When you read something like this from Conor Clarke (h/t Andrew Sullivan) — it’s tough not to be just a little cynical about the so-called “arguments” from the so-called “conservative” camp.

Of course, the so-called “liberal” camp also distorts reality. Case in point, Rachel Maddow’s report last night re: the alleged criminal past of Dr. Tiller’s suspected killer, Scott Roeder.

Confession: I like Maddow and generally find her reports (and her show, overall) to be — while slanted — more even-keeled than many of the openly slanted media on either side of the political equation. At the very least, she’s far easier to watch than, say, her raving colleague, Mr. Olbermann.

Even then, in this particular report last night:

* Maddow offers a hypothesis, which goes something like this: The Bush administration’s eight-year failure to adequately pursue and prosecute Roeder — as a suspect in alleged, non-murder crimes — left him free to kill Dr. Tiller.

* She interviews a source who (at multiple points) undermines or (at best) raises serious questions about her hypothesis

* She finally recaps, positioning the interview as substantive support for her opening hypothesis, ignoring the points that Roeder’s most recent alleged offense (i) occured with Obama in office, days before Tiller’s murder; and (ii) was backed up by potentially more robust evidence than the FBI had against Roeder when Bush was in office.

Now — to be perfectly clear — I am not suggesting that the Bush administration adequately enforced relevant law; they probably did not, based on other points Maddow shared, prior to the aforementioned interview. I am also not suggesting that the Obama administration failed to adequately enforce relevant law; they barely had time to react when Roeder resurfaced. I’m only suggesting this: Maddow — though she is clearly baffled in this segment by the failure of her interviewee to support her hypothesis — glosses over that inconvenience and sticks to her hypothesis. In similar fashion, her colleagues on the right gloss over the inconvience of Conor Clarke’s pie chart, not to mention the inconvenience of the mounting evidence debunking the Cheney torture regime … and so on.

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Here’s the Maddow segment mentioned above. I trust you’ll let me know if you disagree with my assessment of it.