Conservatives everywhere are parroting the standard-issue rhetorical ammo against anyone they don’t like: they are “hurting America.” It’s almost absurd, really, that they could categorize America so: a young but powerful nation of different races and cultures is being characterized as a child on a playground, poked by liberal schoolyard bullies.
In this case, the big scary bully is one Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved and perhaps overpoliticized mother of a fallen soldier, who has been camped out outside Bush’s Texas ranch. I don’t know offhand what her demands are—a meeting, probably— but her naïvetè charming. She’s one of thousands of grieving parents, certainly not the first to protest the administration’s bumbling in Iraq. Does she expect, perhaps, that she’ll scold George, perhaps hit his hand with a wooden spoon, and he’ll say, “By God, you’re right! I’m going to pull out of Iraq immediately, sever all ties with my corporate interests, stop giving taxpayer money hand over fist to corrupt companies like Hallliburton, and for the first time ever admit that I made a mistake to the American public.”
Hmm, let me think about that one.
Bush has yet to meet with Sheehan, and won’t, as long as he has his jabbering throngs to paint pictures of protesting Americans as traitors.
On the August 16 edition of Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume, Krauthammer claimed that Sheehan’s protest is “hurting our troops and endangering our troops.” Krauthammer went on to state that Sheehan’s statements “have to be attacked because they are libeling America, endangering America, and they are untrue from beginning to end.” When Fox News contributor Juan Williams questioned whether Sheehan’s statements actually endangered American troops, Krauthammer retorted, “You don’t think it’s encouraging, you don’t think it’s going to encourage Iraqis who are attacking us, particularly this kind of stuff about American imperialism?”
You know what motivates Iraqis to attack American troops? Hatred. And religion. Something tells me that hooded insurgents in Iraq aren’t sitting around the TV and night, drawing motivation from a sad little woman protesting outside the President’s house.
But aye, there’s the rub: the urban legend that conservatives love to perpetuate, either from the big guns like Hannity, Limbaugh, Malkin, or Coulter yammering about it on Fox Snooze, from those indignant e-mail forwards that they send to each other, those along the lines of “[insert liberal here] said [insert anti-war sentiment here]. [S/He] must be a [communist/hippie/terrorist]. God bless America.” That terrorists and liberals are one and the same; that being against war emboldens people who are attacking us because they hated us before all of this. I’d be willing to bet that W’s swaggering cowboy diplomacy emboldens more terrorist than any angry mother.
My favorite, however, comes from good old David Horowitz, the “liberal conspiracy” tool that popped into real prominence with the Ward Churchill debacle.
It is one thing to criticize a war policy. It is quite another to accuse your own country of creating the monster it went to war to remove and fabricating intelligence information to send American youth into battle to die for a lie — which is what she has done.
So, when we gave Saddam Hussein weapons in the 80s, that wasn’t creating a monster, right? And, if Richard Clark can be believed, while I won’t go so far as to say the administration deliberately falsified evidence, their zeal to invade Iraq was so great that they didn’t factcheck worth a damn (obvious). Didn’t Bush lie to us when he said Saddam had weapons? Wasn’t that, in fact, a lie? Or is “academic freedom” that Horowitz speaks of a freedom from academic rigor?
Yes, of course. Republicans and conservatives are SOOOOO much more guilty of rhetoric than are their more liberal counterparts.
The difference here is that there are a lot more conservative pundits harping this party line. The Democrats/liberals fail miserably in this manner.
Well, I seem to remember, in the mid-90s, when a Republican Congress was a new thing, how pundits reported that benefit “cuts” (actually just slowing the rate of increase, not decreasing anything) would lead to old people starving in their flea-ridden beds and children being served dog food at school.
Perhaps there are fewer liberal pundits these days than there are conservatives, but I doubt it. More to the point is that the liberal pundits know how out of the mainstream they are.
You can talk about blue states and red states and individual issues until you are bluish-red in the face. But more of the country is more conservative than they are liberal. Even if they consider themselves liberal because certain positions of the right have been demonized, they still are not comfortable with the left agenda as a whole, either. And it has nothing to do with spin or proper communication; it’s that most Americans don’t buy into their systemology.
Part of the problem is that since the GOP is currently incumbent in, well, everything, media laziness adds to the perception that there isn’t much of a liberal voice anymore. On the other hand, however, where is the liberal counterpart to Fox News Channel? Al Gore’s network? Puh-lease. Where’s the counterpart to radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh (on the stringently conservative and patently enormous ClearChannel network)? Air America Radio? Plays in a few select cities only.
Republicans tend to be Republicans, whether moderate or extreme. The Dems are, like I said, fragmented and inefficient. I believe that public opinion is not so much a matter of disagreeing with the Left’s systemology, but that fact that there’s no Left systemology to agree with! Not truly Leftist, anyway, outside of the Green Part.