Get your talking points straight

All right then. Either he is or he ain't. Yesterday, Mel Gibson was a verminous, anti-Semitic, Michael Moore lovin' liberal, but today, prominent conservatives are mounting the barricades in his defense, including culture warrior numero uno, David "Lord of the Google Monkeys" Horowitz [all bolds are mine]:

On the August 1 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Horowitz told co-host Sean Hannity that "people deserve compassion when they are in this kind of trouble." Horowitz continued: "As a Jew, I feel much more threatened by people like [former President] Jimmy Carter when Israel is facing genocidal enemies who have sworn to destroy it and kill the Jews, and Carter is out there, wagging his finger at the Israelis." Horowitz added that the anger over Gibson's comments is "all about politics" and that "a lot of the people who are jumping all over Mel Gibson see him as some kind of a conservative or as a Christian. There's a lot of hatred of Christians in this country."

I put it to you: does this qualify as self-hatred? And I'm guessing that I'm not supposed to point out that Horowitz's smear of our evangelical, Southern Baptist former president as an enemy of the Jews is just the very same hatred of Christians so throroughly deplored by Horowitz and his merry band of misfits.

Some of the other tortured rationales profferred in Gibson's defense:

In his August 2 column on National Review Online, John Derbyshire excused Gibson's comments because "[t]he guy was drunk, for heaven's sake. We all say and do dumb things when we are drunk." Derbyshire added: "As little as I care for Mel and his splatter-fest Brit-hating oeuvre, though, I care even less for the schoolmarmish, prissy, squealing, skirt-clutching, sissified, feminized, pansified, preening moral vanity of the vile and anti-human Political Correctness cult."

I must say, this begs the question of what kind of drunk this guy is after his three-scotch-before-dinner warm-up. In vino, veritas.

On the August 1 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, William A. Donohue, president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said, "There's a lot of people who have made comments which are bigoted who are not necessarily bigots," adding that he is "concerned now about piling on." Of those who won't forgive Gibson, Donohue said: "Who gives a damn about those people?" Donohue then asked, "What kind of blood do they want out of this man?"

To prove his point, Donohue busts out his copy of Blazing Saddles and, sans irony, states, "See, the n*%@!# and the k$@& aren't really bigots, but they're saying bigoted things!" From this, we're to assume that the alcohol didn't so much let Gibson's inside-voice loose in public as throw off his sense of comedic timing, thus turning a perfectly hee-larious Mel Brooks-esque gag into an unseemly anti-Semitic gaffe.

As to Donohue's later question, I hear the Red Cross can always use O+, but they're not choosy about blood types. I hear they prefer you show up sober for these things, but the pay-off, apparently, is that it's easy to get schnockered after giving a pint or two.

So, are all these people liberals, now, too?