Who does Ed Morrissey think is ‘mainstreaming the fringe’ exactly?

Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air tries to argue that Van Jones’s ouster will make anti-Obama birthers as far out on the fringe as 9/11 truthers currently are:

What exactly does that mean? In the next Republican administration, we can expect a great deal of scrutiny for Presidential advisers. For one thing, it means that no one who ever expressed public support for Birthers to get the benefit of the doubt. The two conspiracy theories are different, but they both are entirely speculative and imagine dark conspiracies at the highest orbits of power, and neither have any actual direct evidence for support. Anyone who signed a Birther petition can expect to get bypassed for political appointments in a Republican White House with a halfway-decent vetting team, strictly on the basis of politics, in the wake of Jones’ resignation.

The media and the leftward parts of the New Media will get to work in the meantime on advisers and staffers of Republicans in Congress, and in the New Media itself. They will use the Van Jones Standard to launch attacks on high-profile conservatives, looking for everything from John Birch Society membership to militias and Birtherism as well. They have done this all along, but the Left and the media will find much more enthusiasm for these efforts in order to trade Van Jones’ scalp for one or more on the Right.

To some extent, this isn’t a bad trend. The nation could improve with a little more disavowing of conspiracy theorists and political extremists, although they tend to degrade into very damaging witch hunts more often than not. However, with the Democrats in charge of all the electoral organs of the federal government and the amateurish vetting at the White House, conservatives will have a much more target-rich environment than the Left for at least the next year.

via Hot Air » Blog Archive » An end to fringe mainstreaming?.

Sorry Ed, but I’ve got to call BS on this one.

I remember that day back in January 2007 when Steve Doocy popped up on Fox and Friends with the false claim that President Obama had studied in an Indonesian ‘madarassa.’ The claim was sourced to Insight on the News, a magazine published by the same company as the Washington Times. Of course, the report was completely untrue – Obama studied in a private school for the privileged in the neighborhood of Menteng, which is sort of like the Georgetown of Jakarta at a time when militant Islam in its Qaida-style form had no real presence in Indonesia. But it was the starting gun that launched the race to the bottom of the Obama birther barrel, where we now find ourselves with conservative nutbars wondering whether Obama was circumcised and if his grandmother was actually his mother.

While I won’t say that Ed and Hot Air have engaged in birther-ism, it’s new media outlets like WorldNetDaily with top down editorial structures that have been the biggest sounding posts for those nutbar ideas. Outlets like WND, or say Pamela Oshry’s Atlas Shrugs, have been more directly engaged by Republicans in and out of government than their left wing opposites have been engaged by the DNC, President Obama, or members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Seriously, you won’t find “9/11 was an inside job” banners at the top of the Huffington Post or Fire Dog Lake or even prominently displayed at Democratic Underground. MSNBC may be cable’s home for the left now, but it’s not like Morning Joe is looking into the question of whether or not WTC7 was brought down by Zionist real estate developers. Instead, it’s shows like Andrew Napolitano’s online-only Freedom Watch for Fox that have given the John Birch Society a platform and have given the “9/11 didn’t happen” movement’s generalissimo, Alex Jones, an opportunity to do a joint webcast (oh, and btw, guess who has guest hosted Glenn Beck’s show: Andrew Napolitano). More often than not, when truthers show up at the latest political networking convention, the left tries to lock them out of the hotel. The right tries to make sure their nuts have got enough table space in the hallway.

My point is that it’s the conservative media outlets who have and continue to be mainstreaming the fringe with the tacit encouragement of elected political leaders. Like I said, when the right mainstreams its fringe, it’s an asset among its base. When the left mainstreams its fringe — to the extent that the 9/11 truthers have anything to do with the left given the large Venn Diagram with Ron Paul fans — Van Jones gets run out of Washington on a liability-strewn rail. There is no equivalency here on a two wrongs don’t make a right level because the truther movement is just as likely to vote against the Democrats or not vote at all, in contrast to the birthers who voted in droves for McCain/Palin ‘08.

While I explained in my post yesterday that progressives need to own up to their occasional engagement with truthers and the like, the political right has a much bigger problem with the birthers et al because it relies so much more on their numbers to swell its votes. If you really want a fringe truce, Ed, your conservative media outlets, both old and new, have a lot more that they need to give up.