"But The Lefties are Just as Bad!"
Jan. 13th, 2011 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs"The lefties did it too!" is a terrible beginning, because there's no market on the left for that kind of rhetoric. Lefty verbal bomb-throwers do not get $400 million contracts (Rush Limbaugh), rent space on the national mall (Glenn Beck), get their own reality TV shows (Sarah Palin), or get elected to Congress (Michelle Bachman).
When you can point to a sustained, supported, widely praised, and idolized lefty who says the kind of nonsense that routinely comes out of Glenn Beck's mouth, then you'll have some equivalency.
But you can't have it both ways: You cannot claim consistently that the left is made up of a bunch of peace-loving nudnicks who want to take away our guns and leave America completely defenseless, that only the right has the strength and will and character and training to embrace America's martial destiny, and then claim that both sides have an equal receptivity to violent rhetoric.
If you believe in the free market, then believe this: since 2000, a right-wing noise machine has created a market in resentment and advertised violence as a potential solution. Karl Rove's formula, "Aim for civil war, then pull it back just a notch," seems to have worked.
The left seems to have no equivalent market at all: in 2006, at the height of Bush-bashing, a movie about the assassination of George Bush made little more than $400,000, but Rush Limbaugh made $50,000,000.
Saying "Left and Right are equally bad" is false equivalence, and deceit, and wrong. Right-wing resentment is a thriving market with a hundred times more economic power than left-wing frustration.
When you can point to a sustained, supported, widely praised, and idolized lefty who says the kind of nonsense that routinely comes out of Glenn Beck's mouth, then you'll have some equivalency.
But you can't have it both ways: You cannot claim consistently that the left is made up of a bunch of peace-loving nudnicks who want to take away our guns and leave America completely defenseless, that only the right has the strength and will and character and training to embrace America's martial destiny, and then claim that both sides have an equal receptivity to violent rhetoric.
If you believe in the free market, then believe this: since 2000, a right-wing noise machine has created a market in resentment and advertised violence as a potential solution. Karl Rove's formula, "Aim for civil war, then pull it back just a notch," seems to have worked.
The left seems to have no equivalent market at all: in 2006, at the height of Bush-bashing, a movie about the assassination of George Bush made little more than $400,000, but Rush Limbaugh made $50,000,000.
Saying "Left and Right are equally bad" is false equivalence, and deceit, and wrong. Right-wing resentment is a thriving market with a hundred times more economic power than left-wing frustration.
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Date: 2011-01-14 12:31 am (UTC)So of course they're going to say "The Lefties Did It Too!" They feel persecuted by "The Liberal Media" to the point of overreacting enough to make an entire news channel about their persecution complex.