Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (4 page)

Liberals claim conservatives use “code words” and as proof they babble about vague ephemeral concepts—a “metaphor,” “proxies,” a “three-step process,” indistinct feelings “in the air.” Meanwhile, conservatives can produce a chart of word-to-word translations from liberal code: Moderate = liberal; far right wing = conservative; centrist = 95 ADA rating; choice = abortion; affirmative action = race discrimination. Even the phrase “code word” is a code word for liberals lying about Republicans. Liberals can’t just come out and say that they want to take more of our money, kill babies, and discriminate on the basis of race. So instead they compare Republicans to George Wallace—a Democrat.

Had enough of the love? We’re still not done because ... Republicans are also dumb and ugly. If Republicans are so stupid (and poorly dressed!), it’s hard to understand why Democrats haven’t been able to get as much as 50 percent of the country to vote for them in any national election for the last twenty-five years.

On CNN’s
Capital Gang
on July 24,1999, Margaret Carlson analyzed a Republican’s bill to cut taxes, saying: “I mean, the only thing that could explain this love of tax cuts is a lowered IQ.”
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Writing in the
Washington Post,
columnist Richard Cohen made one of his typically incisive points, explaining that the Republican Party is “dumb as a post.” In case the nuance of Cohen’s logic was lost, he continued, saying the Republican Party “is defined by a hostility toward minorities—all sorts of minorities—and by a craven cowardice on the part of its more moderate members. The truth of the matter is that the party is having a crackup. If it were a person, it would be medicated.”
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Howell Raines, former editorial page editor of the
New York Times,
who covered the Reagan White House with the
Times’s
trademark objectivity, asserted that “Reagan couldn’t tie his shoes if his life depended on it.”
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And still, somehow, he won the Cold War. Al Gore told Virginia voters at a campaign rally that they should re-elect Virginia Senator Chuck Robb because his opponent, Oliver North, was supported by “the extreme right wing—the extra-chromosome right wing.”
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(The presence of an “extra chromosome” is the birth defect that creates Down’s syndrome.) The
Washington Post
famously reported as hard fact that the followers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”
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Paula Jones was attacked by
News-week’s
Evan Thomas as “some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks.” Aren’t these the same people constantly demanding campus speech codes, an end to “intolerance,” and “hate speech” laws—so that no one’s feelings get hurt?

More than any of their other hate speech, the left’s attacks on women for being ugly tell you everything. There is nothing so irredeemably cruel as an attack on a woman for her looks. Attacking a female for being ugly is a hideous thing, always inherently vicious. Unless it’s a guy in a dress. That’s always funny. Two unbending rules of the universe are: (1) It is horrendous to attack a woman for her looks and (2) A guy in a dress is hilarious. Everyone knows this.

So which women are constantly being called ugly? Is it Maxine Waters, Chelsea Clinton, Janet Reno, or Madeleine Albright? No, none of these. Only conservative women have their looks held up to ridicule because only liberals would be so malevolent. A blind man in America would think the ugliest women ever to darken the planet are Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, and Katherine Harris. This from the party of Bella Abzug.

Journalists have called Linda Tripp “Barracudaville,” smelling of “gunpowder and garlic,” “ugly and evil,” and “Howard Stern in a fright wig,”
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“a snitch, and an ugly one, at that.”
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Syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux referred to the “ugly stick [Tripp’s] been beaten with—there’s something wrong with that woman, I’m serious.”
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Actress Rose McGowan
(Jawbreaker)
told the
Village Voice:
“One thing that gives me pleasure is how ugly [Tripp] is. That’s a karmic point. She deserves to be ugly.”
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Another female (!) columnist, Heather Mallick, wrote: “Linda Tripp’s the hulking dykey one and book agent Lucianne Goldberg’s her ugly sister.”
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In the book
Monica’s Story,
the author, Andrew Morton, also wrote of the “two ugly sisters, Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, [who] ensured that Monica never made it to the ball.”
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Liz Langley, a (female) opinion columnist, said Linda Tripp and Paula Jones were neither “attractive nor possessed of human DNA.” They “look like a bloated carcass and whatever’s pecking at it.”
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This isn’t John Goodman playing Linda Tripp in drag on
Saturday NightLive.
It is
Newsweek,
the
Washington Post,
pundits and columnists launching these attacks. This isn’t humor, it’s hatred. They aren’t trying to be funny, they’re trying to make their victims hurt.

You will never appreciate the full savagery of the left until you get in their way. Wincing while others are attacked cannot compare. Imagine it is you, your wife, or your daughter they have set about to destroy. Then it won’t matter if the authors of the hate speech are hideous, talentless wretches. You will hear the words calling you ugly and stupid and you will believe, if only fleetingly, that the whole world sees you that way. Tripp ended up getting two face-lifts and liposuction. Paula Jones got braces and a nose job.

In what ought to have been a case study of the Stockholm syndrome, both blamed themselves for the sadistic attacks on their looks. Linda Tripp later apologized to the country for her ugliness, telling
People
magazine: “I didn’t realize how ugly I was,” and “I was horrified as well as the rest of the nation, really.”
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Paula Jones also blamed herself for the malevolent attacks: “I can laugh at myself, you know. I mean, I looked, you know, that way. And I look different now.”
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Despite Jones’s going under the knife to quell complaints about her looks,
Time
magazine would not be mollified. The magazine sniffed that Jones was getting a nose job because she “apparently felt her affection for the camera was not sufficiently requited.” In response to Jones’s explanation that she “was sick of being made fun of by cartoonists,”
Time
sarcastically snipped: “This should really help.”
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Even polished, wealthy, Harvard-educated, attractive women will be attacked for their looks if they get in the Democrats’ way. When Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was suddenly cast into the limelight because Al Gore was a sore loser, liberals promptly launched sadistic attacks on Harris’s looks. A
Boston Globe
columnist wrote that unless Harris “was planning to unwind at a drag bar after facing that phalanx of cameras Tuesday night, the grease paint she wore should be a federal offense.”
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In the careful analysis in the
Washington Post,
reporter Robin Givhans wrote that Harris “seems to have applied her makeup with a trowel.”
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Givhans continued: “Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid.” This major investigative report graced the front page of the
Post’s
Style section. The issue of Harris’s mascara no-no’s was framed as a matter of national urgency: “One wonders how this Republican woman, who can’t even use restraint when she’s wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship.” The public, it was said, “doesn’t like falsehoods, and Harris is clearly presenting herself in a fake manner.... Why should anyone trust her?”
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Al Gore advisor Mark Fabiani later explained the Democrats’ attacks on Harris, glibly telling the
New York Times,
“We needed an enemy.” He said attacking Harris was “the right thing to do, and it worked.”
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A central component of liberal hate speech is to make paranoid accusations based on their own neurotic impulses, such as calling Republicans angry, hate-filled, and mean. With no sense of self-irony, the left spitefully stereotypes Republicans as—among other loathsome characteristics—spiteful stereotypers. There is maybe just the tiniest element of projection and compulsion in all this.

New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert wrote an entire column on the Republicans’ “Mean Strategy.” As Herbert wearily explained, “Back in 1998 I offered the Republican Party some unsolicited advice.” It was: “ ‘Give up the politics of meanness,’ I said. ‘It’s killing you.’ “ Alas, he concluded, “the G.O.P. never seems to learn.”
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Liberals have compared conservatives to Down’s syndrome children, wished them dead of cholesterol-induced heart attacks, malevolently attacked women for their looks, called Clarence Thomas every racist name in the book, repeatedly stated they “hate” Republicans, and now—in addition—they say Republicans are “mean.”

After a rape victim spoke to the Republican National Convention in 1996, NBC’s Tom Brokaw interviewed the speaker, posing this conundrum to her: “[The Republican Party] is a party that is dominated by men and this convention is dominated by men ... Do you think before tonight they thought very much [about] what happens in America with rape?”
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When Juanita Broaddrick went public with her claim that Bill Clinton had raped her, liberals wouldn’t give her the time of day. Having flamboyantly accused Republicans of ignoring rape victims, liberals were later freed of the responsibility of having to pretend to care about rape themselves. In polls—considered determinative on most matters by Democrats—80 percent of respondents who heard Broaddrick’s allegations thought they were true (62 percent) or possibly true (18 percent). Only 20 percent of respondents did not believe Broaddrick’s assertion that a sitting United States president committed rape.
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NBC had spent months investigating every aspect of Broaddrick’s claims to rout any possible inconsistencies in her story. They found none. As is often the case with rape, no eyewitnesses were present for the actual rape, but as far as rape allegations ever go, Broaddrick was, at the very least, an extremely credible witness.

Still, out of pure political calculation, NBC refused to run Lisa Myers’s interview with Broaddrick describing her rape at the hands of Bill Clinton until after the Senate had acquitted Clinton in his impeachment trial. Dan Rather did not mention Broaddrick’s rape allegation once on the
CBS Evening News.
He later explained that he had refused to report a plausible charge that the president was a rapist out of respect for Clinton’s “private sex life.”
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Every single Senate Democrat and all but five House Democrats voted against the impeachment or removal of a president whom they knew was, more likely than not, a rapist.

Those are cold, hard facts about how Democrats treated a credible rape charge. You can look them up. But according to the objective news reporting of Tom Brokaw, it’s Republicans who don’t care about rape.

Maybe a diligent LexisNexis search would turn up a few comparable quotes from the thousands of right-wing politicians and pundits. Maybe. Frankly, I doubt it. For one thing, even the more spirited remarks of conservatives tend to come from humorists and polemicists. Moreover, if a conservative calls you a drunk, it means you’re a drunk. If a conservative calls you stupid, you are stupid. These are not simply ritualistic denunciations of any political opponent. Liberals lie even when they call people names.

At the risk of helping liberals formulate more persuasive arguments, there are a few pointers that might help them upgrade from the overheated demagogic rhetoric of fanatical cult members. A little variation in epithets would at least create the illusion of having an argument. “Nazi” can be used properly in a sentence, but it tends to lose its sting when you call every Republican a Nazi. “Stupid” is also a fine word, but not for twenty-five Republican presidential candidates in a row. Using the same words to describe school vouchers as to characterize the Holocaust tends to leave the impression that you forgot your point.

For the left, name-calling need bear no relationship to the facts: It is mere liturgy. There are many things Newt Gingrich could be called, for example, but “stupid” is not among them. However, the ritual imprecation must be uttered. Thus, the Tacoma, Washington,
News Tribune
advised Gingrich, “Stop blurting out dumb stuff.”
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San Francisco Examiner
columnist Rob Morse sneered—there was Gingrich trying not to “say something stupid” again and rarely producing “one barely decent line.” Newt’s “landing gear,” Morse said, “never is fully locked.”
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Using the popular Quote-Someone-Who-Agrees-with-Us technique, the
New York Times
repeated the remark of a California accountant who called Gingrich “an idiot—he’s just an idiot who plays to the media.”
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(An overture the media deftly managed to resist.) Gingrich’s “Contract with America”—the document that helped give Republicans control of Congress for the first time in half a century—was derided by one columnist as “politically stupid.”
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