Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (5 page)

Finally, when right-wingers rant, there’s at least a point: There are substantive arguments contained in conservative name-calling. One of Newt Gingrich’s more pithy turns of phrase, for example, was to call Bob Dole “tax
collector for the welfare state.” In addition to the welcome bipartisanship of attacking a member of his own party—and not from the left—Gingrich’s attack conveys a meaningful concept. It succinctly degraded Dole’s legislative function as consisting of nothing more than taking the taxpayer’s money. Dole had failed to oppose behemoth government; he was a cog in the system that Democrats had created. All that in six words.

By contrast, what does it mean to say Republicans are making “war on the kids of this country”? It must mean something because Democrats say it a
lot.
President Clinton said of Republicans in 1995: “What they want to do is make war on the kids of this country.”
⁷⁷
As First Lady, Hillary Clinton said: “If the wrong side wins in this war on children, what will be lost is our notion of who we are as a people and what we stand for as a society.”
⁷⁸

It’s not just the felon and his bride who talk this way. Democratic Representative Patricia Schroeder said, “The first thing being thrown off the ship J)y Republicans] are women and children.”
⁷⁹
Democratic Representative John Lewis said of Republicans: “They’re coming for our children, they’re coming for the poor, they’re coming for the sick, elderly, and the disabled.”
⁸⁰

Far be it from me to complain of colorful language, but these diatribes are utterly meaningless. They make no deeper point than “I hate you.” The lack of specificity is the giveaway. Republicans could just as easily say the Democrats are making “war” on the kids of this country (by condemning them to fatherless welfare-supported families, a life of tax-gouging, a bankrupt social security fund, and huge federal deficits to repay). Republicans

could call Democrats the “wrong people,” too. But Republicans have an actual point to make, so they don’t say that.

Republicans couldn’t get away with political argument that sounds like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
even if they wanted to. They don’t own the mainstream media. As Freud observed, communal neuroses will always be much harder to detect because they define an entire group, not an individual distinct from the group. Perhaps if conservatives exercised hegemonic control over the media, they would be venom-spewing haters, too. But they don’t, so they aren’t. Any Republican impropriety will be endlessly held up to scorn in a series of
New York Times
editorials, then picked up by the networks and featured on
Good Morning America.
Everything feminists claim about working women having to be smarter, better, and tougher than their male counterparts really is true of conservative Republicans.

Usually the best that liberals can do in the way of Republican “hate speech” is to cite the funny jingles or hyperbole of talk radio hosts and explicit controversialists. Even here, the alleged “hate speech” is not likely to be honestly quoted. Rather it is paraphrased, unfairly excerpted, summarized, or—if the liberal is the
Washington Post’s
Howard Kurtz—invented out of whole cloth.

It’s true that Rush Limbaugh has identified a particular breed of feminists as “feminazis.” Not all feminists, just those who appear to prefer abortion (“choice”) to childbirth. Limbaugh is also an openly opinionated talk radio host—not the president, the vice president, a United States senator, editor of the
New York Times,
or a putatively objective TV news anchor.

By contrast, hate is the coin of the realm for liberals at all levels of status, power, objectivity, and cache. There is no difference between the fanatical ravings of a foaming-at-the-mouth James Carville and the utterances of a United States senator. Champion desecrator of life Senator Teddy Kennedy said this about a respected federal judge on the Senate floor:

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, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

That’s how the left expresses substantive disagreements “with the legal philosophy of a sitting federal judge. Is it Hitler, or is it a former Yale professor? It can be categorically stated that no sitting Republican United States senator has ever accused an ideological opponent of anything along the lines of trying to bring back segregated lunch counters.

It can also be categorically stated that no network news anchor would describe a Democratic National Convention as a “craftily designed... broadcast image of tolerance and diversity that’s starkly at odds with reality.” That’s how ABC’s Jim Wooten casually reported on the “reality” of the Republican National Convention.

It can further be categorically stated that NBC’s Matt Lauer would never have insinuatingly asked a Democrat to “look me in the eye” when answering Lauer’s question. When interviewing President Bush, Lauer said: “So you can look me in the eye and say that you are a president committed to cleaning up the environment?”
⁸¹
Even when Hillary Clinton was retailing huge whoppers to Lauer in the famous “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” interview (affirming, for example, that what “the president has told the nation is the whole truth and nothing but the truth”
⁸²
), Lauer never imperiously demanded that Hillary “look me in the eye” as she openly lied to him.

Scurrilous attack ads from the Democratic National Committee are gleefully replayed by the major networks and pointedly endorsed. After the 2000 election, the Democrats ran a commercial falsely suggesting that President Bush was befouling our pure drinking water by putting “more” arsenic in it. This was a lie. But the deceptive commercials were replayed by TV news programs along with testimonials to their accuracy.

The claim that Bush had effected a “rollback” of current policy was more misleading than some of Joe McCarthy’s more outlandish assertions. Bush had merely delayed a prospective change to a sixty-year standard governing arsenic in drinking water. This was evidently a matter of such burning urgency that the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, had done nothing about it during seven years and three hundred-odd days in office. It was not until three days before he left office that IMPOTUS lowered the arsenic standard from fifty parts per billion to ten parts per billion. Even Clinton’s eleventh-hour alteration in the standard was not to take effect until the year 2006. The DNC’s demagogic, hateful television commercial showed a little girl asking, “May I please have some more arsenic in my water, Mommy?” The narrator then intoned: “George W. Bush tried to roll back protections against arsenic in drinking water.” Except there was no rollback.

CBS News
reporter John Roberts played a clip of the inaccurate Democrat ad and then critically asked: “Democrats ask what happened to Mr. Bush’s vaunted promise to change the tone in Washington and put an end to partisan sniping?”
⁸³
NBC’s Tim Russert followed his presentation of the outrageously misleading ad with the announcement “There’s nothing inaccurate in that ad.”
⁸⁴

Despite the neurotic compulsion to attribute all liberal stunts to “both sides,” conservatives couldn’t get away with nonsense like this even if they wanted to. It is a stunning reflection of the left’s monopoly of the news that an opinionated, partisan talk radio host is more accurate than television news programs.

Assuming that in more than ten thousand hours of radio and television commentary Rush Limbaugh had made a similarly exaggerated claim, I searched LexisNexis for the indignant news reports on Rush’s alleged distortions. There are plenty of denunciations of Rush for being inaccurate, but it turns out, liberals lie even when accusing conservatives of lying. “Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting” (FAIR)—hilariously dedicated to exposing the right-wing bias in media (and cold days in hell)—had compiled an allegedly “meticulously researched” anti-Rush report. The Rush distortion that was the left’s major expose, the contretemps to end all contretemps, the anti-Rush reporter’s “favorite bit” from the “meticulously researched” FAIR report,
⁸⁵
was Rush’s claim that after a California woman had been mauled to death by a mountain lion, “a fund for her children had received about $9,000 and a fund for the orphaned lion cub (the lion was killed) set up by ‘a bunch of animal rights activists’ had received $21,000.” According to the “meticulous” research of FAIR, it was triumphantly proclaimed, “There never was such a fund for the cub.” The real story, one columnist proclaimed, had been “explained on ABC’s 20/20.”

It was a great
gotcha
moment, except that, as usual, once you go to the trouble to look up the facts, it was a lie. Rush was right. There was a cub fund and it had received more money than the orphaned children’s fund. Indeed, every detail was exactly as Rush had said. Though Rush was among the first to report on the disparity in the funds for the lions versus the humans, eventually the story became the subject of dozens of news articles.

New York Times
reporter Michelle Quinn wrote, for example, that “the
cub
had received $21,000, while the children’s trust fund had raised only 59,300” (just as Rush had said). She even quoted an environmentalist wacko defending the wildly disproportionate donations to the lion cub versus the orphaned children, saying, “People have support systems and animals don’t.”
⁸⁶
The children’s fund did eventually gain some ground, but only thanks to Rush. As the
Times’
Quinn also reported: “Since the disparity between the funds was publicized—Rush Limbaugh devoted part of his radio show on Tuesday to the subject—the children’s trust fund has received an additional $3,000 in checks and cash.”

Even the famed
20/20
report did not contradict Rush’s account. The only issue disputed on the 20/20 segment was a point no one had made or could conceivably care about. To wit: 20/20 reported on how many “unsolicited public donations” the cub had received (a mere $3,000). This would have really nailed Rush (and the
New York Times
as well as scores of other news outlets) if any of them had ever claimed the $21,000 in donations to the cub had come exclusively from “unsolicited public donations.” The single largest donation had come from a nonprofit zoo group—or, as Rush had said, “a bunch of animal rights activists.”

Locating some minor inaccuracy by Rush Limbaugh on the order of those corrected daily in the
New York Times
turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. It hardly seems worth the trouble to pursue FAIR’s less impressive finds. But on the off chance that anyone ever does locate some minor inaccuracy by Rush Limbaugh comparable to those regularly nurtured by the major media, the point is this: Rush Limbaugh is not the president, the vice president, or a Massachusetts senator. He’s not the
New York Times.
He’s not ABC, NBC, or CBS. Arguably, the satirical commentary of a noted polemicist should not be treated with the earnest indignation better reserved for the invasion of Poland.

The best liberals can do to try to even the score on venom-spewing is to define every random nutcase in the country as “right-wing.” But no matter how many times liberals say it, Nazis and white supremacists (all six of them) are not “right-wing.” The Ku Klux Klan is not merely a somewhat more exuberant version of the Republican Party.

A 1992 column in the
Chicago Tribune
casually reported that Illinois Republicans were “not worried” about David Duke causing trouble for President Bush. “The reason: Conservatives such as Phyllis Schlafly, Don Totten and Denis Healy are already signed up for Bush.”
⁸⁷
Phyllis Schlafly was torn but ultimately came out for Bush rather than David Duke. This is libel masquerading as analysis.

If, for some peculiar reason, one were itching to draw a correlation between “white supremacist” nuts and one of the two mainstream political parties, Democrats are manifestly the more obvious candidate for that distinction. With their infernal racial set-asides, racial quotas, and race norming, liberals share many of the Klan’s premises. The Klan sees the world in terms of race and ethnicity. So do liberals! Indeed, liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society. They don’t even get to the first step with racists.

Of course, one big difference between the Klan and liberals is that liberals have a lot more power. Though endlessly celebrated in sensational news reports, the random “Nazi” or Klan member is rare and comically unthreatening. Nazism is simply not a burgeoning phenomenon in America just now. Klan marches bring out more protesters than Klan members.

But there are a lot of liberals. They are painfully self-righteous, they have fantastic hatreds, and they could not see the other fellow’s position if you prodded them with white-hot pokers. They are United States senators,
New York Times
editors, news anchors, and TV personalities.

And they are completely unhinged.

TWO

the Gucci position on domestic policy

Liberals thrive on the attractions of snobbery. Only when you appreciate the powerful driving force of snobbery in the liberals’ worldview do all their preposterous counterintuitive arguments make sense. They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs. Every pernicious idea to come down the pike is instantly embraced by liberals to prove how powerful they are. Liberals hate society and want to bring it down to reinforce their sense of invincibility. Secure in the knowledge that their beachfront haciendas will still be standing when the smoke clears, they giddily fiddle with the little people’s rules and morals.