Vicious panic

Charlie Cook laments the viciousness that has come into political rhetoric:

More and more Republicans don’t just disagree with Democrats, they despise them—and vice versa. People don’t just challenge someone’s views—they challenge the other person’s integrity. Enjoyable, informative, and civil discussions between people with different points of view are becoming rare.

The most recent episode to deeply offend me occurred after Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito’s wife left the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in tears. An Alito opponent soon asked on a popular liberal Web site, “Do we want a judge who would marry such a weak-willed bitch?”

Note that he has to go back 14 years to find an example to support his charge abainst Republicans and even then, it's a fringe phenomenon.

He's certainly right about the Angry Left which seems to include most of the leading Democrat officials and bloggers and many in the MSM. However, to reach back to the Clinton administration and cite the far right fringe who made Bill Clinton an obsession is not a fair comparison.

Bill Clinton was and is unburdened by any core convictions except playing other liberals for chumps. He drove everybody nuts, not just conservatives. But his replacement, couldn't be more different. He's disciplined, religious, honest, and feels strongly his duty to protect the nation and our government. But the vitriol being hurled at him and conservatives in general is so bitter, angry and just plain nasty, it goes beyond anything I've ever seen.

There were people calling Clinton a murderer, to be sure, but they were hardly the base of the party. The problem was that Clinton's actions and frat boy personality embarrassed the whole nation. And the Democrats, seeing him as their ticket to power, could not admit the glaring truth. Their cognitive dissonance resulted in a need to deny that Clinton was the sleasy embarrassment that he was and a more powerful need to believe that the Republicans are just as bad if not worse. Add to that the closeness of the 2000 election, and the "we was robbed" feeling and the failure of their attempts to "fix" the results in Florida by recounting the ballots until they came out the way they wanted, and you have the formula for madness.

The problem with the current lefty rhetoric is that so many mainstream Democrat voters have bought into it. Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, George Soros, DemocratUnderground, and uncounted liberal commentators have lost all sense of proportion. It's as if they don't care about the future of their party or their point of view.

There have always been such people on both ends of the political spectrum, but when they take over the party, they lose the swing voters who prefer that their leaders be rational. They have made to mistake of believing their own press which has been rendered nearly homogenous by the J-school system, but doesn't speak for the broad mainstream of the nation any longer. If they did, Rush Limbaugh would have remained obscure and Fox News Channel could never have outdone CBS News, let alone CNN.

There were a lot of knocks on Clinton from the right, and there were some moonbats who saw him as the Antichrist, but most Republicans just thought of him as something to be endured, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn't really their fondest hope to impeach him, but his dishonesty and dishonor of his office were so public, and the arguments made in his defense so offensive to logic and their beliefs about America, that they felt obligated to press the case, just as they had felt morally bound to abandon Nixon after Watergate. That's just the way conservatism is. Republicans aren't all conservatives, but without the conservative vote, no Republican candidate can get past the primaries.

While there is still plenty of nasty rhetoric on the right toward Democrats, it does not occupy the mainstream the way similar Anti-Republican wrath does on the left and it especially doesn't include the amount of obscenity and the over-the-top accusations that seem to have become the conventional wisdom for the left.

Yes, the rhetoric has become more vicious and more irrational, but it is obvious that the right is arguing from facts and ideas, while the left more and more only has epithets. When was the last time you saw a reasoned argument for increasing taxes and more welfare. The best they can do is to appeal to platitudes about fairness and caring for the unfortunate, even as they denounce the role of religious values in matters such as abortion. Without religion, what is the basis for the view that life should be fair, or that the weak should be helped by the strong? Socialism has been tried here and in Europe and it is becoming more and more clear that top-down social planning and liberalism in general is a disaster. It is leading to the depopulation of Europe, unless you count immigrants from the Third World, and a concommitant financial crisis as the number of people paying into government safety-net programs declines relative to those drawing on them.

I think that the slogan "All viciousness, all the time," is misleading because it assumes that only the left is the victim of "hate speech" while it is innocent of making scurrilous accusations toward the right. The cure is objectivity, but I'm not holding my breath for that to return soon to the likes of The Daily Kos, and MSM. The left has built its winning coalitions by appealing to blocs like Big Labor, New Deal largesse and appeals to victimology among minority groups. But those interests are becoming more and more disparate. Jews are seeing the liberal reflexive support for the underdog result in support for Palestinians and the idea that Suicide Bombers are more to be pitied than blamed and that Israel is the neighorhood bully. Those who remember vividly the sight of airliners flying into the Twin Towers and the chilling realization that those bits of debris were human beings, find it hard to feel sorry for Saddam Hussein and Islamist terrorism.

I thought, after 9/11, that liberalism and the rationalizations for terrorism were dead. I was wrong. The need for power has driven the left to the edge of insanity, and I don't see it coming to itself anytime soon. Any rational political advisor would have cautioned the Democrats against trying to cozen a man as smart as Alito into announcing how he would rule on issues he will be called to rule on and trying to blacken the name of such a boyscout. I'd have told them to play down the confirmation hearings and reserve their shots for the floor debate. When the subject is right in front of you along with his wife and children, trying to hang fangs and claws on him can't help you and you will lose a lot of trust, especially when your supporters go even further, calling his wife "a weak-willed bitch."