Hypocrisy for thee, but not for me.

If we could develop a power source that ran off of right-wing double standards, we wouldn't really need oil anymore. Consider the following recent bit of insipitude from Commander Chimpy McChimpster:

Mandela still alive after embarrassing Bush remark

Fri Sep 21, 8:15 AM ET

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader's death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

"It's out there. All we can do is reassure people, especially South Africans, that President Mandela is alive," Achmat Dangor, chief executive officer of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said as Bush's comments received worldwide coverage.

In a speech defending his administration's Iraq policy, Bush said former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's brutality had made it impossible for a unifying leader to emerge and stop the sectarian violence that has engulfed the Middle Eastern nation.

"I heard somebody say, Where's Mandela?' Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas," Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

Man, that George Bush, what a tool! What a dimbulb! What a freakin' moron, right? Except that, if you put what he said in context, he was actually simply making an analogy -- that Saddam Hussein had gotten rid of Mandela-like democracy advocates in Iraq -- an analogy that, not surprisingly, every loyal wingnut began pushing. Like here:

There Are Morons, But They Don't Include George Bush

It has become apparent that some journalists covering President Bush either have a learning disability or work extra hard to twist his words until the reporters turn into novelists. The latest to prove this theory correct works for Reuters, which sent out a story that claimed George Bush thought that Nelson Mandela had died, when in fact Bush used an analogy that clearly sailed over Reuters' head.

So there you have it -- it's irresponsible to simply look at the words themselves, when the proper thing to do is back up a step and make sure you establish the context. Right? Right?

Unless it involves a Democrat, of course, such as when John Kerry made a lame joke about how not-so-bright people end up in Iraq and, my oh my, the deliberate misinterpretation of that remark took on a life of its own, didn't it?

Big Story attack dogs on Kerry, lapdogs for Bush

As expected, the Big Story was all over the remarks that John Kerry made yesterday, misquoting, misinterpreting, and gleefully twisting into an anti-troop attitude shared by all Democrats. Gibson wonders if this is the October surprise?

For the record, the quote is

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Kerry says it was a misdelivered joke, intended to skewer Bush and his less-than-stellar academic record and subsequent misadventures in Iraq. A Kerry aide said (according to CNN) that the comments should have been

"I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq."

FOX News has been misrepresenting the comments all day, adhering to their proven formula that if you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it as truth.

So there you have it. When a Republican says it, it behooves everyone to carefully examine the statement and put it in its proper context for the sake of fairness. On the other hand, when a Democrat does the same, it behooves us to deliberately and knowingly distort and misrepresent the words as much as possible, to maximum political effect.

Tune in tomorrow when we explain how politicians who want to bring back the troops to keep them from getting killed secretly hate them and hope that they all get killed.