When is it OK to make comparisons to a “terror attack”?

For NewsBusters, it's OK if you are a conservative who is attacking President Obama.

Here's NewsBusters' Tim Graham yesterday, slamming Matt Lauer for not criticizing Michael Eric Dyson for his “vicious attack on Rep. Joe Wilson and other conservatives as comparable to terrorists, like the suicide attackers of 9/11” during the previous day's edition of NBC's Today:

NBC spotlighted radical black Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson to rail against President Bush as a “clueless patrician” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and then Brian Williams threw those words in Bush's face. On Wednesday, they spotlighted Dyson's vicious attack on Rep. Joe Wilson and other conservatives as comparable to terrorists, like the suicide attackers of 9/11. Matt Lauer didn't find this an occasion to interrupt and interject. Instead, he then read Maureen Dowd's New York Times column calling Wilson a racist. Here's how Lauer brought Dyson in:

LAUER: Michael, I don't know which is worse. Is it worse if, in fact, some of this opposition to President Obama is fueled by outright racism? Or is it worse if some liberals, in an attempt to defend President Obama and his plans, invoke the charge of racism to discredit the critics?

DYSON: Well clearly the first would be the problem, Matt. The existence of an abuse is far worse than those who trump it up. But let me say this. You don't ask the person who's been, you know, the abuser what the status of the, the progress is. You ask the people or the person who's been abused. Or if we look at terror, there's only been one terrorist strike, 9/11, but since then we've had terror alerts, we've been proactive, we've been preemptive. So race is the same way. Race is not only a former of terror, it is terror.

And here's NewsBusters' Brad Wilmouth today, cheering actor Alan Autry for “observ[ing] that the conditions created by the federal government by intentionally withholding water are similar to what he would have expected in the aftermath of a terror attack” on last night's Hannity:

Then, actor Alan Autry, a former Republican mayor of Fresno who is also famous for starring in the television series In the Heat of the Night, slammed President Obama for refusing to intervene. As he recounted post-9/11 fears that al-Qaeda would target the water supply to hurt American agriculture, Autry observed that the conditions created by the federal government by intentionally withholding water are similar to what he would have expected in the aftermath of a terror attack. Autry:

One of the things we were charged with by the federal government was to work together locally to protect the water supply to farming communities so they could continue to provide food for the nation. Now, if you would have told me that those – that water would have stopped, I would have believed maybe al-Qaeda struck, not the federal government.

Can't anybody over there play this game?