Watching Alan Grayson defend himself against the likes of Alex Castellanos, Wolf Blitzer, Joe Johns, and Gloria Borger, with only an occasional assist from James Carville, who can’t exactly call his wife “a nut job,” I was struck by how Alan defended himself from the false equivalence attack of the punditocracy. When these folks tried to establish a false equivalence narrative and attempted to characterize Alan as a “nut job” behaving the same way as Joe Wilson and the birther and death panel types, Alan defended himself by saying that unlike these folks he was telling the truth and “truth is an absolute defense.” And every time that attack came up he just wrapped himself in the truth again, and refused to give an inch to the media mavens.
I really loved Alan’s way of answering the false equivalence. And I think it should become standard with Democrats. Answering this way is terribly important because it breaks the MSM’s framing of these issues. The MSM has ceased to believe in the truth or to pursue it. They find it easier to maintain a false objectivity and to talk about process and the back-and-forth of two conflicting sides of any question. They never talk about more than two sides, and they can never abide a situation where there is only one side, because from their point of view, there is no truth, so there cannot be only one side.
What Alan did is to oppose this embrace of relativism by saying, no, I’m not the same as they are. “The Republican Health Plan is don’t get sick. And, if you do, die quickly.” This isn’t the same as Joe Wilson and nut jobs like him, because I’m not a liar. I’m not an ignoramus, I’m not deluded. I’m not fantasizing. I’m telling the truth, and truth is an absolute defense.
And, so it is!
(Also posted at firedoglake.com where there may be more comments)