Political discourse

There’s been some back and forth in the comments of this (surprisingly popular) post about the double standards liberal media outlets bring when they try to police political discourse. I am sympathetic to Mikey’s larger point that this tit-for-tat type of thing gets us nowhere, but I don’t think he quite realizes what riles up conservatives. When it comes to the birthers and other loons on the right, almost every reputable conservative outlet denounced them* (including this one, though it might be a stretch to describe CF as “reputable”). But when Bush is described as Bushitler or painted up to look like The Joker or drawn to resemble a vampire sucking the life out of America the establishment left — the people who publish our newspapers and run our television networks — utters nary a word in protest; these same people freak out when the same thing happens to Obama, writing that opponents of the health care bill are “political terrorists” and writing of the Obama-as-Joker poster that “The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can’t be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he’s black.”

I think this is my larger point: The loons on the right — the birthers, the “Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist” — are at the margins.** The loons on the left are the gatekeepers. This is what really bothers most conservatives, and I think why the post comparing the reactions to the Vanity Fair Bush-as-Joker painting and the anonymous Obama-as-Joker struck such a nerve with many on the right.

(And with that, I’m off to AC for the weekend for a bachelor party. See you on Monday.)

*Even Rush Limbaugh has more or less sat it out, and this is the sort of thing I would have expected him to jump all over.

**I still think that the media continues to report on this birther nonsense as a way of marginalizing the right. It took years and years from them to report on the 9/11 Truthers, the left’s version of the modern day crazy conspiracy theorists…