As Salon's Glenn Greenwald tweeted, the Beltway media's desire to routinely create these types of false equivalencies is quite common, it's just that Mark Murray's recent effort at MSNBC.com was especially egregious.

You know the drill, pundits at this point cannot help but notice the extraordinary rage and anti-government hate that now passes for mainstream GOP talking points. And political professionals like Murray realize that what's happening today as part of the organized, and unhinged, anti-Obama movement has no precedence in modern American politics. And yes, Murray points to specific examples including recent outbursts by Liz Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Michael Steele who all basically accused Obama of being an un-American radical.

The dead-on headline:

When the Rhetoric Goes Too Far

But then comes the inevitable yeah/but paragraph about how Democrats did the exact same thing when Bush was in office. Here's Murray's attempt at rewriting history:

Democrats, of course, have engaged in their own unfair claims -- scaring seniors over GOP efforts to reform Social Security and Medicare; charging that George W. Bush stole the 2000 presidential election; and declaring that the Bush “surge” in Iraq was a failure (when it clearly worked).

First of all, note that the examples cited were all policy disagreements; not hateful name-calling coming from Democratic Party leaders.

Secondly, the examples cited are rather foolish. Dems scared senior about GOP efforts to reform health care? Are you kidding me? Please recall that it was the GOP that scared seniors when Bush falsely claimed SS would go bankrupt if the government didn't act. Democrats fact-checked the GOP, but today, as pundits rewrite the past, that qualifies as “scaring” seniors; as “overheated rhetoric.” Same with Medicare.

Meanwhile, gimme a break about the 2000 president recount allegation, considering the GOP Noise Machine was making the exact same claim about Al Gore at the time. And how on earth does Murray compare the Democrats' critique of Bush foreign policy with today's claims that Obama is a communist/socialist/Nazi/racist/fascist? The attempt is patently absurd.

Murray is correct to note that today's movement by the right-wing, and its high-profile surrogates in the media, to relentlessly attack the President of the United States as a radical, traitorous agent set on destroying the Constitution is off the charts in terms of “overheated rhetoric.”

But the idea that Democratic leaders did the same thing to Bush is a joke. And frankly, it says more about today's press corps that strains to make the hollow comparison, than it does about Bush's former liberal critics.