That liberals are world class haters is a fact of life apparent to any sentient being with an IQ higher than that of, say, a typical television anchorperson. This is particularly true in the wake of the extended post-election tantrum thrown last fall by allegedly sane and sophisticated liberals, who heaped the ugliest calumnies and invective on the heads of tens of millions of their countrymen whose only sin was voting to reelect President Bush.
Jacoby notes that once again this year “Republicans were almost routinely associated with Nazi Germany.” Former vice president Al Gore – these days nothing more than a bloated shouter whose endorsement of another accomplished screamer, Howard Dean, helped send the latter’s presidential campaign into a fatal tailspin – characterized Republican activists as “brown shirts.” Hugh Pearson, a Newsday columnist, beheld the Republican National Convention and was reminded of “Nazi rallies held in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler.” Singer Linda Ronstadt reflected on the election results and lamented that “we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”
Tarring Republicans with the “Nazi” or “racist” label is, of course, old hat for liberal hatemongers. Here’s Harlem congressman Charles Rangel, one of the more accomplished name-callers on Capitol Hill, responding in the mid-90’s to a Republican tax-cutting initiative: “It’s about race and a certain costume change. Where once it was the sheets and hoods of the Klan, it’s now the black suits and red ties of conservative politicians. It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘nigger’ anymore. They say, ‘Let’s cut taxes.’ ”
Here’s Rangel again, referring to the Republicans’ 1994 Contract With America: “When I compare this to what happened in Germany, I hope you see the similarities to what is happening to us.”
When George W. Bush chose John Ashcroft as his attorney general shortly before being inaugurated to his first term in 2001, Representative William Clay, Democrat of Missouri, Ashcroft’s home state, said the choice reminded him of “the way Ku Klux Klan members worked to improve race relations; they, too, reached out to blacks with nooses and burning crosses.”
Some months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the actress Sandra Bernhard, a proud and outspoken liberal, opined that “the real terrorist threats” to the nation “are George W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs.”
Getting back to Jacoby’s compilation of liberal hate speech in 2004, here’s the considered wisdom of left-wing crank Bill Moyers, easily one of the most overrated men in the history of television news, who told viewers that if Democrat John Kerry were to defeat Bush by a narrow margin, “I think there’d be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly….The right wing is not going to accept it.”
In case you missed it, consider the lovely liberal sentiments voiced in an ad paid for by the St. Petersburg, Fla., Democratic Club that called for the assassination of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The ad read, “Then there’s Rumsfeld, who said of Iraq, ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, ‘This is one of our bad days,’ and pull the trigger.”
Speaking of liberal bloodlust, in 2004 the prestigious publisher Alfred A. Knopf came out with a thinly plotted, poorly written novel by Nicholson Baker in which a pair of Bush-haters spend the entire book arguing the merits of killing President Bush. It’s inconceivable that a mainstream publishing house would ever even entertain the idea of putting its imprimatur on a novel that discussed in such graphic detail the planned killing of a Democratic president.
Liberal rage is an ugly phenomenon that’s likely to increase in intensity over the next few years. Somebody please medicate these people, and fast.