Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

PT is critiqued for a category of things he either doesn't refute or explicitly participates in. Therefore, analogizing RH's functional error to PT's body of work pretty clearly confuses the conversation. "PT would not get the same treatment" isn't interesting because PT != RH.

The question is actually much simpler than you're making it out to be here.

How so? Simply stating that doesn't make it true. PT, again, is critiqued for held/expressed beliefs. What happened with Reid is something he's apologized for. Regardless of your belief as to whether RH deserves further on this issue, these are pretty clearly distinct things.

Let's go back to Mike's tweet, I don't think he was asking "why is RH not generally more critiqued, like PT?" Because the answer is clearly substantive -- more people find PT objectionable. I think Mike was asking the better question: "Disinfo is bad -- are we watching for this?"

I don't think we've got quite the same lens on this (or that you've got a good sense of what mine is), but I think I agree with the bottom line, here. "How would I feel if it were the other side?" isn't meant to equivocate; it's a thought experiment to dispel some degree of bias.

So when I run that thought experiment about what if it was Peter, I find myself stopping at him writing a public apology for decisions that turned out poorly. Does he do that?

The apology doesn't matter much. IMO, two things matter here: (1) what was known and intended — and I'm very inclined to err on the side of believing RH, and (2) what actually occurred: in this case, a pretty blatant manipulation of a critical democratic process.

I don't think RH needs to be scapegoated. At all. But we really, really need to be able to talk about what happened here, because holy shit.