Douthat - at best, half right about the GOP and Xn right

Ross Douthat says that journalists should look at claims of Rick Perry's or Michele Bachmann's religious dominionism, or whatever, with the same eye as claims about Barack Obama allegedly palling around with socialists.

Well, wrong on half, and the half-right portion is itself only half right. Let me explain.

Douthat is right that, to some degree, some GOP wingers pander to the religious right. He cites Rick Perry and the cervical cancer vaccine pandering to Merck even in the face of outcry from Christian rightists and others. But, he ignores, even while citing the diversity of the Christian right, that its "success gospel" subset would be perfectly OK with pandering to big business. He also gives little more than lip service to the "What's the Matter with Kansas" issue of many winger GOP politicians pandering to the Christian right then not following through.

Where he's 100 percent wrong, the half where he's totally wrong, is making the analogy to the 2008 claims against Obama.

Why? Obama wasn't even pandering to "socialist," to Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers or any others. Let alone actually trying to put in socialism in the White House.

The GOP's wingnuts are at least pandering to the Xn Right, on the other hand.

And, in the case of a Bachmann, if not a Perry, actually trying to implement Xn Right beliefs as part of public policy.

I'm inventing a new scale for judging the stupidity of mainstream media punditry. (With some "equivalency" exceptions, MSM news coverage is still generally OK.)

This scale will be 1-10 "doorknobs," based on Alcoholics Anonymous' claim that one's "higher power" can even be a doorknob.

There will be two ratings ... one a general one, the other scaled to the "base point" of a columnist I review regularly.

This column gets 7.5 doorknobs overall (higher is stupider) and 5 Douthat doorknobs (it's about the middle of his stupidity range).