Two party chairmen, two different standards.

Democratic party chair Howard Dean is defending remarks he made Monday that the Republican Party is "not very friendly to different kinds of people, they are a pretty monolithic party ... it's pretty much a white, Christian party."

Challenged on that on "Today," Dean said that "unfortunately, by and large it is. And they have the agenda of the conservative Christians."

Here are a few items from that agenda so we can evaluate how accurate Dean's characterization is:

• Banning funding for embryonic stem cell research.
  
• Federal legislation interfering with the Terri Schiavo case.
  
• Nominating reactionary activist judges.
  
• Making abortion illegal.
• Teaching "intelligent design" at the expense of evolution.
  
• Restricting women's access to birth control.
  
• Abstinence-only sex education.
  
• "Faith-based" initiatives.
  
• Banning gay marriage and civil unions.

Now we move to Meet the Press from this past Sunday when Republican party chairman Ken Mehlman blatantly lied to Tim Russert by claiming the Downing Street memo has been completely discredited.

"Tim, that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then. Whether it's the 9-11 Commission, whether it's the Senate, whoever's looked at this has said there was no effort to change the intelligence at all." When Russert noted "I don't believe that the authenticity of this report has been discredited," Mehlman reiterated: "I believe that the findings of the report, the fact that the intelligence was somehow fixed, have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it."

While Dean's remark was a generalization, Mehlman's lying about how this country got dragged into the Iraq war is much more egregious. Yet, it's Dean who has come under scrutiny by the media, Republicans, and some of his fellow Democrats.