Just last year, when Barack Obama was running for president, we were deluged with stories about Obama’s connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers.  CNN, NBC, (of course, Fox) and the rest couldn’t get enough of this.  In fact, we’re still hearing about this nonsense. 

The funny thing is that candidate John McCain had his own Rev. Wright–two of them, in fact: the Revs. Parsley and Hagee. McCain was proud to accept the endorsement of Rev. Hagee, who claimed the Koran teaches Muslims to kill Christians and Jews and that Hurricane Katrina was an expression of God’s wrath against gay pride parades.  McCain called Rev. Parsley his spiritual advisor, even though Parsley claimed America was founded in part to destroy the "false religion" of Islam and dabbled in some serious anti-gay rhetoric of his own.

McCain even had his own answer to Bill Ayers: convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy.   Liddy, who at one time plotted to murder a journalist, called McCain a "close personal friend".  McCain accepted Liddy’s financial support for a decade and appeared on his radio show, the same show Liddy used as a platform to discuss the best way to shoot and kill federal agents.

I think it’s safe to say that anyone who was following the presidential campaign knew who Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers were.  I doubt that many people ever heard about McCain’s connections to Parsley, Hagee, and Liddy.  It’s not exactly clear why the media ignored McCain’s ties to radical figures, ties that were far more substantial than the Obama connections they harped on incessantly, but it could be that media types personally liked McCain and/or, by their own admission, gave McCain a pass on some issues.

The double standard continues.  Elected Republican officials like Sen. Jim DeMint recently stood side by side with wackos accusing Obama of being a terrorist and a Nazi.  Sen. DeMint called these extremists a "cross-section of the population" and suggested they were "freedom fighters".  As Steve Benen observes, elected Republican members of Congress were also proud to address the "How to Take Back America" conference in St. Louis.  One activist, Janet Folger Porter, who co-chaired the event, believes President Obama took office as a part of a communst conspiracy.  She has also claimed that the Obama administration is setting up internment camps to hold conservatives.  As People for the American Way notes, the event included workshops on "How to Recognize Living Under Nazis and Communists".   Kitty Werthmann, a speaker at the event, argues the United States is becoming just like Nazi Germany.   Reps. Michelle Bachmann, Steve King, Tom Price, Tom McClintock, and Trent Franks, as well as presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, agreed to speak at the event and lend credibility to these off the wall crazies.

Right wing rhetoric in the United States today isn’t just crazy, it may be dangerous.  Murderers have shown they are willing to act on the twisted "logic" that underlies the hateful bile spewed by the right.  

The media still seems to think this is just politics as usual–David Gregory asked Bill Clinton yesterday if there is a "vast right wing conspiracy" against President Obama.   Gregory will insist he was merely quoting Hillary Clinton’s own description of the right wing from 15 years ago, but using this language is telling.  Gregory is suggesting that people who see extremism on the right are either conspiracy theorists, or playing partisan politics, or both.  I know the media sometimes has trouble calling out craziness, but they seemed to have no problem delving into Obama’s supposed ties to Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers.  Will they ever pay the same amount of attention to elected Republican members of Congress who are standing shoulder to shoulder with certified wackos, or will we have to wait for another instance when right-wing rhetoric turns to violence for the media to pay any attention at all to the extremism that marks today’s right wing and today’s Republican party?