WHY RON FOURNIER WROTE THIS COLUMN TODAY AND NOT A WEEK FROM NOW

When I saw the headline of Ron Fournier's latest -- "Why the Republican Convention Is So Mean" -- I thought, Wow, even the king of Both Sides Do It realizes that the GOP has reached new depths of awfulness.

Then I saw Fournier's subtitle:

Both parties are trying to convince undecided voters that their candidate is the lesser of two evils.

Yup. You and I think the GOP has gone completely insane -- dangerously insane -- but the problem, according to Fournier, is in both parties:

This is an unusually negative convention -- a low-blow infomercial focused far more on why Americans should vote against Clinton than why they should vote for Donald Trump....

Why is the convention so negative? For the same reasons next weeks’ Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia likely will be an anti-Trump orgy.

* The 2016 electorate includes an unusually large number of undecided voters.

*Most of those voters hate both candidates.

*Both campaigns think their path to victory is to win almost by default -- to make their rival the most feared alternative....

Clinton faces a similar challenge. Her strategy depends on persuading Americans to vote against Trump because he is temperamentally ill-suited for the job, a liar and a bully who enriched himself by gaming the legal system and taking advantage of other people.

She has a credible case, but Democrats could go too far.

Shouts of “fascist” from the convention floor, for example, would be the Philadelphia analogue of “Lock her up!” Smug dismissals of Trump’s populist approach and policies might be viewed by undecided voters as an indictment of them.

Trump's advisers privately hope that Clinton and her fellow Democrats overreach on the issue of racial division, specifically by yielding the convention stage to black activists whose appearance could be construed as anti-police...

Do you see what Fournier does there? He invokes things that have actually happened during the Republican convention, then says they're equivalent to things he thinks Clinton and her supporters will do at the Democratic convention. Voila! Instant false equivalence!

In order to make this case in an honest manner, Fournier should have waited till next week. After a couple of days of the Democratic convention, we'd know whether it was as negative as the Republican convention. But Fournier knows it probably won't be, so he's making his Both Sides Do It case now, while it still seems plausible to gullible readers.

No one is going to shout "fascist" from the floor of the Democratic convention, unless the whole convention is time-warped back to 1972. There aren't likely to be "smug dismissals of Trump’s populist approach and policies" (what policies?), though there ought to be speakers who call out Trump as a phony friend of the common man. And I don't know what Fournier means by "black activists whose appearance could be construed as anti-police" -- to the right, anyone who ever acknowledges police misconduct is "construed as anti-police," even if it's done in the mildest and most responsible terms. Trust me, no one at the convention is going to call police "the enemy," a term applied to Black Lives Matter by Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke, a Republican convention speaker.

In short, the Democratic convention is going to be nothing like this:

In the past 48 hours, the Trump campaign and the GOP have:

* Invited a C-list actor who called Hillary Clinton a “cunt” on Twitter to speak on stage.

* Invited another C-list actor to speak on stage, only to have him run to the cameras to call President Barack Obama a Muslim.

* Invited Ben Carson to speak on stage, where he called Clinton an agent of Lucifer.

* Encouraged a party-wide consensus that their presidential election opponent should be in jail.

* Blamed Hillary Clinton for the deaths of Americans in Benghazi.

* Plagiarized a speech Michelle Obama wrote eight years ago, then lied about it.

* Shrugged it off when a Trump adviser and party delegate called for Hillary Clinton to be shot -- executed -- for treason.

Will mean things be said about Trump at the Democratic convention? Sure, though no one's going to say he should be jailed or killed. Will positive things be said about Hillary Clinton? Absolutely -- and by people she's not related to. That alone will make the Democratic convention different from the Republican convention. Also, Democrats will talk about policy ideas intended to make life better for ordinary Americans -- something that still hasn't happened at the Republican convention.

Shorter Fournier: Both sides do it -- or at least one side is going to do it just the way the other side is already doing it, I swear to you.

Reality: One side is doing it. The other side won't.