Written by William I. Greener III on Monday - September 12th, 2011
If it is true that, as the quote goes, “consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” then nobody can accuse liberals, especially liberals in the mainstream media of being small minded. After all, how to account for the coverage of the recent debate over raising the debt ceiling?
For weeks and weeks, we were told that any Republican who refused to vote for whatever package came forward, no matter what it did or did not include, was an individual who would put the economic well being of the nation at peril. A resistant Republican was willing to “risk default to simply attempt to make a political point” was something we all read or heard more than once. That Republican was also subject to being accused of harboring not only rigid (“out of the mainstream”) ideological views but also likely dedicated to the fall of the Obama presidency (a sentiment sometimes attributed to a motivation with a racial component).
So, what happened when real rubber hit real road, when there was an actual piece of legislation to raise the debt ceiling—a measure endorsed by President Obama? In the House of Representatives approximately two of every three Republicans voted in favor of the legislation. And the Democrats? The Democrats in the House split exactly down the middle—75 for it and 75 against it. Funny thing. I recall not a single column from the E.J. Dionne’s of the world offering a word of criticism regarding the Democrats who in reality “turned their back on the President of the United States and said default was preferable to what the leadership of both parties endorsed….”
How is it barely possible, under any sort of intellectual honesty, to pretend that a Republican who would not promise to vote for a non-existent piece of legislation to raise the debt ceiling is guilty of all those terrible things the liberals in the mainstream argued at the time, but a Democrat who actually did vote against the legislation to raise the debt ceiling (legislation endorsed by the President and the mainstream media’s favorite entity—bipartisan leadership in the Congress) did nothing wrong?
Ah, I know. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Yet, there is one consistent aspect to all of this. Conservatives and Republicans are always wrong and liberals and Democrats are always right. Quite a high standard for analysis, don’t you think?
