Casual allegations of treason

From the Washington Post's Political Animal blog, courtesy of AlterNet:

Rick Santorum argued earlier this week, with a straight face, that President Obama has “sided with our enemies.” The same day, Santorum also accused the president of engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.”

The New Yorker’s George Packer raised an excellent observation about the way in which these allegations were covered. (thanks to D.K. for the tip)

[T]his kind of gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it’s not worth a political journalist’s time to point it out. In 2008, when Michele Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-American, there was a flurry of criticism; three years later, when a surging Presidential candidate states it flatly about a sitting President, there’s no response at all.

Certain forms of deterioration … become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they’re wrong…. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers?

There was a point not too long ago when the standards of our discourse included more meaningful norms. Accusing the president of the United States, leading during a time of war and crisis, of “siding with our enemies” and engaging in “un-American activities” was just about the most extreme accusation imaginable.

More here.

Um, hey journalists, here's how you deal with this kind of bullshit: you make it part of the ongoing narrative; your writing should always include the fact that Republicans constantly lie about Democrats; you give the GOP absolutely no deference when they start this shit; you call them liars to their faces when you interview them. That is, you do your fucking job and report the fucking news. And the news here is that Republicans constantly lie about Democrats. Anything short of this is a failure to report the news. Any journalist who doesn't push back on this crap is not a journalist at all. I mean, I don't know what such "journalists" are, but they're not reporters, that's for sure.

The reason Republicans get away with calling the president a traitor is because journalists let them do it. I have no pity for "attrition." And I don't really believe that the news business would lose readers and viewers if reporters reported the truth. Really, I'm not sure who is more annoying. Republicans for lying constantly, always, all the time, or corporate journalists who have pity parties because they're tired of observing that Republicans lie all the time.

It's really beginning to disturb me how fucking stupid people in the establishment appear to be.

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