Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (3 page)

One wonders what words liberals could ever deploy to identify a real bigot in our midst. In liberal-speak, the words for George Bush are indistinguishable from the words for David Duke.

A false argument should be refuted, not named. That’s the basic idea behind freedom of speech. Arguments by demonization, rather than truth and light, can be presumed to be fraudulent. Real hate speech does not have to be flagged and labeled. It speaks for itself. If a person makes an argument that is, in fact, “racist” (anti-Semitic, sexist, looksist—whatever), that fact ought to be self-evident. Simply restating the argument would expose the wily bigot—if bigotry it is—without a big warning label screaming “Racist!” “Sexist!” “Homophobic!”

But ad hominem attack is the liberal’s idea of political debate. They selfconsciously hold themselves outside the argument and make snippy personal comments about anyone who is actually talking about something. The Republican’s motives are analyzed, his intelligence critiqued, his personal life unearthed. If it were true that conservatives were racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, stupid, inflexible, angry, and self-righteous, shouldn’t their arguments be easy to deconstruct? Someone who is making a point out of anger, ideology, inflexibility, or resentment would presumably construct a flimsy argument. So why can’t the argument itself be dismembered rather than the speaker’s personal style or hidden motives? Why the evasions?

It ought to raise eyebrows that no one can ever seem to get a real live quote from a Republican demonstrating all this hate evident to
New York Times
editors. If conservatives actually were seething with such boundless hatreds, one might expect it to bubble over into their public discourse every once in a while. Like what Monica Lewinsky testified to, in her scintillating concluding statement to the grand jury: “I hate Linda Tripp.” (Would that have been deemed cute if Tripp had said it?)

Or what columnist Rob Morse wrote in the
San Francisco Examiner:

I’m trying to forget, but I’m not quite ready to forgive everybody yet.

Linda Tripp should be exiled to an island with no TV studios, book deals or interviewers, just an endless loop of her taped conversations with Monica played over loudspeakers.

Ken Starr should be sent to a Siberian gulag built in the general shape of colonial Salem.

Henry Hyde, Bob Barr and the other 11 House impeachment managers should be placed in a soundproof chamber for life with only bread, water and one microphone to fight over.
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Suppose Jerry Falwell had put together a list of those he was “ready to forgive.” How do you imagine that would have played?

Noticeably absent from Morse’s list of those he is “not quite ready to forgive” were: (1) Bill Clinton and (2) Monica Lewinsky—the only two people in the impeachment affair positively known to have lied and tried to fix a trial in order to deny an American citizen her rights under the law. What was Hyde’s crime against God and man?

Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile called Colin Powell an “Uncle Tom.” Seemingly unaware of her boss’s race, she vowed that she would not “let the white boys win in this election.” Brazile said Colin Powell and Republican Congressman J. C. Watts “have no love and no joy” and would “rather take pictures with black children than feed them.” Democratic strategist Peter Fenn defended Brazile, saying she was trying “to be inclusive.”
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Colin Powell failed to appreciate the inclusiveness, saying he was “disappointed and offended” by Brazile’s comments. J. C. Watts called her inclusive statements “racist.”
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Gore—striving for inclusiveness—refused to apologize to Powell or Watts.

Meanwhile, when he was still co-host of the
Today
show on NBC, Bryant Gumbel casually asked J. C. Watts whether it bothered him to be associated with “conservative extremists who are historically insensitive to minority concerns.” This is in contrast to Democrats who are “inclusive.”
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After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the
clearly
expressed position of the
New York Times
editorial page, the
Times
responded with an editorial on Thomas titled “The Youngest, Crudest Justice.” That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called a “colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,” “race traitor,” “black snake,” “chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,”
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“house Negro” and “handkerchief head,” “Benedict Arnold”
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and “Judas Iscariot.”
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All this from the tireless opponents of intolerance. The “lawn jockey” name in particular was a huge hit with the inclusive crowd.
Emerge,
an African-American magazine, ran on its cover a caricature of Thomas as a grinning lawn jockey with the title “Uncle Thomas: Lawn Jockey of the Far Right.” An illustration accompanying the article portrayed a grinning Thomas shining Justice Antonin Scalia’s shoes. The late federal judge Leon Higginbotham said Thomas rendered “Uncle Tom Justice.” Syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux said she hoped Thomas’s “wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease.”
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And thus were exposed the logical flaws in Thomas’s judicial philosophy!

If liberals have a principled argument against Justice Thomas, they’re not telling. But they really don’t like him. Thus they malign Thomas in terms that would constitute a hate crime if it came from anyone but a liberal.

What liberals mean by “goose-stepping” or “ethnic cleansing” is generally something along the lines of “eliminating taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.” But they can’t say that, or people would realize they’re crazy. So instead they accuse Republicans of speaking in “code words.” This is one of the most enraging twists on the left’s refusal to debate. Since authentically racist behavior would be apparent on its face, the concept of “code words” allows liberals to call anyone a racist. The basic idea is that the untrained masses cannot be expected to comprehend a confusing world on their own, so the liberal clergy will translate for them. In a 1994
New York Times
editorial on Newt Gingrich, the Pious Gray Lady explained:

Welcome to Speaker Gingrich’s Retro-World. Mr. Gingrich... communicate[s] in the venerable code words of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace.

The code words, of course, originally had much to do with race; Senator Goldwater and Governor Wallace bandied them, after all, in a battle for Deep South electoral votes.... But this race-based, anger-charged politics mutated in Mr. Gingrich and some others of his generation into a more generalized moral authoritarianism.
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New York
magazine’s Jacob Weisberg and the Reverend Jesse Jackson also noticed the amazing similarities between Gingrich and George Wallace. Liberals don’t even have original ideas when they call Republicans names.) If Gingrich’s legislative plan had, in fact, included provisions to resegregate the schools, wouldn’t someone have noticed? Instead liberals are left to make vague allegations about an apocryphal secret “code” calculated to inflame pogrom-oriented Americans.

One reporter on
Inside Washington
discerned the Republican desire to murder gays in the “air.” (It’s sort of complicated—but involves a “three-step process.”) Discussing the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay man brutally killed by two thugs in Wyoming, Deborah Mathis of Gannett News Service explained how conservative Republicans were responsible for Sheppard’s death.

The Christian right per se and some particular members on Capitol Hill have helped inflame the air so that the air that these people breathed that night was filled, filled with the idea that somehow gays are different, and not only are they different in that difference, they’re bad and not only are they bad, they are evil and therefore can be destroyed. The next step to that, it’s a three-step process, and they certainly weren’t part of any plan to do that, but again, what air are they breathing now? It’s the air filled with that hate ... I mentioned Trent Lott, Jesse Helms and Dick Armey particularly. The Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Concerned Women for America.
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Mathis could remember the names of the destroyers with some precision, but the “three-step process” became rather vague between step one and step three. Without the second and third steps—the part where Republicans start hectoring the populace that gays “are evil and therefore can be destroyed”—the first “step” doesn’t amount to much. Aren’t gays “different”? Because if gays aren’t different, then heterosexuals are different and Republicans have a lot more murders to answer for than Matthew Shepard’s.

In another translation from the liberal rabbinate, a
Washington Post
columnist casually compared serious and substantial men like Shelby Steele and Clarence Thomas to a cringing, servile slave from the miniseries
Roots
on the basis of... a “metaphor.” As the author readily conceded, only highly advanced intellects—such as her own—were capable of grasping this particular “metaphor.”

There is a scene [in
Roots]
where kidnapped African Kunte Kinte won’t settle down in his chains. “Want me to give him a stripe or two, boss?” the old slave, Fiddler, asks his Master Reynolds.

“Do as I say, Fiddler,” Reynolds answers. “That’s all I expect from any of my niggers.”

“Oh, I love you, Massa Reynolds,” Fiddler tells him. And instantly, my mind draws political parallels. Ward Connerly, I think to myself. Armstrong Williams. Shelby Steele. Hyperbole, some might say. I say dead-on.

“Clarence Thomas,” I say to Cousin Kim. And she just stares at me. She may be a little tender yet for racial metaphors. I see them everywhere.
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If anyone talks in code, it is not the people who need the Internet and talk radio merely to communicate with one another. Only total hegemonic control of all major means of news dissemination in America could possibly give rise to the insane pig Latin patois of the left.

Conservatives can’t even pin down liberals on the word “abortion.” That’s a “choice”—not school “choice” or pension plan “choice” or arts funding “choice.” “Choice” refers to one lone medical procedure that will never cross the lips of a liberal: “abortion.” This would be on the order of gun-rights activists refusing to use the word “gun.” And if “abortion” is unspeakable, “baby” is actually punishable. Funnily, you never hear a pregnant woman say: “Put your ear to my stomach and listen to your little fetus sister,” or “I felt the fetus move today!”

Race discrimination tends to attract the most preposterous Orwellian circumlocutions, such as “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action.” Even if the race discrimination is designed to discriminate in favor of historic victims amply deserving of preferential treatment, it is still discrimination. But liberals would sooner say the Lord’s Prayer in a public school than utter the words “race discrimination” to describe “race discrimination.”

Also in the English-to-liberal dictionary, “liberal” is translated as “moderate” or “centrist”—and “conservative” is “far right wing” or “ultra-conservative.” Adjectives like “moderate” and “far right wing” are a crucial part of the journalistic rewards system for politicians. It is how pompously boring newspapers and magazines hurl epithets at politicians they don’t like and suck up to the ones they do. In the entire
New York Times
archives on LexisNexis, there are 109 items using the phrase “far right wing,” but only 18 items that use “far left wing.” There are 149 uses of “ultra-conservative,” but only 59 uses of “ultra-liberal.” Nineteen uses of “conservative extremist,” but only eight uses of “liberal extremist.” For purposes of comparison, other word pairs, such as “really hot”/”really cold” turn up in roughly equal numbers. Only when it comes to politicians are adjectives like “centrist” and “extremist” used to convey no factual information beyond “good dog!” and “bad dog!”

Consider the utter vacuousness of the phrase “moderate Republican.” Moderate ought to mean right in the middle—not too liberal and not too conservative. So why not just say “Republican”? In the
New York Times
archives, “moderate Republican” has been used 168 times. (Good dog!) There have been only 11 sightings of a “liberal Republican.” In a typical formulation, the
Times
reported that a compromise tax bill had been forged in the Senate by pulling together “moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats.”
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Why not “liberal Republicans” and “moderate Democrats”?

Most peculiarly, the
Times
explained in an editorial that President Bush planned to “eke out majorities by wooing conservative Democrats to his side, even if that might alienate some moderate Republicans.”
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When a “moderate Republican” is so liberal that he is less likely to support a Republican president than some Democrats, doesn’t that finally make him a “liberal”? “Moderate Republican” is simply how the blabocracy flatters Republicans who vote with the Democrats. If it weren’t so conspicuous, the
New York Times
would start referring to “nice Republicans” and “mean Republicans.”

The
Washington Post
describes Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia as “centrists.”
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On the basis of interest group ratings in 1999, Kerry and Robb’s counterparts on the right are Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Bob Smith (R-N.H.), Connie Mack (R-Fla.), and Don Nickles (R-Okla.)
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I can assure you, the word “centrist” will never be found near any of their names.