Posted on 10/18/2006 10:01:02 PM PDT by AmericanExceptionalist
Why do Republicans drive leftists so crazy these days? Liberal democrats are beginning to sound like rowdy students on spring break, shrieking and exhibiting themselves on camera.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Consider some of the recent rabid outbursts by once sober, old-guard politicians. West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller insists that the world would be better off if Saddam were still running Iraq. Crotchety Congressman John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, rushed to announce that our Marines were guilty of killing Iraqis in "cold blood" before they were tried. Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin has compared our interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, while Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry said our soldiers have "terrorized" Iraqi women and children.
Then there is the constant anger from Democratic ex-presidents. It used to be that out-of-office chief executives kept relatively hush. Presidents Ford and Bush Sr. - both voted out of office - did not bray when President Clinton had his trials, personal and otherwise.
Not so now with Presidents Carter and Clinton. They repeatedly harp about the sins of the current administration. By now, everyone has seen clips of Clinton losing his temper (complete with finger-wagging) and lashing out at the "right-wingers" on TV. He lectures on political extremism, even as one of his wife's staff members slandered John McCain by saying he broke under torture while a POW in Hanoi. And even at 82, Jimmy Carter almost daily carps over Bush's foreign policy.
Do not forget the unhinged billionaire leftist philanthropists. Ted Turner said he resented President Bush asking Americans, after 9/11, to take sides in our war against Islamic terrorists. George Soros claimed that President Bush improved on Nazi propaganda methods.
The frustration with Bush & Co. has driven a few in the media almost to the point of clinical madness. In 2004, a clueless Dan Rather imploded by airing clearly forged memos that called into question Bush's National Guard service - with the result that he was eased out by an embarrassed CBS News. More recently, Keith Olbermann, the foaming news head on the struggling cable channel MSNBC, keeps his ratings low with uncontrollable rants about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushing a "new fascism."
On college campuses, the old leftist intolerance of unwelcome free speech is back with a fury. A guest spokesman for the Minutemen immigration reform group was shouted down at a recent Columbia University lecture. Earlier, Harvard's liberal president Larry Summers was forced out, after timidly questioning academic orthodoxy about the role of women in science and engineering.
What sends liberal criticism over the edge into pathological hysteria?
Is it that George Bush is a polarizing figure, not just in terms of his Iraq policy, but also because of his Christian Texan demeanor?
Or is the current left-wing savagery also a legacy of the tribal 1960s, when out-of-power protestors felt that expressions of speaking bluntly, even crudely, were at least preferable to "artificial" cultural restraint? Why should graying veterans of the barricades, then, remain "polite" when their country's less sophisticated red-state yokels are taking it in the wrong direction?
The Democrats have not elected congressional majorities in 12 years, and they've occupied the White House in only eight of the last 26 years. The left's current unruliness seems a way of scapegoating others for a more elemental frustration - that they can't gain a national majority based on their core beliefs. More entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, gay marriage, de facto quotas in affirmative action, open borders, abortion on demand, and radical secularism - these liberal issues don't tend to resonate with most Americans.
To compensate, leftist pundits, billionaire philanthropists and politicians, from current officeholders to ex-presidents, work to ensure that isolated moments of Republican ineptness (George Bush strutting on a carrier deck in his flight suit) and wrongdoing (repulsive e-mails from a perverted Congressman Mark Foley) blare out as the only issues of the day. This distracting drumbeat, not their own agenda, is the only strategy for success in the next election.
True, reactionaries in the 1990s expressed a Neanderthal hatred of Bill Clinton. But now shouting leftists have lowered the bar. The danger, of course, is that by emulating the rhetoric of a Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore, the feral Democrats - when they come back into power again as tamed leaders who must govern -will have created Frankensteins. And, as we know, such monsters always turn on their creators.
One caveat: I don't consider myself "reactionar[y]" or a "Neanderthal" because of my severe distaste for Bill Clinton. That said, just about everything else in this article was right on target.
Huh? That was the ultimate in rallying the troops. What does VDH expect the "Commander in Chief" to do?
Good piece, but for that pandering-to-the-moonbats line.
Reading VDH is fun for a minute you can forget how bad it would be with the moonbats in charge. Of course, how bad it is won't make the news and if it does of course it is the fault of the previous administration. It is bad enough with Demonrats in the passenger seat telling Republicans how to drive.
...exactly...we didnt dispise Clinton the man...we despised his actions
"when they come back into power again as tamed leaders who must govern"
"When"? So long as they act this way, the proper word is "if."
We see this in their expressions in every picture taken of them in action - violent emotion, condemnation, hysteria, rage, pathological hatred. These are not the earmarks of someone who is convinced of the intellectual soundness of his or her position, they are the signs of someone whose failing belief cannot be subject to examination. They are the signs of a True Believer in a false creed.
What drives them all nuts is that their march to an impossible utopia is not running the way their dearest hopes imagine it should, and someone must be to blame. And all of the frustration for the failure of the "inevitable" progress of history must find a focus.
And so their political opponents must be accorded superpowers, for no ordinary individual may stay the course of history. And inasmuch as the progressives have laid claim to all noble ideals, their opponents must therefore be the mirror image, all things evil. This is genuine insanity.
"What does VDH expect the "Commander in Chief" to do?"
Prior to 2000, sit around playing with himself.
[you all know you were thinking it, too]....;]
Why would anyone have athought like that rattling around in their head?
I sure wouldn't post it if I did.
Now people are going to wonder about you.
Thanks, you saved me a lot of typing, nice work.
Easy: that's what they show in the Girls Gone Wild commercials, and from there, you insert the most heinously hideous liberals you can think of.
It's not the Republicans' fault. Leftists are just inherently crazy.
Modern day Wagnerians. The same sense of self-dramatization, too.
Who is going to explain all of the big words to the lefties so they know what ol' Vic is saying?
Perhaps that's why they support Islamic terrorism, and see nothing wrong with the teachings of the hadith (life and ways of Mohammad) and Koran.
They share a similar disability which is instilled in them by their respective doctrines, the inability to think independently and rationally, and examine a statement and test its soundness. They must instead blindly believe.
An excellent observation! I have long maintained that today's leftism is merely warmed-over Hegelianism: the doctrine of historical inevitability (we must not "turn back the clock" or wind up "on the wrong side of history"--as though all final outcomes were preordained).
And, of course, it is no coincidence that Hegel was a forerunner of Marx...
Personally, I despised the man. To my way of thinking, you can't separate the man from his actions. When I first heard of Bill Clinton, it was on an NPR piece about his possible run for president in '92 (the piece ran on NPR in 1991). Hearing him for the first time, I thought, "Sheesh, this guy is full of himself." He immediately struck me as a pompous, arrogant, self-aggrandizer. I was right about that. What I was wrong about was that I assumed a guy like that would never stand a chance of winning the presidency. He turned out not only to be perhaps the most disgustingly arrogant person ever to have the position of President, but he turned out to be one of the most dangerous men to sit in the Oval Office. Not only was he a danger because he was more concerned about his next score than the security of this nation, but he was dangerous because of his slash and burn style of politics, destroying anyone who might stand in his way. Bill Clinton sowed the seeds which produced the rotten fruit of the hate politics we see going on on the left today. That's his biggest legacy.
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