As one would expect, Stuart Taylor's article about the campaigns is a masterpiece of false equivalence, using such tricks as balancing lies and smears from John McCain's campaign with stupid articles in The New York Times that the Obama campaign had nothing to do with. He also somehow gets through an article about campaign lies without mentioning McCain and Palin's constantly repeated howlers about the "bridge to nowhere." He approvingly cites Byron York's defense of the McCain campaign's claim that Obama "wanted to teach kindergartners about sex" while failing to notice that the "age-appropriate" proviso completely destroys York's argument. But I especially enjoyed this one:
McCain also deserves criticism for the ugly culture-warring epitomized at the Republican convention by Rudy Giuliani's keynote speech and sneers about Obama's stint as a community organizer. But who started the culture-warring? Democratic talking heads and pols--although not Obama--heaped disdain on Palin's social class, religion, and anti-abortion values from the moment that McCain plucked her from obscurity.
First of all, it's a big country so I don't want to say that there are no isolated examples of "Democratic talking heads and pols" disparaging Palin's "social class" or "religion," but Taylor really needs to provide evidence that such attacks were made with any frequency by people with any influence. Rather, this strawman is used by Republican hacks precisely to insulate Palin from any substantive criticism. Which brings us to the next point -- Taylor also arguing that it's not legitimate to criticize Palin's "anti-abortion values." Palin is in favor of using state coercion to force women to carry pregnancies to term and as president would be in the power to appoint judges who would allow state governments and the federal government to do that. Since when is it beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse to discuss these views?
And, of course, there's an even more risible argument -- the idea that "culture war" attacks started with unnamed attacks on poor Sarah Palin. Yes, no Republican operative or McCain campaign flack would ever dream of attacking Obama as an arugula-eating urban elitist who can't bowl if some blog commenter somewhere hadn't said something dumb about Palin's family.
--Scott Lemieux
