Grass is Green, Water's Wet, Roger Ebert's a Hypocrite

Michael C. Moynihan in Reason:

In a recent blog post upbraiding Glenn Beck for his reckless invocations of Nazism and Communism, Roger Ebert, the boring movie critic turned heavy-breathing political blogger, laments the “increasing tendency of the extreme right to automatically describe its opponents in negative buzz words.” Couldn’t agree more, Roger. But wait! Here he is, offering a warm encomium to American Taliban and Moulitsas, who “alerts us to a clear and present danger in America: radical zealots who disregard our Constitution and our freedoms and who disguise themselves as patriots.”

In Ebert’s post on Beck, he rightly bemoans the lazy use of Nazi references, “This whole argument is described by a term widely familiar on the internet (sic), the (sic) reductio ad Hitlerum. It is also known, Wikipedia explains, as playing the Nazi card.” But that’s only when the other side calls people fascists; when Ebert does it, it’s with a certain measure of precision and élan. So in a more recent post, Ebert writes that, in her silly effusions on the so-called Ground Zero mosque, Sarah Palin “employs the methodology of the Big Lie, defined in Mein Kampf as an untruth so colossal that ‘no one would believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.'” No need to explain the implication.

Read the full piece here.