Tim Graham, today, makes an effort at taking issue with a pair of Washington Post articles detailing the evolution of the respective platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties over the last 52 years, but though he puts on the standard Newsbusters show of being Angry And Offended by them, he doesn’t offer any real basis for this reaction.

The core of his complaint is that Marc Fisher, who authored both articles, gave disparate treatment to the evolution of the two platforms:

But last Wednesday’s piece on the GOP was headlined “Over the past half-century, a strong shift to to the right.” And for the Democrats, a strong shift to the left since 1960? The headline today was “In search of a balance between ideals and realities.” (bolding by Graham)

Has there been any “strong shift to the left” by the Democrats, though? The idea forms the core of Graham’s objection, but Fisher’s article on the Democrats does a fairly solid job of debunking this notion, showing how the party has shifted back and forth between liberal and more conservative language on issues over the years. By contrast, Fisher writes, Republicans “moved in fairly linear fashion to ever-more conservative stances” on a broad range of issues. Both the Fisher articles offer a broad overview of the evolution of the two parties, but Graham, to support his own premise about a sharp Democratic turn to the left, singles out only a few right-wing hot-button issues; abortion, gay marriage, “bringing ‘undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.’”

After mentioning that last one, Graham doesn’t touch it again, from which we can assume Newsbusters readers are simply supposed to understand that brown-looking foreigners with funny accents but without proper paperwork are supposed to be regarded with contempt by anyone except extremist liberals.

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