Read the whole article. It is detailed, and I think gives an accurate portrayal of the present political attitude of the black community. And this is in Chicago. Blacks might not be ready to vote Republican, but they apparently are finally beginning to realize that the Democrats aren’t their saviors.
Nancy Pelosi said the following about Republicans: “They don’t just want to make cuts. They want to destroy. They want to destroy food safety, clean air, clean water, the Department of Education. They want to destroy your rights.”
I want to ask you: How do you do business with someone like that? How do you do business with a party like that? “They want to destroy”? (I’ll grant that we think the Department of Education a total boondoggle.) “They want to destroy your rights”? I’m reminded of why I revolted against the Democratic party long ago: They all talked like this. They all regarded their opponents as monstrous or subhuman. And I knew it was bunk.
Civility for thee but not for me: Bill Maher considers it perfectly acceptable for him to use four-letter words to attack conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.
First was the hostility. People were really tearing into me and one common accusation was that I was a conservative troll. In fact, many suggested that I’d pretended to be liberal – like I was in a sleeper cell. These sort of accusations are a common argument.
The other shock was a really antipathy to facts. I mean, actual facts – like John Edwards was caught by reporters who saw him firsthand. My critics did all sorts of backflips to get around this; the reporters were lying, the Enquirer can’t be trusted, they are going after Edwards because of his stance on poverty and so on. I pointed out that while the Enquirer will stretch the truth, it seemed highly unlikely they would outright lie about seeing Edwards firsthand – especially since he was a successful attorney – and that tellingly, Edwards hadn’t denied the facts. I made phone calls to the Beverly Hills police to confirm facts…and still the mob on DailyKos went ballistic.
Another liberal shows how he tones down the rhetoric: NYU fellow and leftwing journalist Nir Rosen appears to justify the rape of CBS reporter Lara Logan because he doesn’t like her politics. Key quotes:
“At this moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified, we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.”
“Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson (Cooper)…but it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson, too.”
Rosen went on the say that he even doubted she was assaulted saying she “was probably groped like thousands of other women.”
The bigotry among social psychologists. Key quote:
Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience [at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference] that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.
“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”
Meanwhile, more evidence that among Democrats at least there is no middle ground: The middle-of-the-road Democratic Leadership Council, a major player under Clinton, is about to fold.
Look, I agree that we’ve got to tone down the rhetoric. And I also agree that conservatives bear as much responsibility to do this as anyone. Free debate in a civilized society requires reasoned discussion of the issues, and a willingness to tolerate disagreement. It should not include ad hominen attacks, or the wishful desire to murder your opponents.
However, it is not the tone of rightwing discourse that worries me much these days. You would be hard pressed to find any examples of any Republicans or Tea Party activists suggesting it would a good thing to kill Democrats. Such suggestions are not only considered unacceptable, everyone on the right knows that to say such a thing would probably destroy your career in the public arena. Thus, it just doesn’t happen.
Instead, it is the left, the press, and the Democratic Party’s efforts to whip up anger at the right that scares me. Nor did this ugly behavior begin on Saturday after the Tucson murders. In the past decade there have been the numerous examples (which I have been documenting these past few days) of leftwing activists, Hollywood movies, talk radio hosts, and Democratic officials advocating violence against the right. (For a talk radio host example, see this new list of liberals calling for the murder of conservatives.) Worse, such behavior has almost become routine in recent years. It seems that every random violent act has become a vehicle for the left and the press to attack and slander conservatives, despite the fact that there is no evidence that any of these accusations are true.
This behavior must stop. Violent and angry rhetoric can and will cause violence. And it probably has, considering the fact that a large number of the random violent acts in recent years have actually been committed by deranged individuals with liberal, not conservative, leanings. This is not to say that I blame the left for this violence, but that the left has as much of a responsibility as the right to think carefully about what it says, before it says it. Otherwise, they might find that they have made their less rational followers more angry than they ever imagined, or can control.
Or as Michael York says to his NAZI friend at the end of this scene from the 1972 movie, Cabaret. “You still think you can control them?”
Is this an example of toning down the rhetoric? The Facebook Group “I Hate It When I Wake Up & Sarah Palin Is Still Alive” has more than 2,000 members.
So you have no doubt about the ugly tone of this Facebook group, here is a screen capture from the page. Note the desire to kill Palin (and Bush) in several images.
Feel the hate: A man shot his television in outrage over Bristol Palin’s success on Dancing with the Stars, then held off the police for fifteen hours.
