A.J. DiCintio
Liberals and the big hate
By A.J. DiCintio
Today before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us. — MoveOn.org
Pick the Target, Freeze it, Personalize it, Polarize it. — Saul Alinsky.
Supported by innumerable others like them, those quotes remind us of what our daily experience confirms: The sliming of opponents has always come naturally to liberals.
But there should be no surprise because humans arrogant enough to make a religion of politics and gods of politicians are arrogant enough to find it impossible to resist the temptation of denigrating "heretics" as stupid Know-Nothing yahoos.
That's why during every presidential election liberals coalesce into a cloud of obnoxiously droning locusts to din our ears and minds with insufferable, pride-bloated protestations of the intellectual superiority of the Democratic candidate.
And that's why liberals have become so good at teaching by example that liberal high school students have learned to use "conservative" to mean "a war-mongering reactionary who is anti-science, anti-art, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-poor, and anti-peace — in truth, anti everything good."
This contemptible (and eminently stupid) behavior is on my mind these days because liberals — especially those who write "all the [opinion] fit to print" — are using murders committed by a few madmen to depict conservatives as vile hate mongers, puffing this opinion with their usual amnesia unashamedly and outrageously on display.
Following are some particularly disgusting examples.
Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations [read "conservatives and Fox News"] wind up such people at their, and our, peril. (Paul Krugman, "The Big Hate.")
How interesting Mr. Krugman doesn't denounce unrepentant former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers as "an all-American lunatic" while condemning the American left for "winding up such people."
However, it is not just Krugman who is conveniently and hypocritically selective; for there are legions of liberals prepared to lavish praise upon Ayers as a "Distinguished Professor" and "Senior University Scholar" at the University of Illinois, never mentioning that he conducts his research not in Urbana-Champaign but at a satellite campus where he can take full advantage of the resources provided by The Chicago Political Machine — an institution every liberal praises as an exquisite exemplar of "empathy," morality, and intellectuality.
Moreover, there is not a liberal to be found who will denounce Barack Obama as (at the very least) a dense, dangerous Pollyanna for considering it no big deal to associate himself with the former bomber and self-described "small 'c' communist" who teaches teachers to instruct inner city children not in the Three R's but in the principles of leftist community organizing.
Let's now move over to Frank Rich, who alleged that a former Michigan GOP chairman suggested Republicans stop associating the term "socialism" with Obama, to tar him instead with the more effective "fascism." Then, Rich wrote this:
He didn't seem to grasp that "fascism" is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find "bad" because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler. ("The Obama Haters' Silent Enablers.")
Incredibly, however, the Harvard educated former drama critic forgot these words spoken by Emilia in Shakespeare's Othello:
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
Poor Frank Rich. He can't remember that passage any more than he can recall Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) kicking off the liberal tradition of invoking "a mass-murderer like Hitler" to attack opponents when at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he veered from his script to slime the Chicago police as follows:
If George McGovern were president, we wouldn't have these Gestapo tactics. . .
Poor Frank, indeed; for he can't remember that if he had a dollar for every "fascist" liberals have used to smear conservatives or conservatives policies since '68, he wouldn't lose even a nanosecond of sleep over the fact that his employer's payroll account may soon be drier than the raisin in Lorraine Hansberry's most famous play.
The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3000-plus cases she's adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench. (Rich, "Silent Enablers.")
Venom? Directed at Judge Sotomayor? If there is so much of it, why couldn't Frank Rich come up with at least one example?
But with respect to real "venomous personal attacks" that have nothing to do with one's service as a judge, this one totally slipped Frank's memory.
Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy... (Senator Ted Kennedy, speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate.)
Ah, how beautiful is amnesia regarding hateful speech — but only when the venom flows from the mouth of one whom the left lionizes as, well, a lion of American politics.
This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren't warned. (Rich, "Silent Enablers.")
Actor Jon Voight's purely political, entirely democratic call to "bring an end to this false prophet Obama" so exercised Frank Rich that he condemned it as "toxic" and implied that conservatives who fail to speak out against it will be responsible for its poisonous consequences.
Fear and loathing of the term "false prophet" in a political context?
You would think, then, that if a person — for example, an editor of Newsweek, who by extension represents the entirety of the Obama worshipping, Obama softballing, Obama thrill-enveloped liberal media — infinitely upped the "pseudo-Scriptural" ante by calling a merely human president "God," Mr. Rich would explode in a volcanic fit of apoplexy.
But he didn't because another fundamental principle of liberalism is the relativity of truth.
Or, to put it another way, a liberal's first and most enduring obligation is never to betray The Revolution, the consequences of a rank hypocrisy be damned.
© A.J. DiCintio
June 20, 2009
Today before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us. — MoveOn.org
Pick the Target, Freeze it, Personalize it, Polarize it. — Saul Alinsky.
Supported by innumerable others like them, those quotes remind us of what our daily experience confirms: The sliming of opponents has always come naturally to liberals.
But there should be no surprise because humans arrogant enough to make a religion of politics and gods of politicians are arrogant enough to find it impossible to resist the temptation of denigrating "heretics" as stupid Know-Nothing yahoos.
That's why during every presidential election liberals coalesce into a cloud of obnoxiously droning locusts to din our ears and minds with insufferable, pride-bloated protestations of the intellectual superiority of the Democratic candidate.
And that's why liberals have become so good at teaching by example that liberal high school students have learned to use "conservative" to mean "a war-mongering reactionary who is anti-science, anti-art, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-poor, and anti-peace — in truth, anti everything good."
This contemptible (and eminently stupid) behavior is on my mind these days because liberals — especially those who write "all the [opinion] fit to print" — are using murders committed by a few madmen to depict conservatives as vile hate mongers, puffing this opinion with their usual amnesia unashamedly and outrageously on display.
Following are some particularly disgusting examples.
Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations [read "conservatives and Fox News"] wind up such people at their, and our, peril. (Paul Krugman, "The Big Hate.")
How interesting Mr. Krugman doesn't denounce unrepentant former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers as "an all-American lunatic" while condemning the American left for "winding up such people."
However, it is not just Krugman who is conveniently and hypocritically selective; for there are legions of liberals prepared to lavish praise upon Ayers as a "Distinguished Professor" and "Senior University Scholar" at the University of Illinois, never mentioning that he conducts his research not in Urbana-Champaign but at a satellite campus where he can take full advantage of the resources provided by The Chicago Political Machine — an institution every liberal praises as an exquisite exemplar of "empathy," morality, and intellectuality.
Moreover, there is not a liberal to be found who will denounce Barack Obama as (at the very least) a dense, dangerous Pollyanna for considering it no big deal to associate himself with the former bomber and self-described "small 'c' communist" who teaches teachers to instruct inner city children not in the Three R's but in the principles of leftist community organizing.
Let's now move over to Frank Rich, who alleged that a former Michigan GOP chairman suggested Republicans stop associating the term "socialism" with Obama, to tar him instead with the more effective "fascism." Then, Rich wrote this:
He didn't seem to grasp that "fascism" is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find "bad" because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler. ("The Obama Haters' Silent Enablers.")
Incredibly, however, the Harvard educated former drama critic forgot these words spoken by Emilia in Shakespeare's Othello:
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
Poor Frank Rich. He can't remember that passage any more than he can recall Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) kicking off the liberal tradition of invoking "a mass-murderer like Hitler" to attack opponents when at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he veered from his script to slime the Chicago police as follows:
If George McGovern were president, we wouldn't have these Gestapo tactics. . .
Poor Frank, indeed; for he can't remember that if he had a dollar for every "fascist" liberals have used to smear conservatives or conservatives policies since '68, he wouldn't lose even a nanosecond of sleep over the fact that his employer's payroll account may soon be drier than the raisin in Lorraine Hansberry's most famous play.
The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3000-plus cases she's adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench. (Rich, "Silent Enablers.")
Venom? Directed at Judge Sotomayor? If there is so much of it, why couldn't Frank Rich come up with at least one example?
But with respect to real "venomous personal attacks" that have nothing to do with one's service as a judge, this one totally slipped Frank's memory.
Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy... (Senator Ted Kennedy, speaking on the floor of the U.S. Senate.)
Ah, how beautiful is amnesia regarding hateful speech — but only when the venom flows from the mouth of one whom the left lionizes as, well, a lion of American politics.
This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren't warned. (Rich, "Silent Enablers.")
Actor Jon Voight's purely political, entirely democratic call to "bring an end to this false prophet Obama" so exercised Frank Rich that he condemned it as "toxic" and implied that conservatives who fail to speak out against it will be responsible for its poisonous consequences.
Fear and loathing of the term "false prophet" in a political context?
You would think, then, that if a person — for example, an editor of Newsweek, who by extension represents the entirety of the Obama worshipping, Obama softballing, Obama thrill-enveloped liberal media — infinitely upped the "pseudo-Scriptural" ante by calling a merely human president "God," Mr. Rich would explode in a volcanic fit of apoplexy.
But he didn't because another fundamental principle of liberalism is the relativity of truth.
Or, to put it another way, a liberal's first and most enduring obligation is never to betray The Revolution, the consequences of a rank hypocrisy be damned.
© A.J. DiCintio
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