Posted on 10/26/2008 9:05:33 AM PDT by jazusamo
There's battle lines being drawn Nobody's right if everybody's wrong -- Buffalo Springfield
What is happening to us? What explains the boorishness, hate and even violence that increasingly mark our politics?
No, this isn't another prissy commentary on "negative" ads -- another high-sounding homily on how we ought to focus on "the issues," by which the writer means "the issues that I think voters should focus on." Nor is this a screed against demonstrations, however boisterous, or some young fools' lawn-sign stealing. There's no interest here in trampling on free-speech rights or spitting into the wind of what must be a rite of passage.
What troubles me -- what should trouble us all -- is the outbreak of largely liberal intolerance we've seen over the last few elections, and especially this one.
Something's happening here, and it's getting scary.
We've had two 23-year-old males here tossing Molotov cocktails to burn down Gene Scrutton's John McCain sign in the Sellwood neighborhood.
In Minnesota, graffiti messages ("u r a criminal resign or else") were spray-painted on the garage of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman's St. Paul home.
A 23-year-old Michigan man, a Democrat, has admitted to plotting to detonate a homemade bomb in the tunnels near the Republican convention.
In the Washington, D.C., suburbs, a motel with a McCain sign on its lawn received threatening calls and a McCain-signed pumpkin patch was vandalized.
In central Florida, the Republican headquarters manager told police he believed that his home with two McCain signs was shot up because of his support for McCain.
It doesn't involve physical violence, threatened or real, but "The Daily Show" host Jon Stewart's "[expletive] you" to Sarah Palin in a recent comedy (?) act suggests how far we've gone in the age of the unhinged.
Yes, I know this stuff runs both ways. Here in Oregon, we had the hanging of an Obama cut-out at Newberg's George Fox University. The Washington Post reports that Obama signs in Alexandria, Va., were painted with racist epithets. We learned Friday that a McCain campaign worker's claim that she was beaten up and had the letter "B" cut into her face because her car had a McCain sticker was a hoax. Such deranged doings are just as appalling when it comes from the right, though my sense is that this hate-filled intolerance more often comes out of left field.
I also know we're a big country, and a few goof-balls do not a national trend make. But I don't think I'm committing sociology based on a few incidents. We're talking about more than a few beer-addled goofballs here.
A young friend of mine was working for the Bush campaign in 2004. One weekend he left his car outside a friend's Eugene house for safekeeping while he was out of town. Upon returning, he noticed the "W" sticker had been removed from his car. Hey, buddy, you were supposed to take care of my car, he said to his friend. Oh, yeah, his friend said, my father did that when he was here this weekend. He couldn't stand a student having a Bush sticker on his car.
Now, mind you, this wasn't a practical joke. The father was dead serious, and he wasn't some ne'er-do-well with a six-pack of beer aboard. He was an immaculately credentialed Portland professional who also headed a major community organization.
I love politics and public policy, but the ugliness, the anger, the coarseness and even the threats of violence I've experienced as a conservative opinion-writer in achingly "tolerant" Portland have contributed to my decision to leave the business after this election. My heart was starting to harden -- do we conservatives not have hearts, do we not bleed? -- and I didn't want that to happen.
I joked at first about some of it. When a reader sent me my column covered with dried feces, I looked on the bright side. He could have said he wouldn't .... on my column. I took comfort in the fact law officers visited the Iraq War foe (a peace advocate!) and the liberal critic (a Portland public school teacher!) who threatened my family. But the constant expletive-laced rants, the nifty Nazi-Hitler-German references, the holier-than-thou hate for any opposing view from the half-informed -- well, it's not what our public discourse should be about. It wasn't in a better age. If I sometimes responded in kind (and I did), forgive me.
What accounts for this rage? Maybe it's that so many feel the White House was stolen from them eight years ago. Maybe they just feel entitled to rule. (Dude, where's my country?) Maybe it's the Iraq War. Or George Bush, though many lefties have worked themselves into the same derangement syndrome over Palin. Maybe the cause is deeper. I don't know. I only know it's not a good thing for civil society.
Obama's not my candidate -- McCain is -- but, if he's elected on Nov. 4, Obama will be my president and I'll be happy to cheer two things. One, the fact that the United States has, at long last, elected an African-American president. Two, the possibility that Obama's election might deliver us from this nastiness. I think it's called the audacity of hope.
Thanks.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to state the evidence and then inexorably conclude that such things are being deliberately orchestrated by an unholy alliance between Democrat party leaders and the institutional Left that has been building its power and influence for decades for precisely this purpose, in concert with other (foreign and domestic) enemies of the Nation as a whole, propelled by purposeful subversion, wholesale intimidation, and mind-boggling supplies of dirty money to grease the skids. Such corrpution may have been in evidence in the past in some big cities or even in some statehouses, but never has it been seen on the nationwide scale and with the chilling effectiveness that is evident this time around. Can you point to any other national election that has seen anything close to what has gone on this time around? I didn't think so...
ping
The real problem is that we have so many cowards on our side who fear conflict and disregard Jefferson’s warning about The Tree of Liberty.
The appeasers who are ready to wave the white flag of surrender to Marxism as it implements its final push to domination in America.
We have slowly watched this thing unfold for decades doing everything we could to stop it.
Enjoy your Marxist state, appeasers.
Appeasing Marxist take over of America is no different than waving the white flag of surrender to any of America’s enemies both past and present.
Appeasement never makes the problem go away.
This is like saying electing a Muslim will deliver us from terrorism.
“Obama’s not my candidate — McCain is — but, if he’s elected on Nov. 4, Obama will be my president and I’ll be happy to cheer two things. One, the fact that the United States has, at long last, elected an African-American president.”
1. Obama is NOT an “African American” to quote that fallacious term. First of all he’s bi-racial mulatto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulatto
2. He has yet to produce satisfactory evidence he was even born a US Citizen.
3. What the hell does “African-American” or any bloody hyphenated American’s color have to do with A N Y T H I N G?
To focus on that is simply appeasement to the reverse racists.
So you and people like you are ready to bow down to an unqualified Marxist and simply let him march in and set up an Obama-Ayers administration?
There will be no “reaching across the aisle” and the war will continue.
Today we passed a portrait of the Zero that was probably 10 feet high and 7 or 8 feet wide. What type of politician puts pictures of themselves up everywhere like this ?
No one has ever done it in an American election. The only people who do it are megalomaniacs like :Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao.
There are great comments on this thread, yours included. This is a personality cult of the worst kind.
ROFLMAO! That's good! Good think I have my key board covered in silicone because I snorted about half a diet pepsi up through my nose laughing!
I hear you...Lets make sure the turkey isn’t elected, it’s not just taxes it’s national security.
I actually lived in the Emerald People’s Republic for many years. Check out the house at 1862 Kincaid where parts of my brain still reside. However, the liberal intolerance that Mr. Reinhard decries has been around for at least 25 years. I found it in full flower way back in 1980-1985, and again when I decided to feel the blanketing gray awfulness of Willamette Valley intolerance again from 1988 to 1994.
Oregon’s a snake pit of Stalinists and birkenstockian brownshirts. Please don’t tell me how nice it is in John Day or Pendleton; I understand that the Cascades mark more than just a watershed. And, yes, Nancy’s Yogurt is quite good.
I only thank Oregon for one thing - living among Northwest liberals helped mold and cultivate my conservatism. Sometimes you need to be confronted with how awful things are before you get the message.
****So in actual fact the sword IS mightier than the pen.****
There’s the rub. Never give up. Never give in. And fight like hell.
I know, I lived in So OR for fifteen years before moving to WA, of course I’m closer to Portland now than when I lived in OR.
The I5 corridor from Eugene north to the WA border is the lib bastion in the state, I couldn’t have stood living there.
For one thing, Obama and the left, who are nothing if not vindictive, will be looking for payback against everyone who criticized them.
They're not nice people.
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........and the other Hussein.
The rage should be coming from people who have seen the last election cycles break down into lawlessness by our politicians. Barney Frank is at the heart of the financial system meltdown; Chris Dodd received sweetheart loans; Charlie Rangel is hiding income in the Caribbean, misusing rent-control properties, and underpaying his taxes; former Democrat politicians looted their companies of tens of millions of dollars and fled before the collapse. Nobody is doing anything hold anyone personally accountable.
Gov. Palin's personal email was hacked into and the contents distributed on the internet. Was there outrage? The college kid and son of a Tennessee Democrat was caught, but will he really be prosecuted or just dismissed as a youthful prank?
The college kids who rented a house in Ohio and registered to vote are not being prosecuted.
Acorn is openly stealing elections and nobody is stopping it.
The Ohio Democrat Secretary of State is going rogue with the election laws, and nobody is stopping it.
Obama is suppressing all his records and hiding his past, and nobody is stopping him.
The MSM is ignoring Democrat scandal after scandal while fabricating stories about Republicans, and nobody is stopping them.
There better be outrage out there!
-PJ
All true plus a lot more outrages.
Just the other day a journalist posed an honest question to Biden and he mocked her. Bo and his campaign had a fit and cut the station off for any future info. The majority of the enemedia doesn’t say squat about it.
I fear nothing will change until the public is outraged enough to bankrupt the media who are not doing their jobs. Fortunately it has already started but it’s a slow process.
The WPA “worker’s art” of the 1930s was taken from the Soviet “Socialist Realism” school of “art.”
Liberal ‘rats in the 1930s idealized the USSR. Remember the NYT Pulitzer Prize given to the reporter who hid the Ukranian forced starvation that he eye-witnessed. He praised the USSR up and down. “I have seen the future, and it is working in the Soviet Union” etc.
It wasn’t until after WW2 that the liberal love for communism was beaten back and forced underground for a generation. But as we have seen with Ayers etc, it has always been latent like a fatal virus in our body politic.
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