Josh Marshall Connects Malaysian Air Shoot Down to Tea Party

Josh Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo, suggested this morning that the separatist “warlord” who may be responsible for shooting down a Malaysian airliner and killing nearly 300 people is, somehow, just like the Tea Party. After a quote noting that the “warlord” in question used to take part in Russian military reenactment battles, Marshall writes:

So that’s who you’re dealing with: some mix of civil war reenactor or
Tea Partier decked out in revolutionary garb, with a mix of reckless
aggression and comical incompetence. Here we have them break into
nursing homes to photographs senator’s comatose wives; there Putin gives
them heavy armaments designed for full scale land war in Europe.

Just to spell this out a bit, Marshall is connecting the mass murder of civilians by a “warlord” to the Tea Party via the (admittedly reprehensible) behavior of a single blogger who snuck into a nursing home and took photos of a Senator’s ill wife.

This is the kind of juvenile writing (and thinking) that leads 14-year-olds to announce something is “just like” the holocaust. Inevitably that something, whatever it is, is not just like the holocaust and the comparison itself is offensive. Casually connecting the Tea Party to the mass killing of hundreds of people half a world away is unhinged. It tells us more about Marshall than it does about the Tea Party.