Ross Douthat over in the New York Times has an interesting piece up that first glance might seem like one of those bogus "false equivalency" pieces that excuses something shameful by Conservatives by pointing out that Liberals do it too — or vice-versa. Upon closer inspection though, I see that he's not claiming that everything is a wash or that the scales balance…which is fine because I think the false part of those "false equivalency" pieces is usually the insinuation that the equivalencies are anywhere near equivalent.
Anyway, Douthat makes the following remark that I agree with…
Up to a point, American politics reflects abiding philosophical divisions. But people who follow politics closely — whether voters, activists or pundits — are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be doing.
I would amend that slightly to say that a lot of activists and pundits are entrepreneurs first, partisans second and ideologues third…and the third may even be a distant third. Lucrative careers are built on loud, entertaining (to the proper crowd) partisanship. I may have mentioned this before but one of my "check every so often" e-mail addresses is subscribed to a lot of ultra-right-wing mailings. One that pops up in there at least once a week and has for at least five years is from a guy who basically writes, "Here's the scandalous, illegal thing Hillary Clinton did yesterday and as a good American who doesn't want to see this country destroyed, I'm sure you'll send me lots of money because if I have lots of money, I can destroy her." I'm assuming the guy gets something for his troubles. He wouldn't be writing one or two of these each week unless they brought him some bucks. So if Hillary eats a cheese sandwich on date nut bread, he has to rig up an outrage about it to get someone mad enough that that person will PayPal him some moola.
An awful lot of our political discourse in this country operates on that basis: Get 'em mad enough to donate, buy your book, follow your radio or TV show, etc. It's so bizarre that a lot of us Obama supporters are annoyed at the man for retaining as many of George Bush's policies and employees as he has. At the same time, we have to watch Republicans and other Obama foes "reverse-engineer" (as Douthat puts it) arguments as to why those policies, which most of them supported when they were Bush policies, are now wrong. Ain't politics fun?