I have three children. The oldest is a 6 year old boy, tall for his age and getting near impossible to pick up and carry places. The middle one is a 4 year old girl, tall for her age too but still light enough to carry piggyback or on my shoulders. (The little one's a baby, still stroller-bound, and as you will soon see, irrelevant to the analogy I'm about to draw.)
So when we do family things on weekends, like go to the zoo, especially on these global-warming killer-heat summer days, these kids get tired. As kids do. And when they get tired and hot they get cranky. My 4 year old is peak-crankiness these days thanks to her age, and when she gets hot and tired and cranky we all suffer! So the easy thing is to pick her up and carry her for a bit.
Bear with me, I'll thread this needle and talk about everyone's favorite pair of mittens after the squiggles.
When I pick up my 4 year old and carry her for a bit, without fail my 6 year old also asks to be picked up. And I cannot tell you how many times I have told him that he simply is too big and heavy to carry like that these days. (He really is. And I'm a strong guy - it's not a cop out, I SWEAR.)
My son has a hard time grasping this which is why I have had to explain it to him a million times. To him, a carry is a carry -- if his little sister gets carried, he should too. But their differences in stature render his argument invalid. He is drawing a FALSE EQUIVALENCY.
Now that I've strained the analogy let me get down to brass tacks. Today on Facebook one of my friends posted this photo:
I will admit that I like the array in the first line. No question in my mind that Barack Obama equates to Ben Kenobi and Mittens Romney equates to Darth Vader. (Though I would have used an image of Chancellor Palpatine. Vader is redeemed in the end, and revealed as maybe a good guy all along. Not so Palpatine. AND NOT SO ROMNEY.)
Conversely, I know some of my friends think Obama is Vader (Palpatine!) and Mittens is the Jedi Master. (Almost spit out my Diet Coke and Cheetos guffawing at that one.)
But it's that bottom image with its tagline that really gets me. BOTH of them are REALLY LIKE.... Jar-Jar Binks? The cartoonish, borderline-racist dope of a CGI character? George Lucas' Waterloo creation?
Nope. No way. I reject that. It is a FALSE EQUIVALENCY.
I probably don't need to tell you all what differentiates Obama from Romney. Obama supports Medicare. Romney doesn't. Obama, though he stretches it sometimes, generally tells us the truth. Romney doesn't. Obama cares about the troops. Romney doesn't. Obama thinks everyone in our country is entitled to equal rights and equal protection under our Constitution. Romney doesn't. I won't push any harder because I don't want to break the Internet linking machine.
In short: We know that journalists are always trying to present balanced stories, nicely rounded-out he-said/she-saids, and that sometimes (maybe more often than not, these days) they fail. They fail by creating false equivalencies. And the falsest of all equivalencies, right now, given everything that is at stake, is that both presidential candidates are equally distasteful, equally abhorrent, and equally representing some sort of policy-morality mishmosh that makes it impossible to tell them apart.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Except perhaps everything that comes out of Paul Ryan's mouth.