Guilt By Association

Matt makes an obvious point about the imbalance between the Wright-Obama conflation and the Parsley-Hagee-McCain nexus:

A certain number of clueless liberals are going to wonder why this isn't nearly as big a deal as Reverend Wright, so in case you don't get it the difference is that anti-Muslim bigotry is a fairly mainstream and popular sentiment in the United States so associating with the Daniel Pipes' and Rod Parsley's of the world is only a problem in the actual, substantive sense of indicating that McCain's foreign policy views are bad and dangerous, not in the freak show "this'll hurt in November in Pennsylvania" sense.

The same goes for the anti-gay stuff. Beating up on minorities is always less politically toxic than beating up on majorities. In democracies, anyway. Atwater, Morris and Rove just did the math.