Reading through Foxman's letter on Moyers' website, I didn't notice a written response was included. I was relieved to see one, as the natural fear that such venal propagandists as Foxman would perhaps intimidate yet another media figure.

In less than a thousand words, you managed to fit into your January 9 commentary...moral equivalency between Hamas, a radical Islamic terrorist group whose anti-Semitic charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and perhaps America’s greatest ally in the world;

And sure enough, like the good Cold Warrior dodger he is, he used the "moral equivalence" dodge. This was a phrase used very commonly in the 1980s, revived on the right to propagandize for Reagan's wars against the civilian populations of Central America and Southern Africa.

People would look at Reagan's hiring of Guatemalan generals to massively slaughter and even attempt genocide against their own civilian population, including the mass raping of women and ancient fashions of bashing babies' heads into rocks. And quite naturally, sane people who observed these policies and their results were pretty horrified. Not so the good Reaganites and the liberal hawks who backed them.

No, no, the righties would say, there is no "moral equivalence." What they mean by that is that if the U.S. foreign policy establishment or its allies want to do horrible things, it's not as wrong as the bad stuff our enemies did, because we are not our enemies. And of course that's right -- the United States under Reagan didn't attempt near genocide in Guatemala; it just hired, armed, directed, and protected the ones who did.

(And afterwards we had a tepidly controversial "Iran-Contra" investigation to make sure Congress was properly informed of everything and that laws were followed in carrying out such medieval slaughter-sponsoring policies.)

For the propagandists then and today, the difference between right and wrong isn't based on any act in question, but upon who's doing it.

When the Bad Guys do something it's wrong and terribly wrong. When the Good Guys do the same, then it's either less wrong or even right. It's exactly the same in the torture debate.

If Palestinian militants kill Israeli civilians callously, it's a hideous crime. If the Israeli military (under orders from a militarist Israeli establishment) kills Palestinian civilians callously (and at a rate of 10 or 100x greater), it's a regrettable outcome of a difficult decision, etc., etc., and by the way Israel is a democracy (except for the Arab parties) and so shut up, Israel is not Hamas so there. Shut. Up. "Moral equivalence." Silence. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Refereshingly Moyers would have none of it:

...to call someone a racist for lamenting the slaughter of civilians by the Israeli military offensive in Gaza is a slur unworthy of the tragedy unfolding there. Your resort to such a tactic is reprehensible.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that the International Red Cross “was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.”

When American troops committed a similar atrocity in Vietnam, it was called My Lai and Lt. Calley went to prison for it. As the publisher of a large newspaper at the time, I instructed our editorial staff to cover the atrocity fully because Americans should know what our military was doing in our name and with our funding. To say “my country right or wrong” is like saying “my mother drunk or sober.” Patriots owe their country more than that, whether their government and their taxes are supporting atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, or, in this case, Gaza.

Contrary to your claim, I made no reference whatsoever to “moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel. That is an old canard often resorted to by propagandists trying to divert attention from facts on the ground, and, it, too, is unworthy of the slaughter in Gaza. Contrary to imputing “moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel, I said that “Hamas would like to see every Jew in Israel dead.” I said that “a radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth.” And I described the new spate of anti-Semitism across the continent of Europe. I am curious as to why you ignored remarks which clearly counter the notion of “moral equivalency.”

I had noticed others attempting to re-introduce this stinky, Reagan-clammy phrase into the discourse, but I just don't think it's working as well this time.

Since Moyers mentioned My Lai and the press, here's another parallel with the idiotic way in which foreign policy is covered in this country.

The My Lai story wasn't broken by the mainstream press; no one would touch it for 20 months. It took the equivalent of the blogs of that day, the alternative media Dispatch News Service, to break the mold and print Seymour Hersh's story.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2526

We should probably try to help out instead of just complaining.

Maybe we could come up with a list of serious crimes that if our leaders do should be investigated and lead to consequences, and which crimes should never be investigated and should lead to no consequences.

So, authorizing torture is obviously not a serious crime.

But lying about a blow job is.

We could probably come up with a longer list.