Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2 page)

It must have been galling that no one in America cared. Eventually, the
New York Times
gave up harping about Bush’s handling of the war and turned its full attention to attacking Enron.

Here the country had finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism and they didn’t want to fight it. They would have, except it would put them on the same side as the United States. In the wake of an attack on America committed by crazed fundamentalist Muslims, Walter Cronkite denounced Jerry Falwell. Falwell, it seems, had remarked that gay marriage and abortion on demand may not have warmed the heart of the Almighty. Cronkite proclaimed such a statement “the most abominable thing I’ve ever heard.” Showing his renowned dispassion and critical thinking, this Martha’s Vineyard millionaire commented that Falwell was “worshipping the same God as the people who bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon” (the difference being liberals urged compassion and understanding toward the terrorists).

Indeed, an attack on America by fanatical Muslims had finally provided liberals with a religion they could respect. Heretofore liberals deemed voluntary student prayers at high school football games a direct assault on the Constitution. But it was of urgent importance that Islamic terrorists being held in Guantanamo be free to practice their religion. This despite the fact that we had been repeatedly instructed that the terrorists were not practicing “true Islam.”

Less than three months after Islamic terrorists slaughtered thousands of Americans, ABC’s 20/20 ran a major report titled “Abortion Clinics in U.S. Targeted by Religious Terrorists.” As Jamie Floyd reported: “Since September eleventh the word ‘terrorists’ has come to mean someone who is radical, Islamic, and foreign. But many believe we have as much to fear from a homegrown group of anti-abortion crusaders.”
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New York Times
columnist Frank Rich demanded that Ashcroft stop monkeying around with Muslim terrorists and concentrate on anti-abortion extremists.
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Rich claimed that only pure political malice could explain Attorney General Ashcroft’s refusal to meet with Planned Parenthood while purporting to investigate “terrorism.”
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Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman recommended dropping the war against global terrorism (“declare victory at the first decent opportunity”!) and instead concentrate on “home-grown extremists.”
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In lieu of a military response against terrorists abroad and security precautions at home, liberals Canted to get the whole thing over with and just throw conservatives in jail.

Rarely had the great divide in the country been so manifest. Liberals hate America, they hate “flag-wavers,” they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam (post 9/11). Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have the energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now.

Long before the war, conservatives had a vague sense that liberals didn’t much like them. Consider that a president whom liberals themselves called “indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, [and] shameless” had staved off removal from office merely by calling his opponents “right-wing Republicans.”
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It was apparent then that we were dealing with a species of primitive religious hatred.

Clinton’s lies under oath in a judicial proceeding were such a shock to the legal system that just weeks before every Senate Democrat would vote to keep him in office, the entire Supreme Court boycotted Clinton’s State of the Union address—one of many historical firsts in the Clinton years. That stunning rebuke was meaningless. Liberals were impervious to any logic beyond Clinton’s mantra that his opponents were “right-wing Republicans.”

Professional Democrats have clintonized the entire party and they will destroy anyone who stands in their way. All that matters to them is power. They believe their moral superiority allows them to do things that would appall ordinary people.

In May 2001, former Clinton strategists James Carville and Paul Begala released a “Battle Plan for the Democrats” on the op-ed page of the
New York Times.
Their central piece of advice was for Democrats to start calling President George Bush names. “First,” they said, liberals must “call a radical a radical.” Other proposals included calling Bush dangerous and uncompassionate: “Mr. Bush’s agenda is neither compassionate nor conservative; it’s radical and it’s dangerous and the Democrats should say so.”
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That’s it. That’s the new plan. It’s the same as the old plan. Call Republicans names.

In a comic spasm of sophistry, the Democrats’ Big-Think men wrote: “We don’t believe the spin that stopping Mr. Bush’s assault on middle-class programs will hurt Democrats with voters.” Evidently someone was retailing the yarn about an “assault” on the middle class being hugely popular. But Carville and Begala begged to differ. (Even the editor must have been overwhelmed by the spin on that one.) These must have been the guys who helped President Clinton formulate his thoughtful response to Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” In his unifying, statesmanlike way, President Clinton referred to it as a murderous hit man’s assignment, repeatedly calling it the “Contract on America.” Go out right now and ask any liberal what was objectionable about the “Contract with America” and see if you get a more reasoned argument than that.

Meanwhile, the left’s political Tourette’s syndrome has gone completely unremarked upon. All parties to the debate carry on as if it’s totally normal for two of the most famous Democratic consultants to be recommending name-calling as political strategy. Clinton seemed to be making a good argument against impeachment by perseverating about a “right-wing” conspiracy out to get him.

An annoying typical Republican response to liberal hate speech is to attack one’s friends in order to appease one’s enemies. Democrats still hate the Republican appeasers; they just hate them a little less. And when it comes time for the left to tear down the conciliators, these Republican “moderates” won’t have many friends left willing to defend them. As Winston Churchill said, appeasement reflects the hope that the crocodile will eat you last. With some portion of (admittedly craven) Republicans casually acknowledging :he liberal premise that conservatives are mean and hateful, the left is emboldened to carry on with ever greater insolence.

When Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party, he explained his defection by saying he was against slavery, supported the Union side in the Civil War, and opposed McCarthyism. (He did concede that his decision to leave the Republican Party was perhaps of “smaller consequence.”) But then he continued in the same ludicrous vein, saying he had joined the party believing it stood for “moderation” and “tolerance.” Alas, he said, “Increasingly, I find myself in disagreement with my party.”
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Back in the party’s halcyon days—when Jeffords presumably did not find himself in disagreement—he opposed Reagan’s tax cut, supported the elder Bush’s tax hike, supported Clinton’s tax hike, and opposed the younger Bush’s tax cut. The Big Tent may accommodate a lot of kooks, but if the Republican Party doesn’t stand for tax cuts, it is nothing but a random assemblage of people—tax-cutters, tax-gougers, whatever. Jeffords was a big fan of Hillary Clinton’s socialist health care plan, which was such an unprecedented federal takeover of private industry that even the Democrats finally blanched. He voted against Clinton’s impeachment and against Clarence Thomas’s confirmation. Needless to say, he has always been pro-abortion.

So maybe the problem wasn’t the Republicans’ sudden lack of “tolerance” and “moderation,” but Jeffords’s slow realization that he had always been in disagreement with his party.

The only reason Northeastern liberals such as Jeffords call themselves Republicans in the first place is class snobbery. They disdain Democrats, whom they view as the dirty working class, and think being a Republican should entail nothing more than thrashing the servants.

Yet the left’s hegemonic control of the media had once again cowed a nominal Republican into averring to the left’s preposterous demonization of Republicans. It always follows the same script: First there is the outrageous accusation from the left, then the abject apology from some pathetic panty-waist on the right, and then—who’s to say Republicans are not racist scum? The cycle of Dumb and Dumber bickering with each other continues without end in sight.

Instead of actual debate about ideas and issues with real consequences, the country is trapped in a political discourse that increasingly resembles professional wrestling. The “Compassionate Conservative” takes on the “Republicans Balancing the Budget on the Backs of the Poor.” The impossibility of having any sort of productive dialogue about civic affairs has become an immovable reality.

Often short on details, the classic liberal response to a principled conservative argument is to accuse Republicans of planning a second Holocaust. No matter how inured one becomes to liberal hate speech, the regularity with which Republicans are compared to Nazis still astonishes. One would almost think fascist dictatorial regimes demanding governmental control of the major means of production were an immoderate extension of efforts to trim the income tax.

Weeks before the Starr Report was released, Keith Olbermann, host of
The Big Show
on MSNBC, said: “It finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses.”
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In an upbeat message delivered on British TV on Christmas Day, 1994, Jesse Jackson compared conservatives in both the U.S. and Great Britain to Nazis: “In South Africa, the status quo was called racism. We rebelled against it. In Germany, it was called fascism. Now in Britain and the U.S., it is called conservatism.”
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The
New York Times
did not report the speech.
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Speaking to the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus forum at the capital, Representatives Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Major Owens (D-N.Y.) said the Republicans “Contract with America” was as bad as Hitler’s Germany. “When I compare this to what happened in Germany,” Rangel said, “I hope that you will see the similarities to what is happening to us.” Owens was more explicit: “These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they’re worse than Hitler.”
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Representative and erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) accused opponents to Henry Foster, Clinton’s nominee for surgeon general, of “goose-stepping over women’s rights,”
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and informed the League of Women Voters that Rush Limbaugh’s listeners “are the ones who are goose-stepping.”
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When not secretly planning a second Holocaust, Republicans seem to busy themselves with ethnic cleansing, race baiting, and lynchings. Also plotting to bring back slavery. The liberal trope of associating Republicans with slavery is a daring smear inasmuch as the Republican Party was formed for the express purpose of opposing slavery. It was the Democratic Party that defended slavery. The Whigs—whence the Republican Party emerged—was “pro-choice” on the slavery issue.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz described Florida’s practice of not allowing convicted felons to vote as the secretary of state “ethnically cleansing the voting lists.”
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Representative Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.), said the Republicans’ plan to cut funding for twenty-eight useless House caucuses constituted “ethnic and philosophical cleansing.”
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Striking an especially high note in the 2000 presidential campaign, Vice President Al Gore aggressively implied that Bush’s Supreme Court nominees would bring back slavery. Not only that, but Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were already hard at work on the Republicans’ pro-slavery initiative. In numerous campaign speeches, Gore said Bush’s pledge to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Court—such as Scalia and Thomas—reminded him of “the strictly constructionist meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written and how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being.” If you were one of the swing voters waiting to see which of the candidates supported slavery, at least Gore had cleared up the confusion. The man was actually demagoguing slavery.

At the risk of seeming overly legalistic, Bush, Scalia, and Thomas do not subscribe to a legal philosophy that would bring back slavery. “Strict constructionism” means only that judges should interpret laws rather than write them. It has nothing to do with slavery. Moreover, Gore’s implication that it would have been nicer if slaves had counted as full persons in the Constitution is the pro-slavery position. Since the three-fifths clause refers only to congressional apportionment, counting slaves as full persons would have given the slave-holding South
more
votes in Congress.

Toward the end of the campaign, Al Gore began regaling audiences with lurid reminders of the barbaric racist dragging death of James Byrd in Texas and accusing Bush of near complicity in the murder for failing to support a “hate crimes” law. With members of the Byrd family by his side, Gore asked in astonishment, “Why after the tragedy that befell James Byrd should [Bush] oppose a hate-crimes law?”
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The only thing missing were clips from
Roots,
with Bush’s face superimposed on the evil slaveowner’s.

As is now well known, since Gore continued to lynch-bait Bush during the debates, Byrd’s killers had already received two death sentences and one life imprisonment. Liberals oppose the death penalty, but in the case of Byrd’s killers, death was not enough. They would not rest until the killers were also found guilty of “hate” and forced to attend anger-management classes. Byrd’s daughter, Renee Mullins, narrated an NAACP television ad for Gore that showed film footage of chains dragging on a dirt road. Mullins’s narrative lacked even Gore’s subtlety in equating Bush’s opposition to a “hate crimes” law to the murder itself: “When Governor Bush refused to support the hate-crimes bill, it was like my father was killed all over again.”