Sunday, March 9, 2008

Brent Bosell Needs Help...with his Priorities

Brent Bosell has always been a guy who has trouble with reality. Here's a guy living in a dominantly Christian country, where elected officials have an unstated requirement to pay tribute to the Abrahamic god(s), and where "liberal" has nearly become a slur, who fights for the downtrodden discriminated-against conservative Christians. That's like fighting for the rights of the downtrodden Jews in Israel. So mostly Bosell is worthy of snickers and little more, and that's where this article comes in. In it, he repeats an old lament, that conservatives get it so much worse from the media than do liberals. This time it is Barak Obama getting the supposed soft treatment while Bush and Cheney get beat up on. But of course Bosell has no sense of scale or perspective and comes off sounding like a loon. Think about the warped view of the world it would require to say something like this:

"Just start with the way they all flail with outrage when a conservative uses his full name, Barack Hussein Obama. It's not a lie. It's not a distortion. It's his name. Chris Matthews thinks this tactic is 'vicious,' this 'ethnic stuff' is 'evil.' Keith Olbermann even sneered at his fellow Bush-basher Jon Stewart for making a joke out of Obama's complete name at the Oscars. The 'mainstream' media don't just feel Obama's pain, they loudly object to any hostility whatsoever.

Ridiculing Obama's middle name stopped being funny a while ago. But the idea that the Obamaholics on TV can pound the desk and proclaim that these tame middle-name jokes are beyond the pale is utterly ridiculous. Are Olbermann and Matthews really going to claim they've been gentle with Bush and Cheney? Olbermann can suggest Bush is a totalitarian who has commenced the "beginning of the end of America," and Matthews can call Bush a "sadistic murderer" and hope for a modern-day Nuremberg trial, as if the Bushies were the Nazis, and then they have the chutzpah to complain about middle names?


So in Brent Bosell's world (which I want to visit less and less), criticizing sitting politicans for the wars they've started and the consequent loss of lives, property and national esteem, is the equivalent of using a politician's middle name to engender a racist bias against him. Really. To Bosell any distinction between the two, and the resulting difference in treatment in the media, is arbitrarily flexible, partisan, and a double-standard. This is why he plays only to the choir, and has absolutely no impact on those who didn't share his twisted view of the world in the first place.

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