Both Sides Don't Do It

The practical effect of claiming that "Both sides do it."

From Nixon’s shame-faced, furtive political burglary to Bush’s eager, lip-smacking use of kidnapping, torture and lies to sell a lucrative war to Trump’s American banana republic, the right’s response when caught red-handed in acts of evil is always, “Oh, both sides do it, so it doesn’t matter.”

And there’s no one I despise more than the cringing “centrists” who deal with every critique of liars like Alex Jones by whining that "Both sides do it!" and stuffing their ears with old David Brooks columns.

At the GOP presidential debates YEARS BEFORE Trump, the audiences cheered wildly for poor people to die in agony without health care, for child labor and for wholesale executions. So the “bipartisan both siderists” can go right on dithering about “both sides being just as bad” until these knuckle-dragging fascists line them up and kill them.

Say a candidate is caught lying relentlessly, and reversing and re-reversing his positions on every major issue. If you reply, with blithe, self-serving cynicism, that “both sides lie,” then you are A) giving the worst candidate a complete pass for his dishonesty and B) awarding the office to the most accomplished con artist, thereby turning a vice into a virtue and deliberately establishing the practice of handing power over to the most corrupt possible candidate BECAUSE he is the most corrupt possible candidate. 

You could hardly imagine a more effective recipe for national disaster — the very national disaster we see unfolding all around us now.