by Rupert Psmith
Kim Strassel managed to get under my skin Sunday morning. Somehow she landed on the This Week roundtable and tossed a smoke grenade on the topic of violent, anti-government rhetoric on the Right.
(http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/roundtable-financial-regulation-10406844 about 1 minute, 30 seconds in.)
The question was raised following former President Clinton’s remarks about how all of this reminded him eerily of the anti-government rhetoric of the ‘90s (which of course led to the Mura Federal Building bombing). Strassel’s ‘argument’ was that liberals seemed to think it was fine when Code Pink interrupted congressional meetings and back then it was just “public discourse” and “considered good.”
Just a small pet peeve. If one of the central arguments you dust off whenever someone argues a principled point with you is, ‘well the other side was bad once too,’ then you represent a not so serious political perspective. And if your points of comparison are substantially dissimilar, then don’t expect anyone to consider your perspective serious at all.
Look, I’m not arguing liberals are inherently morally superior when it comes to overheated rhetoric versus people on the Right. America has seen violent, anti-government rhetoric from the Left in the past, but now, as in the ‘90s, it’s primarily from the Right and the troubling thing is that conservative politicians are embracing these folks rather than distancing themselves. When Congressman Steve King sympathizes with the nut who flew his plane into the IRS building or suggests the Tea Party come to DC and take over the place and prevent the elected government from functioning, he should be ostracized by others on the Right. They should be coming forward to say this is unacceptable. Instead we hear crickets.
PS-I have yet to find a liberal that has a positive thing to say about the antics of Code Pink. No congressperson I know of thought their interruptions of hearings were a good thing. And as annoying as Code Pink was/is, I don’t recall them ever calling for a violent revolution.
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(THE GRAPEVINE
you are precisely right in two important respects.
first, the lunatic fringe on the left is just that, a fringe that is not embraced by any substantial portion of the democratic mainstream. code pink is a sideshow and most everyone views them that way. i guess if you really wanted an extreme example, you could go for the PETA burglars or eco-terrorists, but to find anyone who supports these extreme views, you're probably looking at a few thousand
second, there is just no equivalency when it comes to the RESULT of heated rhetoric on the left when as compared to the kind of wink-and-nod murder and violence that comes out of heated rhetoric on the right. anti-government militias, racist sons of the south, oklahoma city, militia compounds, etc. are a unique province of the extreme right.
the sad part about the whole false equivalency bullshit is that it is treated as if most dems sort of wink and nod with the silly code pink and eco-terrorism stuff like the republicans do with teabaggers and glenn beck dehumanizing obama as illegitimate and like hitler.
even if they did, it wouldn't matter! the fire and vitriol on the right side of the country (ok, the South) is serving to thrum people into an unthinking state of perpetual fear and a sense that the only legitimate government is a conservative government. this is ANTI-DEMOCRACY, ANTI-REPUBLIC, and ANTI-AMERICAN.
the susceptibility of ignorant rubes to the lies and dehumanization scares me more and more every day. after all, if you were convinced that the president is going to turn the US into Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, WHAT WOULD YOU DO? I think you know the answer
Absolutely. And as if to make our point:http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/04/…
Just to emphasize the import of that article, that is a [edit: FORMER] MEMBER OF CONGRESS saying: Send Obama Back To Kenya!
the founding fathers weeped
I'm with you here 100%. The "they did it, too!" argument is tedious… and bogus. Even the Catholic Church got in on it when a spokesman (I forget who) said something like "We're not the only religion that has abused children."
And that makes it okay?!?
Like you, I hear it in political discourse all the time, but it's even worse when the person making the point denies that their "side" has done anything wrong. I read someone recently say, after lambasting Democrats for doing something questionable, that the Republicans have never used dirty tactics at all (EVER!), but he sometimes wishes they would to teach the Dems a lesson.
Yes… he actually claimed that Republicans never used any dirty tactics.
W… T… F…
When someone says that, you instantly know that it's completely pointless to continue the conversation.