Pundit Boxscore for Thursday 15 January 2004

SPINSANITY ON O'REILLY AGAIN, AND BROOKS: The guys at Spinsanity have consistently taken politicians and pundits to task for "using irrational associations to connect their opponents with hated groups and people" (Nazis, the Taliban, Enron, anti-Semites, etc.). In an article yesterday, Ben Fritz discusses several recent uses of this unfair tactic by liberals and conservatives. First he criticizes David Brooks for a recent column in which he defends neoconservatives by linking their opponents to anti-Semitism:

As Josh Marshall and Bob Somerby have pointed out, this is a clear attempt to associate criticism of President Bush's foreign policy or neoconservatism with anti-Semitism in readers' minds. Certainly some criticism of neoconservatism or the Bush foreign policy team has had an anti-Semitic bent. However, Brooks uses a classic trick of punditry by failing to make such distinctions so that it seems that all critics of neoconservatism are anti-Semitic. He thus ends up implicitly lumping together a whole range of criticism, including that of former General Wesley Clark, the Democratic presidential candidate.

After knocking MoveOn.org and the columnist Alexander Cockburn for Bush-Hitler associations, Mr. Fritz turns to Bill O'Reilly:

Unfortunately, comparisons to Nazis continue to be made - and not just for President Bush. On Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" last Friday, host Bill O'Reilly described the American Civil Liberties Union as a "fascist" group. "The ACLU doesn't care about the law or the Constitution or what the people want," O'Reilly said while criticizing a lawsuit the group filed against the city of San Diego for renting space to the Boy Scouts due to its exclusion of homosexuals. "It's a fascist organization that uses lawyers instead of Panzers," referring to the German tanks used in World War II.