Jim Geraghty News

Jim Geraghty And The Latest In Moral Equivalence

8:13 pm EST March 5th, 2009 | News | 10 Comments

They’ll say anything to defend Leader Limbaugh. Anything.

rush limbaugh mugshot This example is National Review’s Jim Geraghty* who takes issue with characterizations of Leader Limbaugh as a pill-popping oaf. Geraghty says, wouldn’t that justify calling President Obama a “cokehead” for his previous drug use?

But here’s the difference – President Obama did this when he was a young kid. He has made it quite clear that it was a stupid thing to do. In fact, he lectured youngsters on how stupid it was.

When Rush Limbaugh was busted for his addiction to Oxycontin he was, to take a phrase from Cedric The Entertainer, a grown-ass man. A grown-ass man who had spent decades, at that point, pointing to himself as a moral better of anyone else in the world.

In Geraghty’s world of moral equivalence, the stupid actions of a youngster are just the same as the self-described leader of the Republican party.

Well, maybe he has a point.

* I’d also like to point out that this is the ad copy used to sell Jim Geraghty’s book “Voting To Kill: How 9/11 Launched The Era Of Republican Leadership”

From “security moms” to neo-Jacksonian bloggers, people across the country are confronting the post-9/11 era with white-knuckle anger and relentless determination. Voting to Kill captures this zeitgeist, showing why terrorism was the defining issue in 2002 and 2004, and will be in 2006 and 2008, as Republicans rev up instinctively hawkish Americans to vote and campaign as if their lives depend on it.

Geraghty’s book was released in September of 2006, two months before anti-war Democrats swept to control of the House and Senate, and two years and two months before an anti-war Democrat was elected to the presidency by a margin of over 10 million votes. So if you want someone with their finger on the thud-thud-thud pulse of the American people, Geraghty is clearly your man.