Context is everything, whether we’re talking baseball or borders

I don’t know how many others have noticed (probably no one), but absent context, your modern professional baseball team — bearded, dirty-looking, pot-bellied, standing around, spitting and brawling — is remarkably close in appearance to the crowd at a Hell’s Angel’s gathering.  Substantively, of course, they’re not the same at all, but a quick glance might prove confusing.

The same holds true in politics and, more specifically, in the world of moral equivalence that is the hallmark of the Left.  I’ve been grappling with this thought a lot the last few days, since I was unfortunate enough to catch the first five minutes of The Fence, an HBO “documentary” about the wall Congress authorized between Mexico and the U.S.  During those first five minutes, the narrator described Congress authorizing funds for the fence, and then said something along the lines of “although a fence doesn’t seem like a very American concept.”  To illustrate this, the film makers showed two clips:  Kennedy saying  our nation does not need walls and Reagan say “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down these walls!”   At that point, I turned the show off.

Mr. Bookworm was shocked:  “How can you make up your mind about a show in the first five minutes?”

“Because,” I said, “those first five minutes told me everything I needed to know about the film maker’s understanding of the border wall.  Anyone who is incapable of understanding the difference between walls aimed at imprisoning ones own citizens and a wall intended to protect citizens from criminals, is too dumb to waste my time.”

That same willingness to ignore context in order to create a false moral equivalance holds true for the Leftist view of war.  To people alive around the Vietnam era, the paradigm was set:  all wars are evil.  There is no possibility that there might be an enemy that can be destroyed only through war.  Witness the Oliver Stone revisionism that seeks to cast Hitler in a good light and show America as the bully.  I’ll acquit Stone of Hitlerian desires for ethnic cleansing.  This is simply a Leftist’s desperate attempt to create a moral equivalence proving that there is no such thing as a “good war.”

I don’t have much more to add.  I’d love your examples of moral equivalence on the Left, of the type that involves jettisoning meaning and context in order to falsely pair completely unrelated moral or practical concepts.