The left is discovering that unhinged speech directed at Obama is a very bad, very destructive thing.
Wow. I mean, like, Wow.
This is surreal. If Joe Klein really believes that this is some kind of recent phenomenon, then we must assume that he agreed with the vast majority of the Democratic base when they accused Bush of going to war for Haliburton and oil, for being like Hitler, for wanting to kill black people in New Orleans by deliberately withholding aid, for plotting to take over the government and set up a dictatorship…
Since Klein (and the rest of the hand wringers on the left who are currently upset at the idiocy being demonstrated by right wing talk radio listeners who think Obama is a commie) didn’t write similar warning screeds when the kind of talk above was not only commonplace, but accepted as part of the lefty narrative against Bush (and supported by many, many Democrats on the Hill who fed these nutters by hinting that they were right), it makes bullsh*t like this ring hollow indeed:
The amazing thing remains not only the unwillingness of responsible Republicans–a term that is in danger of becoming an oxymoron–to call bull– on this, but also the willingness of many prominent Republicans to join in the slinging of garbage. Michelle Cottle reports that there are Republican-sanctioned efforts afoot to have parents not send their children to school on September 8 because the President is scheduled to address the nation’s school-children that day and they are afraid that he will fill their little heads with socialist propaganda. That is somewhere well beyond disgraceful.
Could I just say that the intensity of this getting pretty scary…and dangerous? We are heading toward a cliff and the usual brakes of civil discourse are not working. Indeed, the Republicans have the pedal to the metal–rushing us toward a tragedy far greater than the California health care forum finger-biting Karen describes below. I’m usually not one to panic or be overly worried about the state of our country–even when we do awful things like invade Iraq and torture people, we usually right our course before long–but I have a sinking feeling about where we’re headed now. I hope I’m wrong.
WHERE HAS JOE KLEIN BEEN FOR THE LAST 8 YEARS? “Stolen elections” ring a bell, Joe? That one was advanced not only in 2000 (despite massive evidence to the contrary) but also in 2004 - to the point that Members of Congress actually challenged the electoral vote! Talk about intensity!
I am at a total loss in understanding such blindness. The left spends fricking 8 years in refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the Bush Administration, and then Steve Benen has the gall to write crap like this?
Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh. Bachmann, Inhofe, DeMint, King, and Broun. A scorched-earth campaign intended to tear the country apart, questioning the legitimacy of the president, the government, and the rule of law. It’s all very scary.
Allow me to substitute: “”No blood for oil” conspiracists, Diebold rigging voting machines, Bush-Hitler, agents of Israel running government, re-instituting the draft, Bush a tool of the Saudi Royal family, HALIBURTON!, a staged terrorist attack so that the 2008 elections would be canceled, FEMA built sites to house anti-war protestors…and on and on.
Not to mention McKinney, Conyers, and half the Democratic caucus who worked tirelessly to undermine the Bush presidency, attacking him in the most vile personal manner, tearing the country apart with their unhinged opposition to anything and everything he did. And while legitimate criticism of our war effort in Iraq could have been tolerated, very few of the rhetorical bombs tossed at Bush from the left was of the “legitimate” variety and much of it was gross exaggeration, hyperbole, dishonest, and deliberately provocative.
Yes Steve, It’s scary now and it was equally scary back then.
There is no excuse for the unhinged nature of dissent on the right - something I have written about at great personal and professional cost for years. But when lefties like Klein, Benen, and their hand wringing ilk invade the public discussion with their weeping about how extreme the opposition is without even acknowledging the dangerous, delegitimzing, depressing, maddening, and yes, scary rhetoric coming from their cohorts during the Bush years, one can not only question their judgment but their sanity as well.
Who are they trying to kid? I will continue to assault irrational, and shallow conservatives like Beck, Limbaugh, and their rabid listeners. But I expect to see a little context from the opposition as well. Nothing in politics happens in a vacuum. For every action, there is an equal or greater reaction.
These vacuous, easily misled talk show adherents spent 8 years listening to the opposition say the most outrageous, the most putrid stuff about their president. And I have seen it more than once in comments on various blogs (and some have taken me to task for writing against the idea), that now it’s our turn for a little payback.
My response has always been “Why ape the absolute worst in your opponents? How dumb is that?” Of course, such logic doesn’t seem to get anywhere except that these same fruitcakes accuse me of being a liberal.
I see very little difference in how unhinged the opposition is acting towards Obama and those who pilloried Bush. Klein, Benen, and the rest are just being drama queens, solemnly informing us how frightened they are at such rank emotionalism in politics, while intoning warnings of these times being the “worst” this, or the “most dangerous” that. It’s pure poppycock. They either slept through last 8 years of the left’s assault on decency and rational discourse or they have the balls to ignore it in order to make a political point.
Get real guys. You’re still part of the problem. The overwhelming number of people who oppose Obama do so in a rational, respectful manner. They are not birthers, or deathers, or any other unhinged faction. They are ordinary Americans and for you to lump them together with the wild eyed fanatics brands you as being equally culpable for the state of political discourse in this country.
Try the truth. It would be a nice change after 8 years of bombastic lies.
11:20 am
I wholeheartedly agree.
12:15 pm
Lest we forget, James Carville - now pontificating grandly wherever they will have him lest he deteriorate into his well-deserved irrelevancy, was the engineer of one of the most devisive and thoroughly despicable election campaigns in the service of the great Oz himself - William Jefferson Clinton.
12:21 pm
Hell, Klein and Benen, while certainly minor offenders, were pretty unhinged at times themselves during Bush’s presidency. The only cause for their alarm is that they are afraid of the return fire you describe. Frankly, while not to condone it, it does the heart a little good to watch these hypocrites squirm as they see “the other side” engage in the very same behavior. Obama just had the misfortune to fall more rapidly than Bush and weakness invites bullying.
1:35 pm
Hussein Obama needs to be shown the door, period. Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, the FCC “Diversity Czar” and others are radical, Marxist, black liberation nut-jobs.
Hussein Obama is one as well. He is unfit for the US Presidency. He is fundamentally anti-American.
Heh - right on cue.
ed
4:40 pm
[...] it has to be understood in a wider context of what is going on in the United States circa 2009. Conservative blogger Rick Moran notes that liberals have had their own share of craziness over the last eight years, and rattles [...]
5:37 pm
“I wholeheartedly agree.”
I see what you did there.
I wonder if Republicans were just as taken aback when people said, “You think Bush is getting it bad? Hello? Do you remember the 90s? Clinton was steamrolled from day one.”
6:00 pm
If I disagree with anything here, its the term “vast majority”.
No question that there were lots and lots of people that raised those allegations against Bush, but do you really think that the precentage of whackjobs/Dems was equal to the current whackjobs/Repubs?
I know you really, really, want the current crop of whackadoodles to represent a minor sliver of the Reds . . . but it sure doesn’t seem or look like that. The fact that there are reasonable Republicans doesn’t make them the driving voice of Redland
6:55 pm
I’ll be happy to count myself among the crowd saying Bush == Hitler was stupid, and to remind folks the #1 meme, that MoveOn.org ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler never, never, ever happened.
What did happen is the ran a contest (which I entered) called Bush in :30. They foolishly setup the process for uploading the videos so there was no pre-screening, their intention that the community would mod-down any outrageous materials.
One fellow, out of thousands submitted the clip. It was immediately removed once they were made aware of it and they changed the process going forward. But by then the damage was down. The key point though is that MoveOn never paid a dime for airtime to run the ad, it was only seen as part of the news stories about the clip’s short time on the web.
This incident is one reason why I rarely get exercised about drive-by posters on sites on either side of the issues. It’s too easy for someone to plant the you know what word on a right leaning site and claim injury, or laud Castro on progressive sites.
Lastly, any hint that Cynthia McKinney or any of the other few wack jobs among the Democrats have or had any major influence on policy is silly.
It’s a world of difference from a back-bench member of congress spreading conspiracy theory as opposed to the former candidate for Vice-President of the GOP or a senior legislator like Chuck Grassley, Newt Gingrich or even the head of the GOP Michael Steele talking about Obama wanting to ice granny.
Compare apples to apples please.
7:32 pm
While I agree with your premise that anyone just noticing now that we’re morphing into an entity that is hard to understand, we must not forget that many Americans, myself included, were behind our president after 9/11; however, as evidence now points out beyond any shred of a doubt that our president and his WH staff circumvented, twisted, or downright violated numerous domestic and international laws and treaties and then lied about it. As late as 2006, our president looked the camera in the eye and stated, “The United States does not torture.”
As s disabled veteran who re-enlisted on a frozen hill overlooking North Korea’s propaganda village near Panmunjom, voicing my opinions over the inconsistencies in the language used by the administration unleashed ferocious, irrational attacks on my character, intelligence, and patriotism by those “shallow” conservatives who were apparently willing to apologize for or defend anything conducted or suggested by the administration. The worst thing about these attacks was the unerringly similar verbiage and accusations, as if everything was scripted. Efforts to enter into respectful exchanges were invariably reduced–in quick order–to ad hominem assaults described above.
Without a doubt, things have changed in our country since 9/11 and intelligent, thoughtful, and humble conservative friends of mine agree with me that it’s largely a by-product of the successful right-wing radio personalities along with the dominant political ascendence of the Bush II WH and Republican control of Congress. And it appears now that the election of Obama has infuriated the same group of citizens who have become unhinged as you described so accurately. My wife and I are fearful that the racism toward Arabs and attacks on Muslims in general have re=opened some racial doors we had hoped were closed. My greatest fear is that our past, the ugly parts of it, may be the model of our future.
7:54 pm
Preach it.
Back in 2004 I already saw the damage being done to the Army. and despite my belief that starting war in Iraq was wrong when we hadn’t finished our commitment in Afghanistan, I looked seriously into re-enlisting at age 48. The didn’t take me then, but wonder if I had tried again a few years later when they we’re raking anyone who could carry a weapon.
It is the maimed in the thousands and the bungling of the war, not to mention the opportunities missed to establish a stable Afghanistan coupled with people who had never found their way to a recruiting office calling me that really made my blood boil.
What as waste, from the unity of 9/12 to a candya** like Glenn Beck adotping that as his own.
9:36 pm
SPOT ON, RICK! I remember election night, 2000, and the awful eight years that followed with the Democrats and the hard left doing EVERYTHING to make George W. Bush “illegitimate”. EVERYONE even a slight liberal or Dem got in the act. Hell, this went all the way back to Richard Nixon. Now, Mr. Nixon was not my favorite Republican. He nearly destroyed the Republican party. But, the scorched earth politics of the left started then and were perfected under George W. Bush. How else could someone so far to the left as President Obama be elected? Pass him off as a moderate and keep the Jones, Wrights, Ayres, et al, in the background. But for these jokers like Joe Klein writing such mealie pap is, mindless. Kind of like a lot of what is going on these days under President Obama!
10:18 pm
please rick identify democrat senators in good standing who published and promoted these memes. otherwise its sneaky rubbish. The scary fact is not that their are nuts like birthers etc it’s that they are getting support from the heart of the repub party.
4:27 am
is it really possible to digest this essay, and respond to the whole loopy thing? No. Just find your part, and respond as you will.
Before I go, all I know about Joe Klein is that he’s slammed by the left only constantly. Is he your straw man du jour?
6:20 am
Rick, on occasion you impress the hell out of me
8:52 am
The title of the next article on this site:
“Some of my best friends are knee-grows”
And your point? Or are you just throwing shit against the wall to see if anything stinks?
I am used to liberals simply halting debate and tossing allegations of racism or fascism because they are too stupid to engage on the issues. Thank you for confirming my thesis in such spectacularly ignorant fashion.
ed.
7:12 am
Hmm… as a vacuous, easily led talk show listener, I wonder why I still like reading you, Rick? Do you challenge my thinking? Usually, but you also strengthen my resolve.
Whenever I read a little into your thought processes I get the feeling if I were to misspell a word or use bad grammar you would check me off as another “idiot” or whatever term you would use to dismiss my concerns. President Obama is taking US down a bad road, agreed? He hasn’t made himself “transparent”, has he? He has misled the people he made promises to, to get elected. Frankly, I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
I value all reasonable intelligent thinking. It doesn’t have to come from university or any Ivy league. I am an Independent voter having tried Libertarians, Republicans, and way back, yes I may have even been a Democrat in my thinking, but Reagan changed my mind and I voted for the first time, for him, a man of ideas. Conservatives have lost our way, but I believe we can unite around opposition to Obama. Nothing personal, just opposition to the direction he is taking US. We need all of our best thinkers and forums, that includes Limbaugh, and Beck, Hewitt and Savage, Medved and Hannity, and YOU!
I don’t completely agree with anybody about everything but we all have great ideas, even the Democrats. But we need to be honest and not petty and territorial, we can lose more than our jobs, more than our way of life, we can lose our whole country and maybe even our lives.
My beef with talk show hosts and many of their listeners is excessive ideology at the expense of independent thought. Of course Obama should be opposed for what he is trying to do. His agenda goes against every conservative principle we believe in and he should be strenuously, and vigorously opposed.
But you fight bad ideas with good ideas, not with the angry, puritanical, rigidity of thought one finds being spouted by Limbaugh, Hannity, et al. Many on the right believe my conservatism is suspect simply because I don’t hate Obama enough, that not believing in birtherism, or not calling him a socialist or communist means that I am insufficiently committed to defeating his ideas. That’s Tommy Rot. But it’s what passes for conservative thinking by many who have proudly announced that unless you “feel” more than “think,” your opposition, you are a RINO or a liberal.
I want to purge conservatism of the ideologues who judge a fellow by how deeply he believes something, not on the merit of his ideas. The former leads to a closing off of necessary debate and reflection - two elements that separate us from the lefty ideologues and are critical for reforming conservatism.
ed.
8:51 am
[...] Rick Moran wonders where the hell Joe Klein has been the last 8 years [...]
12:47 am
[...] Conservative blogger Rick Moran notes that liberals have had their own share of craziness over the last eight years, and rattles off a few of the nutty beliefs: The left is discovering that unhinged speech directed at Obama is a very bad, very destructive thing. [...]