2010 archive

From one of my two or three regular readers in reaction to this (by the way, the emailer is hardly a leftie):

You know, call me slow on the uptake, but this just hit me.

Liberals will call for all members of BushCo to be tried as war criminals, as they should be. But I’ve yet to see anyone call for Bush to receive a bullet between the eyes.

It’s only the conservatives & rednecks who would see Obama be killed. Or see someone spit on. Or someone else called horrible names.

But they claim to represent the majority of Americans. I bet that if the majority of Americans were polled, they would see things differently.

Aside: I don’t think I’ll take that bet. I think the majority of Americans do not consider throwing bricks through office windows and threatening children optimal ways of petitioning one’s elected representatives incongruously assembled.

I have wondered about this myself: the calls for hatred and violence from the right seem frequent; those from the left, so rare that I cannot think of one off the top of my head.

I haven’t addressed it, because, back in my younger days when I was marching in protests, I heard a lot of pretty horrible things come from the mouths of anti-war activists. I wondered whether writing about it would be a pot-kettle-black kind of thing.

These days are different, of course. Back then, to get a platform, you had to get noticed by the press. Now anyone can set up a blog or a social networking account and have a uncensored megaphone. (Getting noticed may be something else altogether.)

As I think of it, though, I don’t recall anyone who was remotely a mainstream opponent of the Viet Namese War who would have even thought of calling for the assassination of a public figure; the protesters wanted less killing, not more. Even the looniest loons, the ones who thought bombing stuff was a means of protesting bombings, tried to bomb buildings when they were empty.

I don’t think anyone shouted “baby killer” (then an anti-war slur, rather than an anti-abortion one) or “You lie” from the floor of Congress back in those days.

The reservoir of hatred on the political right in this country disturbs one.

The Republican Party’s actions not only to appeal to but also to foment the hatred disgusts one.

Reports of the wreckage of the Republican Party, such as this one from Andrew Sullivan, are no doubt premature.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to take some pleasure in the discomfiture of the Party of Privilege. Dick Polman recalls some history while predicting:

. . .10 years from now, Americans may well be amazed that the new normal was resisted so vociferously by the Republican opposition. All the current talk about “socialism” and “the death of freedom” and the onset of “Armageddon” (House GOP leader John Boehner, yesterday: “We are 24 hours from Armageddon”) is likely to seem quaint – much like actor Ronald Reagan’s 1961 warning about the health-care-for-seniors concept that would soon be known as Medicare (“one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free”); and much like the GOP attacks on the 1935 Social Security proposal to fashion a safety net for old folks (New Jersey GOP Senator A. Harry Moore: “It would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords”).

In the comments to that post, Gee1971 reacts with bafflement (I don’t usually read comments because there’s not enough time, but Polman does attract some interesting ones):

Did Something happen last night? I turned off the TV and sat with my most special loved ones enjoying our last moments together as The End approached. I was stunned when I opened my eyes this morning and St. Peter was not standing before me.

Thomas Jefferson was a good man, even as he was a man of his times, as we are a men and women of our times.

He struggled with the idea of slavery, and he lost the struggle, not being able to deal with its ultimate evil.

But he was moral enough to struggle with it–something many of his (and our) contemporaries refused to do–and to reveal those struggles in writing, even as he was unable rise above his times.

And now Thomas Jefferson no longer exists in Texas.

Blue Commonweath sums it up.

As long as it wasn’t filled with mixed nuts.