The Sunday Post-Dispatch ran an editorial about “The Mean Girls & Boys Club”, which described the most gratuitously nasty bills introduced in the current Missouri legislature:
[A] truly mean bill creates hardship for classes of people without sound public purpose. A truly mean bill is based on prejudice, not fact.
The column spewed mean ideas: cutting COLAs for minimum wage earners; weakening child labor laws; designating the day after Thanksgiving until Dec. 26th as the Christmas Season; requiring welfare recipients to undergo drug testing; requiring Voter ID, which would disenfranchise many elderly, poor and disabled voters; and making it harder for fired workers to prove discrimination.
In yet one more example of the press’s willingness to draw a false equivalence in order to appear unbiased, the list of a dozen legislators who’ve introduced such bills included one Democrat, Maria Chappelle-Nadal. It would be imprudent of the Post to print such a column without a Democrat on the list. Chappelle-Nadal’s supposedly mean bill would require drug testing for those elected to the legislature. But if memory serves, and I can’t find proof of it on the internet, she introduced the bill only as a sarcastic comeback at the people who want to require drug testing of welfare recipients–sort of a “sauce for the goose” move. Since the P-D editorial opened her section with that very phrase, I get the feeling they suspect the same thing about the bill.
Since Chappelle-Nadal is very concerned about finding the funds for testing all welfare recipients, she probably relished introducing a bill that would require those mean Republicans to submit to the test AND pay for it themselves. Like I said, though, the editorial staff had to have at least one Democrat so as not to appear biased, even if including her in the list was … kind of mean.
Hey, editors, it is what it is. The Republicans are the mean ones. And your false equivalence doesn’t get you off the hook with them; all it does is embarrass you.
I read this editorial and wondered what Sen. Chappelle-Nadal had done to get in such exalted company. I mean, you’ve got to be pretty bad to rub shoulders with Sen. Jane Cunningham, for example. You may be right that her transgression, if any, was pretty minor. And if, indeed, it was tongue-in-cheek, then she shouldn’t have been included at all. We’ll see if she bothers to respond with a Letter to the Editor.
She sent me this e-mail: