Steyn on double standards

From the Washington Post:

Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder-statesman dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing Tea Partiers to the late Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c'mon, they've got everything in common. The Tea Partiers want to reduce the size of government, and so did McVeigh - McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the Tea Partiers through control of federal spending. But these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends. Also, both "Tim" and "tea" are three-letter words beginning with T. Picture him upon your knee, just Tea for Tim and Tim for Tea, you're for him and he's for thee, completely interchangeable. To lend the point more gravitas, Mr. Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he were trying to determine whether it was his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.

Will it work? For a long time, Tea Partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say, "I'm becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending," that's old Jim Crow code for "Let's get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson." Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the Tea Party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare opponents were uncomfortable with Rep. Barney Frank's sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank's sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 trillion or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time's Joe Klein said opposition to President Obama was "seditious" because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Mr. Klein, thanks to "educator" William Ayers' education reforms, nobody knows what "seditious" means anymore.

....

If the Tea Partiers were truly the murderous goons they've been portrayed to be, they would draw the obvious lesson from the kid gloves with which Comedy Central strokes Islam. They would say, "Enough with peaceful rallies where we pick up the litter afterward. Let's just threaten to decapitate someone. You get more respect that way. At least from the media."

But they won't do that. Because, notwithstanding their outrageous demonization by the media, they're not terrorists. So, in the end, Comedy Central has incentivized Islamic violence and nothing much else. Nevertheless, we should be grateful to its jelly-spined executives for reminding us that the cardboard heroes of the American media are your go-to guys for standing up to entirely fictitious threats. But for real ones? Not so much.