The Left’s eagerness to pin violence on the Right is ridiculous.
By Jonah Goldberg
‘I f
history were to repeat itself,” warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in his 1944 State of the Union address, “and we were to return to the
so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920s, then it is certain that even though
we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall
have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”
The
“normalcy” of the 1920s that Roosevelt referred to was a time of peace
and prosperity. The decade began with Republican president Warren
Harding commuting the sentences of political prisoners jailed by the
Wilson administration, including the socialist leader Eugene Debs.
“Normalcy” meant the end to the Palmer raids aimed at rooting out
dissidents, the end of economic rationing, the cessation of domestic
surveillance and the state propaganda of the World War I years.
“A return to normalcy” was also Harding’s campaign slogan in the 1920
presidential election, which he won in a landslide over Democrat James
Cox and his running mate — Franklin D. Roosevelt.
That Roosevelt
nurtured resentments against the Republicans for the drubbing he
received in 1920 is no surprise. That those resentments ran deep enough
for him to smear Republicans in 1944 with the “spirit of fascism” at the
height of the war against the real thing is nothing short of
disgusting.
But it was effective.
Harry Truman recognized
that when he ran for president against the liberal Republican Thomas
Dewey in 1948. Truman charged that Dewey was the front man for the same
sort of “powerful reactionary forces” that orchestrated the rise of
Hitler in Germany.
When a communist assassinated President
Kennedy, somehow the American Right got the blame. Lyndon Johnson
translated that myth into a campaign of slander against Barry Goldwater,
casting him as a crypto-Nazi emissary of “hate.”
After the
Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton saw fit to insinuate that Rush
Limbaugh and his imitators were partly to blame.
Such partisanship
is hardly reserved for partisans. The late Daniel Schorr, then of CBS
News, reported that Goldwater’s planned European vacation was really a
rendezvous with the German right in “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.”
Schorr
spent his golden years at NPR. No doubt he would have been pleased with
the “reporting” of its counterterrorism correspondent, Dina
Temple-Raston. Before the identities of the Boston bombers were
confirmed, she said her sources were “leaning” toward believing that it
was a homegrown “right-wing” attack, and cited that “April is a big
month for anti-government and right-wing individuals.”
How so?
Well, because April’s when the Oklahoma City bombing took place, as well
as the Waco siege, the Columbine shootings and, how could one forget,
Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
Over the last few years, the invariably
unjustified rush to pin violence on the “right-wing” — particularly the
tea partiers — has reached the point of parody. Remember when New York
City mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated that the foiled Times Square
bomber might just be angry about Obamacare?
As the Washington Examiner’s
Philip Klein recently noted, among the myriad reasons conservatives
take offense at this idiotic knee-jerk slander is that the term
“right-wing” is routinely used to describe both terrorists and
mainstream Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. I can
exclusively report that neither of them celebrates Hitler’s birthday.
Every
Muslim terrorist enjoys not just the presumption of innocence until
proven guilty but the presumption that he’s a fan of Ayn Rand, too.
Ah,
but some would respond that “right-wing” is different than “Muslim”
because there’s so much similarity between mainstream conservative
ideology and the terror-filled creeds of the far right.
Except there isn’t. Timothy McVeigh, an atheist, wasn’t part of the
conservative or libertarian movements. He wasn’t even part of the
militia movement. And what on earth was right-wing about the Columbine
shootings?
In plenty of cases of multiple killings, from the
Unabomber to Christopher Dorner, the perpetrators espoused views closer
to the mainstream left’s than McVeigh had to the mainstream right’s.
Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest,
but the tea partiers are brownshirts in khakis.
And, recall that Secretary of State John Kerry belonged to a group —
Vietnam Veterans Against the War — that once discussed assassinating
American politicians. Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted
domestic terrorist. But to even bring these things up, never mind invest
them with significance, is considered outrageous guilt by association.
And you know what? Maybe it is.
But
if that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal
politics that has confused normalcy with fascism for more than half a
century?
http://tinyurl.com/asgedka
3 comments:
Actually, when you consider their mutual fascination with veganism, pre-Christian theologies, the occult, fringe beliefs like crystal energy, and unprovable versions of how thwe world actually works (AGW is an echo of the Horbiger "Eternal ice' theory), the groups who most closely resembles the Nazis today is... the extreme left, especially the New Age contingent.
Funny thing. They don't like Jews very much, as witnessed by their championing of the Palestinians and their rants against Israel.
Now who do we know who didn't like Jews......
cheers
eon
So what Goldberg is saying is that to put a president in office, from mid 1940s until the 1970s, Democrats have used the Republican-as-Nazi propaganda?
McCarthyism was oversight? Democrat-led HUAC-ism is blacklisting and what people normally think of as "McCarthyism".
I thought this began with the CPUSA parroting "Uncle Joe", didn't know it went to FDR.
But we need to move on from here. The lefties are living in a bubble and nothing any of us might say is going to unsettle them enough to change their views. I have felt for some time now that the best we can hope for is that their bundle of contradictions collapses of its own weight the way communism did. To the lefties I say, "When your government has collapsed and you are out on the street, the people are still going to be here and doing just fine."
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