Everybody does what, exactly?

In looking for a link to a news story about Barack Obama's visit to William Ayers, former terrorist bomber, I found this story on The Politico.

The attitude of the writer, Ben Smith, is very interesting. The standard tactic for a liberal who must admit that another liberal has done something bad is to reluctantly make the admission, but to pair it with something equally bad that a conservative has done to show that "everybody does it" and that it is therefore no big deal. Mr. Smith's example of moral equivalence is very telling.

Here are the relevant quote:

In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.

Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.

On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later called that a mistake.

Notice how in Mr. Smith's mind opposition to providing another taxpayer funded paid holiday to our under-worked and overpaid federal employees is seen as equivalent to carrying out a campaign of terrorist bombings in the hope of sparking a general violent communist revolution in the USA.

I'm sure that Ben Smith would object to that particular phrasing, but what other conclusion are we to draw? Obama rubs elbows with people who targeted the United States with the same kind of terrorist acts that al Qaeda carries out, but that kind of thing is really normal in politics because John McCain took a mainstream conservative position once. A position which he then repudiated in his headlong journey to the left.

The left has a massive problem understanding perspective. Voting no on a King holiday even if done out of pure racism does not compare to carrying out a series of terrorist bombings.