Today In "Both Sides Do It", Ctd.

Two Douchbags -- No Waiting.

With so much rage and tragedy abroad in the land, Conservatives and Both Siderists both know it is especially important not to miss a single opportunity the advance their filthy, symbiotic causes by driving a piton of false equivalence into the suffering of others so they can haul their agendas up another notch or two.

First at bat, the execrable Will Cain, bastard child of The National Review and The Blaze, for whom the chair is always inexplicably pulled out at CNN, "Real Time with Bill Maher" and "Up...With Steve Kornacki".   This time, it is the The Daily Beast which turns over a big swath of its real estate so that Mr. Cain can explain how all those noble Teabaggers are are just as vexed as Bill de Blasio at being defined by their "fringe":

WHO’S DIVISIVE?
Will Cain
12.30.14

Bill de Blasio’s Tea Party Problem

Just as Tea Partiers hate being defined by the Confederate flags at their rallies, the mayor doesn’t want peaceful protests to be defined by the fringe. But he’s part of the problem.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio should know better.

As his relations with the NYPD frayed even further, he tried to flip the script and blame the media for their coverage of the divisive police protests.

“Are you going to keep dividing us?” asked de Blasio. “Twenty-five thousand people marched down one of our streets a few days back, absolutely peaceful, no chants like that, peacefully calling for what they believed in as American citizens, and the NYPD protected them.”

The New York City mayor was understandably frustrated at being asked whether he approved of protest chants like “NYPD, KKK, how many kids did you kill today?”

Ironically, it’s the same frustration Tea Partiers have felt for more than five years at being defined by the smattering of Confederate flags at their rallies.

No movement wants to be defined by its fringe. And no issue should be defined by its outliers because it paints a false picture.

...

Yeah, because none of us actually lived through the beginning, middle and blowoff of the Great Wingnut Teabagger Rebranding Scam, so who really knows what was going on with that, right?

Meanwhile, over at the stripped carcass of "liberal bastion" The New Republic, a 12-year-old named Yishai Schwartz was handed the job of compressing the last 50 years of Murrican history into one, easily digestible blob of pure Both Siderism.

And I must say, the kid went for broke!

The NYPD Is Using the Double-Murder to Dismiss Political Opponents—But Liberals Are Guilty of It, Too

By Yishai Schwartz

...

Forty years ago, when anarchists attacked banks, conservatives condemned the anti-war movement. When Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in an Arizona parking lot, liberals denounced Sarah Palin for her confrontational rhetoric rather than focusing on the shooter’s mental illness (a factor that has suddenly become very important to liberals given the psychological history of Ramos and Liu's killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley). And when Eric Garner was killed by a policeman’s chokehold, protesters indicted police racism and NYPD’s “broken windows” approach to policing. (“Broken Windows Policing Kills People; Senseless deaths are a predictable result of cracking down on minor offenses” was Slate's fairly representative headline.) The critiques of de Blasio and protesters are thus just another manifestation of a standard trope in American politics: one side in a heated political debate seizes on extreme behavior taken by partisans of the other, and declares those actions symptomatic of structural forces or a toxic atmosphere created by the other side.

There is so much so extravagantly wrong with Young Mr. Schwartz's essay that one could occupy a long winter weekend taking it all apart into it constituent idiocies and plating it on the good china.

But why bother?

Instead, meditated on the fact that 10 minutes ago, Yishai Schwartz was a student at Yale --

Yishai Schwartz is currently a senior at Yale University majoring in philosophy and religious studies. A native of Riverdale, New York, Yishai studied for a year at the Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shevut, Israel before entering Yale College. Yishai has worked as a research assistant for Yale Law School Professor Kate Stith, for whom he helped draft a study of Washington State’s sentencing policies and prepare a federal law case-book for publication. At Yale, Yishai is the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Philosophy Review, and a staff columnist for the Yale Daily News. He has also been Speaker of the Yale Political Union, a Vice President of the Yale Friends of Israel, and a founding editor of Shibboleth, Yale’s undergraduate journal of Jewish thought.

-- and 10 minutes later he was The New Republic's in-house expert on race, Conservatism, Liberalism, the 1960s and I don't know whatall. *

And how did he do it?

By taking to heart the three most important lessons every young media climber must learn:

1. You can never have too many straw men.
2. You can never punch too many hippies.
3. Both Sides now.  Both Sides tomorrow.  Both Sides forever.

* Thanks for the catch.