Paul Rosenberg has a must-read piece at Salon about how and why right-wing Republicans have historically managed to play off a different set of rules than those for progressives/ Democrats, and why the media lets them get away with it, and in fact amplifies (or, as Charles Pierce frequently refers to it, "catapults") the Republican message. Here's a teaser:
Put simply, there are two sets of rules: one for liberals and Democrats, the other for conservatives and Republicans. The former are supposed to be fair-minded and rule-abiding, as befits a tradition that harkens back to the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Montesquieu and Locke. The latter are expected to be Nixonian streetfighters—whatever they do is “just politics,” and “everybody does it,” so there’s “nothing to see here.” [snip]
For months, years, even decades on end, liberals and Democrats have played by these bifurcated rules, and they have repeatedly gotten clobbered as a result. The single biggest reflection of this lies with attitudes toward presidential impeachment. Republicans and conservatives routinely think of impeaching Democratic presidents, expending considerable energy to roil their bases, elaborating paranoid, fantastical, conspiratorial narratives. Democrats do quite the opposite—preemptively discouraging talk of impeachment, even when major political scandals raise serious questions of legitimate rule.For anyone who has seen "professional rasslin'", the analogy to this phenomenon is when the referee (i.e., the media) always gets "distracted," leading to the bad guy (you know who) winning the match by cheating and skullduggery, suddenly pinning the good guy (you know who, too) in front of the suddenly alert referee. Too bad in the real world, this behavior has real consequences.
