Inciting to Riot 4

Glenn Greenwald has a great post on Salon about the increasingly angry tone of the McCain campaign and its supporters. It includes a fairly extensive set of links documenting the dangerous behavior of the GOP and its base. But the main focus of the argument is the fallacy of claiming that "both candidates" have "gone negative", as if to equate them directly:

The Washington Post’s Dan Balz has an article today perfectly illustrating how the modern journalist’s conception of “balance” leads them to distort the truth. Balz’s article is about the increasing use of “character attacks” in the presidential race, and rather than state the truth — that the McCain/Palin ticket is now relying almost exclusively on some of the ugliest and most outright dangerous character smears seen in a modern presidential election — Balz instead pretends that this is a phenomenon of which both sides are guilty in equal measure: [ ... ]

Agreed. Tolerance is not a suicide pact. Neither is "balance".