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Posted on 03/31/2010 3:54:43 PM PDT by neverdem
Why are charges of racism and political extremism suddenly in the air?
Party politics is always the norm, but what is unusual this time around is the juxtaposition between the once-soaring Obama unity rhetoric of the past and the hardball Chicago politics of the present, amid a landscape of feigned outrage that somehow politics are not "fair." A bit of history is in order.
Like it or not, throughout much of the Bush administration, the public was conditioned to believe the following:
• Filibusters were a key traditional Senate protection designed to thwart the tyranny of the majority as embodied by the Bush-Cheney steamroller (Republicans, to be fair, often damned them as obstructionist).
• Recess appointments were the desperate acts of an executive without confidence in either popular or legislative support. Popular protests were grass-roots democracy at its finest.
• Occasional fringe groups that frequented anti-war, anti-Bush rallies, and called their president horrific epithets or threatened violence, were either irrelevant or forced into such understandable extremism by their own government's excesses.
• The once-abhorrent expression of hatred in popular culture for the president (cf. e.g., Knopf's Nicholson Baker novel Checkpoint, about killing Bush, or the Toronto Film Festival award winning a docudrama about assassinating George Bush, or Jonathan Chait's New Republic essay "The Case for Bush Hatred," or Michael Moore's abhorrent talk after 9/11 about blue/red state deaths and his empathy for terrorists in Iraq ("Minutemen" . . . "and they will win")) were not merely not abhorrent, but often creative expressions that captured the mood of popular dislike, and certainly no grounds for ostracism (cf. Moore's attendance at film openings and conventions with top Democratic politicians).
In other words, apparently few on the Left realized that in their dislike for Bush, and in their tolerance for those who hated Bush, they more or less changed attitudes toward acceptable and unacceptable public expressions of dissent. So now the public sees their sudden call for polite discourse as abject hypocrisy. Even the toxic and increasingly desperate charge of racism has little currency now, and soon will boomerang back on the accusers.
What does all this mean? A largely center-right country that polls consistently conservative apparently is beginning to think it was had in the election of 2008. A weak McCain campaign, weariness after eight years of Bush, fascination with a charismatic African-American landmark candidate, fright after the September 2008 meltdown, and Obama's centrist "purple" rhetoric all provided the margin of victory, but apparently not the margin for an intended remake of America in which the daily conditions under which we live and see the world (buying a Chevy, going to the mailbox on Saturday, attending the doctor, viewing Israel, making claims on Medicare, paying taxes, trying terrorists, etc.) would be radically altered in just a year.
For the once-giddy Left, which misinterpreted the causes of the Obama landmark victory, the current pushback is seen as somehow terribly unfair, and thus arise both their own furor and their amnesia about their own past attitudes during the Bush years. I think ultimately many "progressives," adherents to relativism, feel that the past furor over Bush in all its creepy manifestations was justified because of who Bush was; but that a similar methodology (or, in fact, far softer manifestations) of dissent toward Obama is unacceptable because of who Obama is (i.e. one can act rudely toward clearly bad people, but not rudely toward unquestionably "good" people). It is that simple.
This explains why a picture of Bush as a chimp or with an Adolph mustache is “funny”, but to see the next president portrayed in an identical manner is “racist”.
Party politics in the US has always been ugly. The hypocritical pretense that it’s only the other side who’s to blame is not quite as traditional: it seems to have originated with the modern ideological Left.
Socialism, by its nature, cannot accept dissent in any form, and must always squash objections. It does this first by marginalization and ridicule, and if that fails, by brute force.
American is currently in the first stage: Those who, in one way or another, can be identified with “red state” culture are ridiculed as ignorant, racist, hate-filled, inbred, uneducated, and dangerously violent. Americans who voice conservative opinions are shouted down and denigrated, and the PC culture ensures social censorship of conservative ideas.
To the extent that a sizeable group of anti-socialists still remains, force will have to be the next step that the socialists take to silence their critics.
Here's an expansion on that. “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Treason is the highest form of dissent. Therefore treason is the highest form of patriotism.”
I want the rats' heads to explode.
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They don't have the guts.
Ugly party politics took a sharp turn for the worse in 2000 when Bush defeated Gore. The Demonrats felt that they were robbed, and whatever they do is OK as long as it helps to defeat the enemy which is everyone with an R behind their name. The level of hatred and vitriol displayed by the left today surpasses anything in my memory, and that memory began in the Eisenhower era.
I can see your point.
We should never forget, this is the true left in action.
You have quite a collection.
Pray VDH is right about this, because this campaign to vilify and dispirit any dissent is coordinated from the White House, Unions, and all of the media. From the day Pelosi strutted through the crowd and the false charges sprung from her A-A "civil rights icon" sidekicks, the full on assault began, and they will not be happy until everyone with any objection to "progressive" government is silenced.
I remember people asking me "do you think that they're trying to steal the election?" I always answered "Yes, I do, but who do you mean by "they"?
The Republicans all lauged, the Democrats got all huffy.
There were some other milestones, too, like when Bubba Clinton came on the radio 2 hours after the Oklahoma City bombing and blamed it on Rush Limbaugh and talk radio.
Future Reference ping to self.
Dissent is patriotic.
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