OXYGEN DEPRIVATION

New York magazine's Ben Jacobs attempts to understand why D.C. Republicans condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene, but not Paul Gosar.

First, the far-right Republican from Arizona was the much-touted surprise guest at an counter-CPAC event in February hosted by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who marched at the infamous neo-Nazi Charlottesville rally in 2017 where a neo-Nazi murdered a counter-protester. Gosar condemned “neocon control” in contrast to “America First” and he was followed by Fuentes praising the Capitol riot as “awesome” and arguing that if the United States “loses its white demographic core … then this is not America anymore.”

Then last week, Gosar a was revealed to be planning a campaign fundraiser with Fuentes, who has engaged in Holocaust denialism, praised segregation, and repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments.

... House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has yet to even chastise Gosar for his repeated associations with the extreme fringes.

Why? Republicans -- after many years -- distanced themselves from white supremacist Steve King. More recently, they've at least condemned Marjorie Taylor Greene's remarks equating mask mandates and the Holocaust. So why nothing about Gosar?

Jacobs writes:

It’s a more complicated case for Democrats to press than with Greene. As one Republican strategist noted, the issue with Gosar is about who he is associating with rather than what he is saying. Then there is the risk Democrats would be hit with “what about Ilhan Omar?”

(Please note that Republicans never refrain from attacking Ilhan Omar out of fear that Democrats will say, "What about Marjorie Taylor Greene?" or "What about Paul Gosar?")

“It’s not easy to do the two-step of educating why an association is unsavory, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying,” said the Republican.

It's especially not easy to do when you think it's a bad idea even to talk about the fact that a congressman from the other party pals around with a neo-Nazi:

One Democrat chalked up the silence to the desire not give the attention they crave to the white nationalists Gosar is associating with. “There is a tension between spotlighting hate and disinformation in order to disinfect it and giving oxygen to people who are in this for the wrong reasons and thrive on it,” Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts told Intelligencer.

It's thinking like this, and exactly the opposite thinking on the part of Republican politicians and propagandists, that leads to what we have in America: a two-party system in which one party is moderate yet is widely viewed as extremist, while the other party is extremist but is widely viewed as moderate.

Democratic politicians aren't solely to blame. I know that the liberal message machine isn't nearly as powerful as the one conservatives have, but even that less powerful liberal machine seems unwilling to make right-wing extremists notorious. Search for Nick Fuentes's name at MSNBC.com and you'll get a mere 18 results. By contrast, Patrisse Cullors -- a founder of Black Lives Matter whose greatest sins seem to be that she has called herself a Marxist and that she recently bought several "high-end" houses -- shows up 1,960 times at FoxNews.com.

Many people believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Our side apparently believes that the best disinfectant is never to acknowledge the infection at all.