This is a little old, but it's a valuable glimpse at how committed the media elite is to the idea that both the Left and the Right are equally guilty of whatever sins are relevant at any given moment -- and into the consistent failure of the media to accurately describe the Right's approach to public policy. Here's the New York Times' Gail Collins a few weeks ago:

I like partisanship. What I don't like, and what nobody likes, is the brain-dead variety we see in Congress where the minority party would rather make a bill worse in the hopes that it would fail than make it better in case it passes. So the Republicans make it impossible for the Democrats to put cost controls in the health care plan by howling “rationing!” And back when the Democrats were in the minority, they made sure that any attempt to contain the cost of entitlements was immediately branded “destruction of Social Security.”

As Matthew Yglesias explained last week, the Bush administration was described as trying to destroy Social Security because ... it was trying to destroy Social Security.

But don't take Yglesias' word for it, or mine. The Bush administration itself admitted their proposals were not about improving the solvency of the Social Security system. They admitted it would have no effect whatsoever on solvency.

And yet Gail Collins clings to the notion that Republicans were simply trying to “contain the cost of entitlements,” and “brain-dead” Democrats unfairly accused them of trying to destroy Social Security.

There's something brain-dead in all this, but it isn't Democrats' opposition to Bush's Social Security schemes. It's the knee-jerk assumption that both sides must be equally guilty of everything; it's the blind faith -- in the face of all evidence to the contrary, including their own admissions -- that the Republicans were simply trying to ensure Social Security's solvency. They weren't. They were trying to dismantle it. It didn't have anything to do with solvency. They even said so!