Both Sides Do It

It seems a little unfair to pick on the right-wing conspiracy theorists and tribalists exclusively, I admit. But the simple fact of the matter is that you're not going to find this kind of lunacy and outright disrespect for reality in a Democratic Senatorial candidate:


The clip (lovingly compiled by Talking Points Memo) includes these classics:

-"...Because I dabbled in witchcraft; I hung around people who were doing these things"
-"One of my first dates with a witch was on a Satanic alter, and I didn't know it."

-"And then there's also the issue of murder, with Vincent Foster. That's a much more serious charge [against Bill Clinton] than failing to seek legal advice -- and yet we're all just blowing that off."

-"The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. You can't masturbate without lust!"

-"The total amount that we're spending currently on AIDS research and care with the Ryan White Act and Medicaid is over $8 billion, and our position is that there is a gross, disproportionate allocation of funds when it comes to treatment of AIDS, as opposed to the number-one killer, which is heart disease."

-"A lot of the money that we're spending goes to things that we know will not prevent AIDS, but will indeed continue to spread the disease. When a lot of our money goes to distribute condoms in high schools, when a lot of our money goes to distribute material that is literally pornographic..."

-"But these groups admitted that the report that said, 'Hey, yay, we cloned a monkey' -- now we're using this to clone humans."
[Bill O'Reilly]: "Let them admit anything they want -- They won't do that here in the United States unless all craziness is going on."
[O'Donnell]: They are doing that here in the United States! American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains."

So, "witchcraft" and Satan are real things, the U.S. spends too much on a deadly communicable disease, condoms and "pornography" cause AIDS, American companies are cloning humans and cross-breeding mice and people to make super-brained mice!

And that's just this one Tea Party-backed candidate -- there's still Sarah Palin, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul, Debra Molina, various Tea Party leaders like Mark Williams, and their conspiracy factories Betsy McCaughey, Alex Jones, Orly Taitz, and on and on and on.

But Dennis Kucinich believes in UFOs!

Folks like The Beast's John Avlon depend on drawing a false equivalence between liberals and conservatives -- possibly because they're blind, but more likely because they're unwilling to take sides, believing that stance as a mark of true objectivity.

Heck, I'm reading Avlon's book, "Wingnuts -- How the radical fringe is hijacking America", and the best examples he can find for the left-leaning fringe include no Democratic leaders, candidates or officeholders -- just Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Keith Olbermann, MoveOn.org (who he says "took heat" when contributors to their contest compared Bush to Hitler!), and various protest signs. The rest of the book is an enumeration of conservative wingnuts. But he sticks to the centrist article of faith that "both sides do it," despite the evidence of his lying eyes.

The Dupes are a right-wing phenomenon at this point in history. It's about time we all recognized it.