Ah, the one-way street of liberal-left-speak

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Joel Johannesen
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As a rather weak additional anecdote to add to this piece in which the writer speaks of the seemingly total acceptance of lies and slanders and denunciations leveled at conservatives, even on national TV network shows, and even while liberals scream bloody murder when they get some back, I can tell you that I laugh out loud several times a day as a read my email and see what liberals say to me. Actually sometimes it is literally scary.

I get email from people too afraid to put their thoughts on the public record —in our forums or any forums anywhere—because it reveals the true character of the writer, and that’s not something they want the public to see. Even when they aren’t revealing their actual name or any personally identifiable feature of themselves, they know they are identifying themselves as “liberal“,  so they hide their thoughts from the public as much as possible—they know it would be a mistake to allow the public to see that liberals actually think that way! I sometimes post the email I get right here for all to see, but many would literally violate decency laws.

Anyway, even in public they make idiots of themselves, as we see here:

The Slander of Ann Coulter
By Don Feder
FrontPageMagazine.com  | October 8, 2004

Earlier this week, the inimitable Ann Coulter was on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” to discuss her new book, How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must).

Co-host Charles Gibson — a media cheerleader for the Kerry campaign, who once expressed disbelief that anyone could question the Democratic nominee’s “distinguished war record”—used the interview as an occasion to deliver another unctuous homily on the need for civility in politics.

For the left, civility is a one-way street, running toward them — but never in the opposite direction.

Gibson, who will host the second Presidential Debate Friday evening, asked Coulter if the public wasn’t ill-served by the “incivility” in this campaign.

Suggesting she was a prime offender here, Gibson inquired of the conservative commentator how she could call the war hero “a gigolo”?

Coulter replied that Kerry married two rich women — one worth $300 million and the other $700 million — which clearly qualifies him as the subject of the popular Louis Prima song.

The blonde buzz-saw also noted that nobody was calling for civility in 1964, when Democrats we’re telling the nation that Barry Goldwater wanted to drop the big one and precipitate a nuclear holocaust.

Now that conservatives can fight back — via the Internet, cable TV and talk radio — liberals whine about civility,  Coulter charged.

Despite their carefully timed civility campaigns, liberals are smear artists who can never resist hitting below the belt — with brass knuckles.

Their modus operandi is calling conservatives: racists, bigots, hate-mongers, warmongers, Nazis, trigger-happy cowboys, gun nuts, psychos, despoilers of the environment and political Ebenezer Scrooges rubbing their bony hands together in greedy glee as widows and orphans starve in the streets simply ?to boost the profits of their junk bonds.

Consider a few great moments of liberal civility:

  • In 2000, during a discussion of the Supreme Court decision allowing the Boy Scouts to bar homosexual scoutmasters,  (when he thought he was off camera) then-ABC News interviewer Bryant Gumbell called social-conservative spokesman Bob Knight “a f***ing idiot.”
  • In 1994, on a PBS program, Julianne Malveaux (a Pacifica Radio talk show host) expressed this wish for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas: “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease.” Liberals regularly describe Justice Thomas as an Uncle Tom, a “house nigger” and a jockey-boy lawn ornament — doubtless, these are expressions of esteem.
  • In 1999, during the Clinton impeachment trial, actor/activist Alec Baldwin said that in an ideal world, “We would stone Henry Hyde (the House impeachment manager) to death and we would go to their homes (other Republican impeachment leaders) and we’d kill their wives and children.” Why not their pets, too, Alec?
  • Walter Cronkite compared the US Attorney General to the leader of the Spanish Inquisition, “Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada…was largely responsible for …the torture and burning of heretics” (this in a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer,  September 22, 2003).
  • Congressman Charles Rangle (D-NY)  has suggested that GOP budget warriors are racists at heart. “It’s not “spic’  or “nigger’ anymore. (Now) they say, “Let’s cut taxes.’” Which makes Jack Kemp the Imperial Grand Dragon?
  • Along the same lines, Jesse Jackson (in a British TV interview, Dec. 25, 1994) claimed conservatives are the heirs of the Third Reich. “In Germany it was called fascism. Now, in Britain and the U.S., it is called conservatism.” This from the establishment’s favorite civil rights leader, who once (in the course of an interview) called New York City “Hymie-town,” in reference to its Jewish population.
  • After the 1998 murder of homosexual Matthew Shepard, the Gannett News Service’s Deborah Mathis blamed “the Christian right per se” and “some particular members on Capitol Hill” (she mentioned Trent Lott and Jesse Helms) for helping to “inflame the air that these people (Shepard’s killers) breathed that night.”
  • In floor debate on Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, that great moralist, Ted Kennedy warned that the former Solicitor General, Yale Law professor and federal Appeals Court judge would drag America back to “a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens doors in midnight raids” — And blondes would die in the backseats of cars off Chappaquiddick Island?
  • Back in 1995, then-President Bill Clinton — the exemplar of let-the-healing-begin — implied that conservative talk show hosts had created the climate of anti-government hysteria partially responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, that left 168 dead.
  • ?It would take a book to chronicle all of the prominent liberals who spent the 1980s telling us that Ronald Reagan was a blithering idiot, a really dumb actor who couldn’t think without cue cards.
  • ?In his book, “Dude Where’s My Country?” Michael Moore, the left’s weapon of mass distortion, inveighed,  ” The bastards who run our country (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al )  are a bunch of conniving, lying, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control.”
  • The day before Coulter’s appearance,  Kerry was in New Hampshire with actor Michael J. Fox, slamming Bush on stem-cell research. Because the president has moral concerns about embryonic stem cell research, the Senator called him a captive of “right-wing ideology.”  And this was what — an example of refinement and an elevated political discourse?

Am I missing something here?

Is calling someone “an f***ing idiot”  a sign of respect? Is comparing tax cutters to bigots who use racial epithets part of the legitimate political dialogue? Is blaming opponents of the radical homosexual agenda for the beating death of a gay man the pinnacle of civility?

Speaking of civility, have you ever heard of College Republicans trashing liberal campus newspapers, or members of the local ROTC unit shouting down leftist speakers? Both regularly happen to collegiate conservatives — whose publications are incinerated and speakers attacked.

Still, when it suits them, liberals run their civility scam — usually, when they’re cornered and seek to stifle a frank discussion.

As Ben Johnson pointed out in these pages, in the waning days of the Clinton presidency, “when the rhetoric of average Americans had begun to match their revulsion at President Clinton’s philistine morality,” an outfit called The Interfaith Alliance devoted itself “to restoring “civility’ to political dialogue.” (Composed of mainstream church leaders, the Alliance was funded by the charitable Left.)

However, Johnson continues, “Now that the Left regularly compares a Republican president to Adolf Hitler, castigates him for genocide and brutally questions his intelligence, The Interfaith Alliance seems to have lost its interest in decorum.”

Not so, the left’s media auxiliary.  But their application of the civility doctrine is highly selective. Democrats can call Bush a liar. Republicans can’t call Kerry a gigolo.

In their eyes, it’s legitimate for the left to question Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton connections (suggesting that Iraq was a war for profit), but scurrilous for the right to note that Vice Presidential-candidate John Edwards earned millions as an ambulance-chasing, litigation lawyer.

What the Left finds really rude and uncalled for is a candid discussion of Kerry’s war record—which he cites as his chief qualification for the White House. Thus, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (with their ads questioning Kerry’s medals and exposing his involvement in the anti-American/anti-War movement) make the civility-mongers positively apoplectic.

They can lie about us; we can’t tell the truth about them. They can name-call; we can’t discuss their record or describe the natural consequences of their policies.

Calls for civility in the political debate have become the last refuge of liberal con men, and should be treated with the scorn reserved for shameless hypocrites.

Oh, how uncivil of me.

 

Joel Johannesen
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