Topic: NewsBusters
As we've seen with Joe Scarborough, the conservatives at NewsBusters deal harshly with fellow conservatives who deviate from the orthodoxy.
It happens again in a June 13 post by Mark Finkelstein, who bashes conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby for daring to voice opinions on immigration that don't conform to conservative opinion. Finkelstein writes that Jacoby's column "could just as easily have been written by his erstwhile Globe colleague Thomas Oliphant, the quintessential effete East Coast liberal" and -- just as Finkelstein colleague Tim Graham suggested Scarborough was suffereing from Stockholm syndrome from hanging around all those liberals at MSNBC -- asks, "Is liberalism contagious?" concluding: "Has Jeff acquired some fuzzy liberal thinking via osmosis? Could it be time for him to take a Beantown break and recharge his conservative batteries elsewhere?"
Nowhere does Finkelstein allow for the possibility that Jacoby -- as a fellow conservative deviating from the conservative norm -- might have a point worth looking into. Finkelstein specifically attacks Jacoby's statement that a Mexico border wall would be "a Berlin-style wall of our own": "As commentators from Rush to Rich Lowry have pointed out, the Berlin Wall was built to keep its people in -- to render them prisoners in their own country. The border fence is there to keep people out. And any country that doesn't control its borders will eventually cease to be a country. It's disappointing that Jacoby doesn't acknowledge this." As Berlin proved, a border wall is fraught with symbolism, and Finkelstein shows no recognition that a U.S.-Mexico border wall can arguably be seen the same way.
