'Both Sides,' My Royal American Eyeball

By Dan Hagen

I am so tired of hearing about these remarkably silent “reasonable conservatives” from the head-in-the-sand “both-sides-are-always-at-fault” crowd.

Show me. Produce even one.

The “reasonable conservative” is a species as dead as the dodo. What we have left are what we saw at the GOP presidential debates — audiences that cheered wildly for poor people to die in agony without health care, for child labor and for executions.

American conservatism is dead. It’s fascism that’s fashionable now.

Yes, MSNBC has liberal guests, and News Corp lies constantly to peddle naked fascist propaganda and engages in police-state spying and blackmail. So "both sides" are "just as bad," right?

“If the Tea Partiers say the earth is flat — and they do — and the Democrats say the earth is a sphere, then the media would report that the earth has a ‘shape crisis,’” noted Brian Moench. Furthermore, both sides would be portrayed as equally intransigent, equally at fault and which shape was actually correct would be irrelevant to the media.

“Next, when the Tea Partiers announce that unless we all agree that not only is the earth flat, but the Democrats are allowing it to hurtle into the sun, the media will ignore whether that is indeed happening and ask the Democrats if they are going to do what's necessary to prevent it. Finally, when the Tea Partiers hold their breath and turn blue and the Democrats concede that the earth is flat and offer the Tea Party our lunch money if they promise not to let it hurtle into the sun, the media reports an historic, bipartisan and ‘balanced’ agreement that, thank God, averts disaster.”

Driftglass summed things up well: “Sit down with the average, ‘independent’ voter and, once you cut through all the snuffling over how aw-aw-awful everyone is, you will get down to their real, core problem. They're terrified.

“They're terrified that they might actually be forced to take a side.  Might actually have to tell a neighbor they're full of shit.  Might actually have to tell Grandpa to shut the fuck up already about scary Negroes and uppity women and ‘illegals’ and all the rest of the bogeymen that Hate Radio and Fox News and wingnut email pumps into his skull around the clock.

“And since Grandpa is obviously never going to shut the fuck up, the only way Mr. and Mrs. Independent Voter can reconcile the awful realities that besiege them on every side with their deep desire to never get involved or take a side on any subject of any importance is to believe with all their heart... 

“They need to believe both sides are equally wrong in equal amounts about everything because if this is not so, then history will not record their continued, obsessive neutrality as wise or thoughtful, but instead mark them forever as dupes and cowards: lazy, gutless AWOLers who stood by and did nothing but bitch about Both Sides while their country was torn to bits by fascists and maniacs.”

No, my dear friends, both sides DO NOT ask who is going to shoot the president of the United States. Both sides DO NOT have public officials call for gunning down American citizens in the streets. Both sides DO NOT show up at public meetings about health care armed with guns and carrying signs about refreshing the tree of liberty with somebody else’s blood. Both sides DO NOT murder doctors at abortion clinics. Both sides DO NOT go to Unitarian churches to hunt some political opponents to slaughter. Both sides DO NOT have TV news pundits who broadcast their hatred of political opponents by laughing at the idea of their assassination. Both sides DO NOT say blacks were better off as slaves, and women were better off without the vote.

The right wing side alone does those things, and they need to ask themselves why they’re the ones huddled in that smelly corner with all those murderous lunatics.