Media Hypocrisy. Let birthers get away with anything but pillory Harry Reid
The media tolerates no end of birther nonsense and other paranoid fantasies from the right, but let Harry Reid accuse Mitt Romney of not paying his taxes and all hell breaks loose. Michelle Goldberg explores this double standard.
For the past four years, various Republican officials have speculated that Barack Obama might be the foreign-born perpetrator of an elaborate biographical hoax, and thus not a legitimate president. Among them were several senators, including Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe, who was quoted in Politico saying that the birthers “have a point.” Later, in a statement, he added, “The White House has not done a very good job of dispelling the concerns of these citizens.”
More recently, several Republican congressmen, led by Michele Bachmann, have demanded an investigation into Muslim Brotherhood infiltration into the Obama administration. While some in the party have denounced her, Mitt Romney adviser John Bolton came to her defense, asking, “What is wrong with raising the question?”
Yet somehow, after years in which calumnies against the president and his administration have become so routine as to be unremarkable, Harry Reid’s suggestion that Romney might have avoided paying taxes has roused establishment pundits to fits of pearl-clutching horror. On Sunday’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl called Reid’s statements "one of the most outrageous charges that I've ever seen actually made on the Senate floor.” On Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer compared Reid’s charges with McCarthyism, an analogy that The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen reported on Monday: “The soaring rhetoric that Obama used in his first campaign has come to ground in the mud of Harry Reid’s latter-day McCarthyism.” On Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial headlined, “Harry Reid, Birther.”
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