Or, Where is the Logic?

In 2008, JPMorgan Chase was forced by the Federal government to accept bailout funds from TARP, even though the bank had no need of these funds.  The government’s reasoning for this was that they didn’t want to embarrass the banks that actually “needed” TARP bailout by having those banks be the only ones being funded by the government.  In the end, some 700 banks received TARP funds, which sounds like a lot, until that number is compared to the total number of banks in the US: nearly 9500 having assets of at least $100 million.  Yet, despite only 7% of the banks receiving bailout funds (and not all of them needing the funds), the entire banking industry is tarred by the failures of the few.  Flowing from this is the view that all banks contributed to the Panic of 2008 by overextending themselves with foolish investments, even though only a few of them actually were so engaged.

Throughout the Tea Party’s history over the last three years, there have been instances, as there are in all large and amorphous groupings, of individuals holding signs of a racist nature.  Whenever these signs, or other behaviors, are spotted by Tea Partiers at the gatherings, these individuals are isolated and removed from the gathering by those Tea Partiers.  Despite this, though, the entire collection of Tea Partiers is branded as racist.

In the current Occupy Wall Street protests, primarily in New York, there have been instances, again as there are in all large and amorphous groupings, of individuals holding offensive signs, this time of an anti-Semitic nature.  Following the logic applied to the Tea Partiers, should the OWS crowd be branded as bigoted?  To date, the NLMSM, which has applied this logic to the Tea Party movement, has not applied it to the OWS.

There are rare, but well-publicized, incidents of police brutality—Rodney King is one such.  Others, placed on YouTube, purport to show the same, but on full investigation, the “brutality” usually turns out to be non-existent.  Yet entire police forces are branded as corrupt on the basis of these rare incidents.

There are some Americans who objected to Barack Obama being elected President because of his race.  As a result of this, all Americans who disagree with Obama are racist, say too many on the Left.

And there are examples of a related “logic:” all who objected to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act while it was being developed were accused by Democrat Congressional leadership of being against all health care reform, even though many alternatives were proposed, both in the Congress and around the country.  Along the same lines, President Obama accuses all who object to his recently defeated Jobs Bill (defeated in the Democrat-controlled Senate, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid initially refused to allow it to come to a vote at all, even though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explicitly requested a vote in response to Obama’s demand for that vote) of wanting all teachers, police, firefighters, et al., to lose their jobs.

Where is the logic in these accusations?  Why is there such imbalance in applying this “logic?”  One answer might be in the outcome of applying such “thinking” consistently: it would contradict the predetermined outcome of those who make the logical leaps in some cases, but not others.

In the end, who benefits from this imbalance?

Update: Corrected a typo in the third paragraph: NLMSL should have been NLMSM, which it now is.