Republicans use imaginary Democratic scandals to rationalize real GOP ones

This is a particularly beautiful example of this dynamic. Ron DeSantis is employing goonish tactics to punish businesses that don’t go along with his ideological projects? Well the Obama administration did a very similar thing when it set the IRS onto Tea Party non-profits, remember? So, um, both sides, and if DeSantis is a budding Orban-style authoritarian, that means Obama was too, or something.

What makes this less than a perfect analogy is that the latter “scandal” was completely fake from beginning to end: The Obama administration had nothing to do with the IRS investigation, which in turn was non-partisan, and in no way improper.

Lots of Tea Party outfits were in fact abusing the tax laws to operate as non-profits while engaging in partisan political advocacy, although none of them ended up losing their non-profit status, because laws don’t apply to Republicans if they scream loud enough about being “targeted” by Democrats — a theory which to this point Merrick Garland seems willing to adopt in re the ringleaders of the 1/6 insurrection.

What’s particularly interesting about this dynamic is how the “respectable” organs of the right wing scream machine, such as the National Review article linked above, continue to be treated by the mainstream media as being something other than pure propaganda outfits. I noted this aspect of the issue four years ago:

Here’s a more interesting, to me anyway, example of how and why the right wing propaganda machine is so successful. Paul Caron is a law professor who operates Taxprof, a highly trafficked — by legal academic standards — blog. Caron has, as of a couple of days ago, put up 1699 (one thousand six hundred and ninety-nine) posts about the IRS “scandal,” continuing to do so for years after it was evident to any disinterested observer that the only scandal was the meta-scandal of treating an imaginary scandal as a real scandal, aka, Republican politics as usual. (If you’re inclined to get out of the boat, read the outbursts of right wing paranoia that festoon the comment threads to Caron’s posts on this subject, illustrating how fake scandals invented by the GOP scream machine are the zombies of contemporary American politics).

A few months ago, Caron was elevated to the deanship of Pepperdine’s law school. From 2004 to 2010, that same position was held by Ken Starr, which suggests the position is one of those sinecures reserved for those who have done great service for the Party.

One reason the GOP propaganda machine works so well is that lots of “respectable” people — law school deans, university presidents, thoughtful(tm) conservatives, and the like — remain part of it, sometimes no doubt without even realizing it themselves. At this juncture, these people are actually no more respectable or believable than Fox News, which in turn is no more respectable or believable than the Breitbart cesspool. They are all merely different faces of the same toxic, post-factual political propaganda machine. Yet lots of go along to get along liberals still refuse to face up to this politically and — even more so — socially uncomfortable fact.

A key to understanding contemporary American politics is that Republican zombie scandals never die, no matter how many times they’re definitively debunked. And a big reason for that is that NPR tote page liberals, reactionary centrists, etc., can’t face up to the fact that at this point in American political history there’s no practical difference between National Review and Alex Jones.