Double Standard Alert

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal has this to say about the President's meeting with Al Sharpton the other day:

In yesterday's item we left out one shameful Sharpton episode, which Jeff Jacoby recounted in a 2003 column:

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants"--code for Jews--with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death.

Remember a few months ago, when liberals shrieked at Sarah Palin for supposedly misappropriating the term "blood libel"? Obama, who was lecturing us on "civility" back then, now is palling around with a guy who put forward an actual blood libel.

One sign of an educated person used to be his ability to identify and avoid double standards and other logical fallacies.   These logical fallacies were taught -- remember the phrase "sic hoc ergo propter hoc"? --  in freshman English.   Now freshman English classes teach gender awareness and queer theory and multiculturalism and Marxism and "tolerance" and "diversity" -- anything but teaching young minds to think logically and consistently.   Is it any wonder that we have a Democratic Party that in January rails against "incivility" by Tea Party Republicans (mostly imagined) as a source of violence, while embracing men like Sharpton who have actually made a parasitic living from fomenting envy and bitterness and from inciting actual violence?