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.