Not at all fair, but deliberately balanced

One does wonder if there's some sort of 'macro' that a columnist hits on their keyboard to add some sort of smarmy false equivalency to any article.

In a recent New Yorker columnist on the legislative nihilism of the modern GOP Congress, Jonathan Chait throws out this beauty:

The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress.

Um...yeah.

The radical left...oh how they would have stopped all that civil rights legislation and medicare -- such obstructionists...hypothetically of course...even if they would have supported all those things.

What, pray tell, would the "radical left" of the 1960s have done exactly that would have stopped the government from functioning? Stopped Vietman?

Oh how terrible that would have been, huh?

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]