The editors of the Arizona Republic owe its readers a retraction and an apology

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

David Safier briefly touched upon this story yesterday in Arizona media in the news.

An editorial opinion published in the Arizona Republic on Sunday is one of the worst examples of falsehoods and false equivalencies presented as fact by the editors of a major publication – presumably professional journalists – in some time.

The editorial in question is This has to stop – on both sides. The editorial starts out well enough, reminding readers that Barack Obama and the Democrats ran for office in 2008 promising health care reform as a principal issue, and that they won a landslide election giving them a mandate to reform health care. Fair enough.

But then the editors veer off the road and into the field:

To reject those fairly played events now and to turn to threats of violence and malicious acts because your side lost is to reject the system you claim to respect. Recall your disgust with ecoterrorists, destructive animal-rights activists and left-wing anarchists? Remember how you felt about the novels and films about assassinating George W. Bush? Well, those folks are you now if you succumb to your anger and do something stupid.

Comparing teabaggers to fringe ecoterrorists, animal rights activists and left-wing anarchists? Really? These small fringe groups are not supported by any major political party, and do not have a right-wing media machine dedicated to their promotion, i.e., FAUX News, talk radio, syndicated columnists, bloggers, etc., like the Tea Party does. Nor do these small fringe groups have well-financed corporate sponsors and K Street lobbyist front groups like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity organizing them.

As Sarah Palin and RNC Chairman Michael Steele recently reminded us, the Tea Party is the Republican Party, with its right-wing media machine at their disposal 24/7, financed by unlimited corporate funding and organized by professional lobbyist firms. This is not a small number of individuals engaged in random acts of violence and threats. The editors' attempt to minimalize the actions of Republican elected officials, conservative media and teabaggers over the past year by making a false equivalency quickly falls apart under examination.

The editors then fabricate another false equivalency to try to claim that Democrats are equally to blame:

To the Democratic Party apparatchiks exploiting predictable tensions to raise a few bucks and stigmatize your opponents:

Concern for the safety of members of Congress and their families is one thing. The campaign to mischaracterize and demonize Republicans as indifferent to portents of violence – or, in some obscene cases, accusing GOP leaders of actually fomenting violence – is beyond the pale. Some Democratic activists are conducting naked campaigns to portray the other side as violent, irrationally angry, hateful thugs, and that is shameful.

Are the editors attempting to deny that Republican elected officials have not used inflammatory language to incite the kind of response we have seen from teabaggers? Have they already forgotten the scenes from the health care townhalls this past year in which retired people on social security and medicare were irrationally angry about "socialist" government-run health care (hello!) and carried signs portraying the president as the joker from Batman or as an African witch doctor with a bone in his nose, or as Hitler, and signs calling the president a socialist/ communist/ marxist/ fascist/ nazi? And how about the birthers, supported by the conservative media, questioning the very legitimacy of Obama's election and his citizenship? This was daily fare on FAUX News. These individuals stigmatized themselves by their own extreme actions for all the world to see.

Here is a helpful video compilation from just the past week of Republican elected officials using inflammatory language to incite the teabaggers at the Capitol to jog the memory of the editors.

Democrats using the outrageous behavior from the past year to raise money to defend Democratic members of Congress is equivalent to the outrageous behavior itself? What kind of perverse logic is that? The images from the past year speak for themselves. The Democrats are not "exploiting" the outrageous actions of teabaggers and Republicans. They have a right to rally their voters.

As Digby observed in Making Daddy Mad: "America's wife beaters have actually decided to use the defense that these Democrats are "asking for" death threats from the right wingers because they are 'making them mad.'" Democrats complaining about their inflammatory rhetoric made the teabaggers snap. "If they'd just stayed quiet and not made daddy mad, he wouldn't have had to hit them."

The editors next engage in perpetuating a false story to invent yet another false equivalency to claim that Democrats are equally to blame:

The most disturbingly violent act to date was a gunshot fired into the offices of Rep. Eric Cantor – a Republican. We pray it ends there.

By the time this editorial was published on Sunday, the Eric Cantor story had already been fully debunked by Virgina police and the news media. Even Eric Cantor had walked back his story. See Cantor's story unravels (Thursday), Cantor not targeted: Richmond PD says bullet fired randomly (Thursday), Cantor's "campaign office" isn't in his congressional district (Friday), Richmond Police on Cantor 'shooting': "Stray bullet…random gunfire" (Friday), Cantor digs deeper (Friday). Joan Walsh had published Eric Cantor's phony victim story – Salon.com on Friday, comparing Eric Cantor to Ashley Todd, the white McCain supporter who claimed she was assaulted by a black Obama backer in October 2008 who carved a backwards "B" in her cheek.

One has to question whether the editors of the Arizona Republic failed to do even a cursory Google search to find out the facts of the Eric Cantor story, or whether they did not care about the facts to create their false equivalency. In either case, the editors of the Arizona Republic owe its readers a retraction and an apology.

As for the general point of the editorial, the DNC offered to issue a joint civility statement with the RNC. On Friday, the RNC rejected the DNC joint civility statement. Sorta undermines the editors' false equivalency, now doesn't it?