Bill Bradley’s The Journey from Here (2000), has a beautiful irony on page 96. (I am sure Bill was struck by it, too, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa could not deny using steroids.) He wrote:

In the 1998 baseball season, we witnessed a great battle between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for the home-run record. Each pushed the other to be better and better, and an incredible record was set.  As I watched the race, I wondered why American politics couldn’t be like that.

Dear Bill,

American politics is like that. Of all the examples you could have used to contrast with American politics, you chose one that perfectly describes American politics — both Democrats and Republicans trying to win at all costs, even if it means cheating (gerrymandering comes to mind).

I love irony — even if it’s accidental.

Now that MSNBC has exploded over President Obama’s “compromise” with Republicans, I want to return to Jon Stewart’s claim that MSNBC and Fox News are guilty of the same kind of biased journalism. In my earlier False Equivalency blog I asked readers to compare how often Fox News and MSNBC commentators prop up a “straw man,” which is the debating technique that distorts an opponent’s belief, and then ridicules the distortion.

In the earlier blog I claimed MSNBC does this much less than Fox News, making a false equivalency of Jon Stewart’s claim that the two channels do the same thing from opposite perspectives. I told Stewart that political discernment makes him funny, and he needs more discernment before making MSNBC the liberal equivalent of Fox News.
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