The first post from "I Can't Believe I'm Not President" John Kerry on DailyKos should make a Democrat want to forcibly rip the keyboard from his hands so that he may never embarass his party again.

To recap quickly, Chris Matthews made a rather tin-ear comment on the latest from Osama:

This is from bin Laden in the audio today. �There is no defect in the solution other than preventing the flow of hundreds of billions to the influential people and war merchants in America.� I mean, he sounds like an over-the-top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore.

I'd expect liberal outrage from the likes of, say, Peter Daou at the Huffington Post or Matt Stoler of MyDD, or even quasi-anonymous open-letter writers: people who aren't too serious, or if we're being charitable, people who may be writing to a deadline and need an outrage of the week. I would not expect inaccurate calumny from a man who once graced a presidential ticket and is young enough to hope he will do so again. Said Sen. Kerry:

There's something that doesn't sit right with me when, on the day Osama Bin Laden resurfaced in a disturbing audio tape, cable television ends up in a game of name calling as a war protester is compared to Osama Bin Laden.

(emphasis mine) First, let me be accurate. At no point in his post does he directly reference the Matthews statement above, and other pundits have made similar comparisons. On the other hand, Kerry mentions Hardball three times, omits any other cable network, and tags the post with Chris Matthews' name, so I don't think I'm entirely in left field when I connect the dots. (No one else seems to think so, either.)

And here's the problem: Matthews never compared Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden. He compared Osama bin Laden to Michael Moore. That makes all the difference.

The current game of left-wing outrage is Rhetorical Question Bingo, as exemplified by Mr. Daou in his Salon piece. The rules are simple: ask what firestorm would erupt if you replaced Moore with some conservative icon. But even cursory answers to Mr. Daou's silly questions reveal what faux-offense this really is:

• "Bin Laden sounds like Clint Eastwood": I'm trying to figure out how that's possible. "Go ahead, Bush, make my day," would be obvious, or maybe "Are you feeling lucky, America?"
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Rush Limbaugh": I can hear the opening line of the next bin Laden tape now: "Live from the Excellence in Islam Institute, your host, Osama bin Laden, seated on the prestigious Saladin the Conqueror Cushion. . . ." (probably makes more sense if you've ever actually heard the show)
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Ron Silver": Did bin Laden announce he was playing Alan Dershowitz or start quoting Douglas MacArthur? (I'll admit, I'm not really familiar with Silver.)
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Bill O'Reilly": What's the likelihood that bin Laden is going to start harassing us with conversations about "phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies"?
  
• "Bin Laden sounds like Anthony Rickey!: That one's not on Salon, but man, that would be great! If Bush's War on Terror is going so well that bin Laden sounds like a law school weblogger whose Sitemeter doesn't exactly runneth over, I think we can declare at least partial victory.

The rather serious conclusion from this tongue-in-cheek guide to terrorist comparison? Offense can only go so far, and calls for an apology are unseemly. Was Matthews insulting Michael Moore by using him as the object of comparison? Sure, but only because he was treating the substantive content of bin Laden's statement dismissively, and the comparison showed that he didn't think much of Moore's substantive views. This shouldn't be news. There's no inference that Moore is a terrorist, terrorist sympathizer, aiding the terrorists, or otherwise hates America.

When Matthews compares bin Laden to Anthony Rickey, I'll assume that he means that the most-wanted man in the world can't keep his word-count down. If this subject is enough to get your blood boiling, switch to decaf--and don't run for President.