The Guilt-by-Association Double-Standard

Ned Lamont, the man challenging Joe Lieberman for the Democratic senate nomination in Connecticut, recently unveiled his first television spot. The ad features a cameo by the increasingly high-profile Markos Moulitsas ("Kos"), founder of the powerhouse Daily Kos blog, who has been a big supporter of Lamont's candidacy.

The ad is entirely benign and notable only for its quirkiness (Kos is not even identified in the spot). Nevertheless, the onstensibly Democratic Marshall Wittman ("the Bull Moose") responded to the ad by immediately cranking out two posts criticizing Lamont for associating himself with Kos.

In the first two-sentence-long post, Wittman "wonders whether Mr. Lamont was aware of Mr. Kos' infamous "screw 'em" comments about the American victims of terrorism." In his second post, which is also only a few sentences long, Wittman repeats his question:

Did Mr. Kos tell Mr. Lamont about his unfortunate comments
that led the Kerry Campaign to de-link from his site? If so,
what was Mr. Lamont thinking? Does he approve? What did he
know and when did he know it?

Wittman is referring to a hastily written and later retracted post in which Kos made some ill-advised comments about the American contractors who were killed by Iraqis in Fallujah in 2004. As Wittman should know, being a blogger himself (and having written a number of very dumb things), it's hardly fair to define a blogger by one post, especially one that he very quickly retracted and apologized for. As anyone who's ever actually read Daily Kos realizes, Kos is hardly the far left bogeyman that conservatives and people like Wittman make him out to be. His personal politics are squarely in the mainstream of the Democratic party. People tend to mistake stridency for extreme ideology.

But all this is neither here nor there. My point here is not to defend Kos but to point out how petty and hypocritical this particular criticism of Lamont is, particularly coming from Wittman. Lately Wittman's blog has become little more than a continuous ode to his political hero, John McCain. Indeed, just last week, Wittman devoted an entire post to praising John McCain for the speech he delivered at Jerry Falwell's Liberty College.

In case you've forgotten, Jerry Falwell said the following just two days after 9/11:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the
feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively
trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People
For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize
America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped
this happen'.

It's hard to think of a more vile statement. And, it's not as if this was some isolated incident. Falwell is batshit crazy, and he says idiotic, hateful things on a regular basis, things a million times worse than anything that has ever even crossed Kos's mind. But when McCain appears with Falwell--in what can only be described as a nakedly political move--Wittman says he "is fine with [it]," and praises McCain effusively for being "unconventional."

I doubt the hypocrisy of all this even occurred to Wittman. After all, this guilt-by-association double standard has become such a regular feature of our political discourse that we barely even notice it anymore. It's a testament to the effectiveness of the GOP message machine that even non-Republicans like Wittman have internalized it.

The standard works like this. Whenever Democrats appear in public with anyone, they are somehow said to be vouching for everything that person has ever said. If that person has said anything remotely controversial, the GOP noise machine (and its enablers) are quick to demand that these Democrats disassociate themselves with that individual. This pressure is often magnified by the press and, all-too-often, Democratic politicians give in or suffer political fallout for not doing so.

The opposite is almost never true, though. Republican politicians routinely associate themselves with people that should be politically untouchable, and they rarely suffer any political consequences for doing so. If there was any kind of symmetrical standard at play, people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh would be political pariahs by now. Each of them has such a catalogue of insane, indefensible quotes to their name at this point that it boggles my mind that they continue to have such access and influence.

I'm not sure why this double-standard exists, and I'm sure that the explanation is complicated. But it really doesn't help when people like Wittman contribute to the problem.