In this inaugural post, let’s hit Matt Bai’s recent NY Times column, in which he makes not one, but two false equivalencies!
One was Sarah Palin’s infamous “cross hairs” map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords’s, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman’s apparently liberal constituents declared her “dead to me” after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.
- A random person commenting on a blog does not have the influence, power, and respectability of a recent vice presidential candidate.
- The phrase “dead to me”, while unfortunate, is usually used in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. And there is no violent imagery inherent in the phrase, whereas gun targets are, by their very existence, violent imagery.
Let me expand upon the second point for a bit. If you were to say, “Jar Jar Binks is dead to me!”, most people would commiserate. If you were to photoshop gun targets onto a screenshot of Jar Jar Binks, most people would say, ” … dude. That’s a bit extreme.”
