By Jonathan Tobin
The government shutdown has brought out the worst in our political
class but the same is true of pundits. It’s bad enough when politicians
call each other terrorists and hostage takers or, as Barbara Boxer did
yesterday, to compare them to those who commit domestic abuse. We know
that’s what Democrats have always thought of Republicans and it takes
very little provocation to get them up on their high horses seeking to
turn a political disagreement, however bitter it might be, into one in
which the other side is depicted as pure scum rather than merely wrong.
But the willingness of liberals to speak as if all those who disagree
with Barack Obama are, almost by definition, racists, is about as low as
it gets.
The attempt to paint the Tea Party as a warmed over version of the Ku
Klux Klan has been a staple of liberal commentary for over three years.
The fact that race has played virtually no part in the argument about
the stimulus, ObamaCare and the current shutdown/debt ceiling crisis
doesn’t deter the left from branding its foes as motivated by prejudice
rather than just by different views about which decent people can
disagree. That’s the conceit of much of Roger Simon’s column in
Politico yesterday. Jonah Goldberg rightly called it “fairly trollish”
and used it as an example of how formerly respected reporters turned
columnists expose the liberal bias of much of the mainstream press in an excellent post on National Review’s The Corner blog. I made a similar point in a piece about a related topic on Sunday. But Simon’s piece exposes a different angle of the bias issue that I’d like to explore further.
The headline of his article was “Government shutdown unleashes
racism” and it was accompanied by a photo of Tea Party demonstrator
waving a Confederate flag in front of the White House at a demonstration
this past weekend. But the headline promised more than Simon could
deliver as the only points presented in the piece that backed up the
accusation lodged in the headline was the flag and a comment made on
radio by “Joe the Plumber,” the conservative pseudo celebrity of the
2008 campaign who said in his blog that America needed a “white
Republican president” to replace Barack Obama. Other than these two
items, Simon’s piece was just the standard denunciation of the
Republican stand on the shutdown and it was that theme rather than
racism riff that was its substance.
I happen to agree with Simon, and probably most other Americans, that
what the plumber said is racist and has no place in our public
discourse, though if liberal pundits weren’t recycling the writings of
the artist otherwise known as Samuel Wurzelbacher, I’m not sure that
most of us would be aware of them.
I also agree that there is something offensive about waving
Confederate flags in just about any context other than a Civil War
reenactment. I know that those from the Old South see it as part of
their heritage but I think we should be able to evolve as a nation away
from the “Gone With The Wind” view of the War Between the States. Which
means that the rebel battle flag is, whether inhabitants of the old
Confederacy like it or not, a symbol of racism and treason (a term I
know I employ at the risk of generating a host of angry comments from
those unreconstructed Confederates who think the Civil War was about
state’s rights rather than slavery and who believe recycling Jefferson
Davis’ views about the right of secession isn’t irrational). While the
attempts of many liberals like Chris Matthews to interpret all criticism
of President Obama as being motivated by racism is slanderous as well
as utterly disingenuous, I will concede to Simon that anyone who waves
the stars and bars in front of the Obamas’ current residence is pretty
much asking to be labeled a bigot and should get no defense from any
responsible conservative.
The bias in discussing this issue doesn’t stem from a desire to
condemn people who do such stupid things. Rather it is in the
unwillingness to place them in reasonable context.
After all, at the height of the public protests against the Iraq War,
the mass demonstrations in major American cities convened by liberal
groups included large numbers of people who were more or less the
leftist moral equivalent of the flag waver at the White House. You
didn’t have to work hard at these events to find considerable numbers of
those demonstrators waving signs accusing George W. Bush and/or Dick
Cheney of being Nazis. Nor was there any shortage of rhetoric from these
people demanding the ouster of the government of the republic by any
means necessary. Yet that didn’t stop the mainstream liberal media from
depicting the demonstrations as being in no way tainted by extremists
who were along for the ride or from asserting, probably rightly, that
they were a reflection of a large segment of American public opinion.
Just as the vast majority of those who wanted out of Iraq were able
to see the difference between Bush/Cheney and Hitler, playing the racism
card against the Tea Party is intellectually lazy as well as wrong.
Both the left and the right need to do a better job policing those on
the margins of mainstream movements. But that is not the same thing as
painting an entire ideological segment of the public as a function of
the fever swamps. Call Republicans who hatched the shutdown strategy
misguided or even stupid if you like, but associating all those who want
to restrain government spending and taxing and to repeal Obamacare,
with racism is slander, not a rational argument.
That liberal pundits can’t resist the temptation to play off this
meme says more about media bias than it does about problems on the
right.
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