You gotta love the wildly off-kilter calibration of the Media Research Center’s outrage meter.
MRC researcher Scott Whitlock devotes a June 13 NewsBusters post to foaming at the mouth over MSNBC’s Chris Matthews likening accused child molester Jerry Sandusky’s wife to Pat Nixon for their apparent stand-by-their-man qualities. Whitlock huffed:
To compare President Nixon’s life and example to that of a man charged with some of the most abhorrent crimes possible is reprehensible.
Matthews should apologize for his disgusting remarks.
Whitlock doesn’t elaborate on what he meant by “President Nixon’s life and example.” What say you, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein?
In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.
Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House.
Your mileage may vary on whether a man debasing the presidency with criminal acts is akin to being a child molester, but Whitlock apparently clearly has no problem with Nixon’s criminality.
By contrast, to our knowledge, Whitlock found nothing disgusting or outrageous about his boss, Brent Bozell, likening President Obama to a “skinny ghetto crackhead.”
Here’s a little advice for Whitlock: He should clean up his own act — and that of his boss — first before he feigns offense at what others say.