"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to the New York Times Building."~Ann Coulter
The overwhelming response received from LNJ letter writers (and one forum columnist) regarding my column of Sept 12 titled "Taking Our Country Back From the Hatemongers," was impressive for the sheer variety of concerns that were aired. Let me say that I appreciate the time and effort expended by these citizens to join a conversation that we've clearly needed to have. That said, while I applaud these commentators for their passionate embrace of the right of free speech, none of the counter-arguments offered has managed to move me one iota from my original thesis: that hate-speech is decimating public discourse and civility in America. Inadvertently, the responses of these writers, which were pretty much all over the lot, have made my point for me. The question remains will we allow it to continue, or move decisively to end it?
Since my column had a relatively tight and simple focus, it begs the question - what were these people responding to? - I suspect the generalized, toxic mental environment that hate speech gives rise to and nourishes. One respondent asked whether my intention was to "extinguish free speech." Nothing could be further from the truth. Another intimated that I somehow desired the "eradication of conservative Christians," but no such phrase appeared in my piece. Finally, a forum columnist sought to divert attention from Glenn Beck's hatemongering in a clumsy stab at smearing President Obama as a racist using the threadbare tactic of guilt by association. Why this writer became fixated on race perhaps he could best explain, but race per se was never my focus. Hate speech was. Despite the well meant (if uniformly off-base) efforts of the respondents, it still is.
David Neiwert's book THE ELIMINATIONISTS deserves further mention in the context of this discussion. Only those who haven't read it could characterize it, as did one writer, as "polemical." In it, is a good working definition of hate-speech, or as he calls it, eliminationist speech. Two main features set it apart from the normal, lively back and forth of oppositional political language. First, it is focused on an enemy within, constituted by entire blocs of the citizenry. Secondly, it advocates the excision and extermination of those blocs by violent or civil means. In other words, the purveyors of hate speech are not content merely to oppose those with whom they differ. They mean to eliminate them.
In July of 2008, Jim David Adkisson entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church and gunned down two elderly congregants. Officials told reporters the next day that Adkisson had been motivated by his hatred of the liberal movement. A search of the attacker's home in Powell, TN yielded guns, ammunition, and books by leading conservative pundits Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Also found was a "manifesto" written by Adkisson which was, according to Neiwert, a "distillation of these works."
Abortion provider Dr. George Tiller after being mentioned on FOX's "The O'Reilly Factor" on 28 occasions with such nicknames as "Dr. Tiller, the Baby Killer," was gunned down as he attended church in Wichita, Kansas in May 2009. When confronted about his coverage, O'Reilly, Pontius Pilate-like, washed his hands of the matter. Recently, at the Family Research Council's annual Values Voters Forum, O'Reilly was awarded the forum's first ever "Courage" award. The trial of alleged shooter Scott Roeder, begins in January.
This summer, in Phoenix at a speech that Barack Obama gave on health care, a man identified as Chris Broughton showed up outside the venue toting an AR-15 assault rifle and a handgun. The day before he'd heard his pastor, Steven L. Anderson, deliver a sermon titled, "Why I Hate Barack Obama," in which he explained why congregants should pray fervently for the President to "die and go to hell." I'm still waiting for the "inevitable" public outcry from those conservatives who still rail against Barack Obama's erstwhile minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
As a liberal, I often peruse the comments expressed by Maddow, Franken, Olbermann, Dowd, Rich, Letterman, Rall, Maher, Pelosi, The Daily Kos, and The Huffington Post. Strange though it may seem, such content has not once caused me to desire or advocate doing physical harm to my conservative fellow Americans. It was a fair criticism of my previous column that it was sparse on examples of left-wing eliminationist rhetoric, but it is equally fair to note that recent incidents like those mentioned above known to emanate from the liberal community have been very rare. If my detractors can produce such examples, I'd be happy to consider them. Until then, I continue (as does Neiwert) to view hate speech, and more importantly, the violence it increasingly incites, as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.
In light of all this, one would expect moderate conservatives (assuming any are left) to quickly move to decry the hate-speech occurring daily within their ranks in order to avoid the stigma it justly carries, taking responsibility and action where appropriate. Unfortunately, what we've seen from politicians, national pundits, and alas, the respondents to my column has been, for the most part, obfuscation, deflection and finger-pointing.
That's disappointing, because the situation we face is becoming dangerous and ever more deeply embedded in our civic discourse. The local response to date has been to reject the search for solutions in favor of partisan inertia and misplaced bravado. Ultimately, this is to settle for being a part of the problem.
d.
Below are links to the column and letters in response to my August 23 blog post:"Civility Strikes Back!"
http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/09/26/09262009_forum_coulter.html
http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/09/24/09242009_letters.html
http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/09/20/09202009_letters.html
http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/09/22/09222009_letters.html
http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/09/23/09232009_letters.html
http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/09/30/09302009_letters.html
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
A Little Push Back For The Locals
It's difficult to believe that in the space of a 300 word letter to the editor that someone could get so much so wrong, but I guess Trudy Taylor is some kind of linguistics savant for having pulled it off. Taylor's letter (Longview News Journal, Sept. 20) was in response to my own LNJ column of September 12, titled "Taking Our Country Back From the Hatemongers." It first appeared on this blog on Sept 6 under the title "Civility Strikes Back." I will take a crack at answering Taylor's concerns because, as the blog's title suggests, Liberals can and should, when called for, respond.
Italics are Trudy
Anderson's list was incomplete
Really? The only person Taylor could manage to come up with in completing my list of hatemongers was President Barack Obama? Now even a cursory glance at my piece will show the average reader that it was inspired by those who use the outsized megaphones of TV and talk radio to spew an unrelenting stream of vile, hate drenched demagoguery into the ears (and minds and hearts) of people too dull or desensitized to realize its harmful effects. And it was willful obtuseness to deflect attention from these purveyors of hatred by dragging out the fusty old ghost of Jeremiah Wright. The matter of Wright was laid to rest in the campaign. Obama broke ties with his erstwhile minister and apparently America was satisfied. After all, America did elect him President. Its foolish, and transparently vicious to equate the likes of Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk with Obama.
Glenn Beck is a buffoonish political entertainer who has recently found his niche taking shots, sometimes very accurate ones, at an administration which has apparently declared open season on itself with its unwillingness or inability to shepherd its own minions.
In the spirit of seeking common ground with those who differ from me on political issues, let me say that I agree with Taylor's assertion that Beck is a Buffoon. Beyond that bit of detente however, I have to disagree.As stated in my column, and in David Neiwert's book which I referred to, it's a mistake to let people like Beck and Limbaugh off the hook with the "entertainer" dodge. I guess what liberals and conservatives consider entertainment just doesn't jibe. Beck referred to the country's first African American President as a "Racist," and said that Obama "had a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." This doubtless would have come as quite a shocking surprise to Obama's white mother and grandparents! Nor can I find anything "entertaining" about it, especially in light of this country's anguished history of political assassination and home-grown terror. But hey, conservatives apparently get their jollies in different ways than we liberals do.
May I also remind Durren that eight years of hysterical name-calling and nastiness was standard operating procedure on his part while President George W. Bush was in office; the bulk of which was due to erroneous frustration at a perceived stolen election. The likes of which did real damage to the office of the presidency, leaving our current occupant even more vulnerable to slights and misjudgments from opponents.
This Orwellian double-speak is the strangest comment of all. And frankly, it cuts me to the quick to have my writings over the last eight years reduced to mere "hysterical name-calling." I prefer to think of it as eight years of deploying some of the most exquisite sarcasm, ridicule, and satire that LNJ readers have seen. All of it "reality-based" and richly deserved. Bush was elected under a cloud that included such stark images as the Brooks Brothers Riot in Florida that intimidated vote counters into stopping their work, and a conservatively stacked Supreme Court that ratified those rioters. This is all well documented in Vincent Bugliosi's book, THE BETRAYAL OF AMERICA. Look it up.
Bush did lie us into a war with a sovereign nation that never attacked us. He did lie about the depth and the full extent of illegal wire tapping of American citizens. He did lie about the horrors of detainee torture carried out in the name of the american people. These lies and others are laid out magnificently in David Corn's exhaustively researched, "THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH". So I would differ with the statement that mere "name-calling" has damaged the presidency. Rather, it was the remarkable lack of ethics, morality, and respect for the rule of law which characterized the Bush administration that did the damage.
Nice try though, Trudy.
d.
Italics are Trudy
Anderson's list was incomplete
May I remind Durren Anderson that President Barack Obama himself would have to be included in his remonstration of hate-speech users and listeners since the president has gone along, in order to get along, with race mongers like Jeremiah Wright.
Really? The only person Taylor could manage to come up with in completing my list of hatemongers was President Barack Obama? Now even a cursory glance at my piece will show the average reader that it was inspired by those who use the outsized megaphones of TV and talk radio to spew an unrelenting stream of vile, hate drenched demagoguery into the ears (and minds and hearts) of people too dull or desensitized to realize its harmful effects. And it was willful obtuseness to deflect attention from these purveyors of hatred by dragging out the fusty old ghost of Jeremiah Wright. The matter of Wright was laid to rest in the campaign. Obama broke ties with his erstwhile minister and apparently America was satisfied. After all, America did elect him President. Its foolish, and transparently vicious to equate the likes of Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk with Obama.
Glenn Beck is a buffoonish political entertainer who has recently found his niche taking shots, sometimes very accurate ones, at an administration which has apparently declared open season on itself with its unwillingness or inability to shepherd its own minions.
In the spirit of seeking common ground with those who differ from me on political issues, let me say that I agree with Taylor's assertion that Beck is a Buffoon. Beyond that bit of detente however, I have to disagree.As stated in my column, and in David Neiwert's book which I referred to, it's a mistake to let people like Beck and Limbaugh off the hook with the "entertainer" dodge. I guess what liberals and conservatives consider entertainment just doesn't jibe. Beck referred to the country's first African American President as a "Racist," and said that Obama "had a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." This doubtless would have come as quite a shocking surprise to Obama's white mother and grandparents! Nor can I find anything "entertaining" about it, especially in light of this country's anguished history of political assassination and home-grown terror. But hey, conservatives apparently get their jollies in different ways than we liberals do.
May I also remind Durren that eight years of hysterical name-calling and nastiness was standard operating procedure on his part while President George W. Bush was in office; the bulk of which was due to erroneous frustration at a perceived stolen election. The likes of which did real damage to the office of the presidency, leaving our current occupant even more vulnerable to slights and misjudgments from opponents.
This Orwellian double-speak is the strangest comment of all. And frankly, it cuts me to the quick to have my writings over the last eight years reduced to mere "hysterical name-calling." I prefer to think of it as eight years of deploying some of the most exquisite sarcasm, ridicule, and satire that LNJ readers have seen. All of it "reality-based" and richly deserved. Bush was elected under a cloud that included such stark images as the Brooks Brothers Riot in Florida that intimidated vote counters into stopping their work, and a conservatively stacked Supreme Court that ratified those rioters. This is all well documented in Vincent Bugliosi's book, THE BETRAYAL OF AMERICA. Look it up.
Bush did lie us into a war with a sovereign nation that never attacked us. He did lie about the depth and the full extent of illegal wire tapping of American citizens. He did lie about the horrors of detainee torture carried out in the name of the american people. These lies and others are laid out magnificently in David Corn's exhaustively researched, "THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH". So I would differ with the statement that mere "name-calling" has damaged the presidency. Rather, it was the remarkable lack of ethics, morality, and respect for the rule of law which characterized the Bush administration that did the damage.
Nice try though, Trudy.
d.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
A Corner On Decency?
The latest manifestation of right-wing craziness has hit the airwaves. It seems that "President Obama is after our children!" In a fit of conservative paranoia in a season that has seen more than its share of the same, right wingers, stoked on a tad too much FOX news, are preparing to yank their kids in droves from school on Tuesday to prevent their hearing a special address to the nation's youth by the President. Spoon-fed on fear by conservative talking heads such as Michele Malkin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh et al., parents nationwide are moving to head Obama's speech off at the pass. The speech, purported by conservative pundits to contain mind-altering messages about the wonders of socialism, has caused dozens of East Texas Schools to announce that they would not be showing the speech to their students. I can recall no finer civics lesson on censorship in the annals of American education. The lone standout unfazed by the hysteria gripping the region is the Longview Independent School District. Hats off to that oasis of rationality in East Texas.
Funny, I don't recall liberal parents yelling "Katie bar the door!" when Ronald Reagan gave a similar address to school children during his administration. Perhaps that's because liberals are just not as susceptible to the wild speculations, not to mention manipulations that irresponsible "journalists" and news "entertainers" traffic in these days. Beyond that, liberal and progressive parents seem to have a clearer understanding of the importance of a presidential address to the nation's youth, regardless of the politics of any given executive in any given year. It's the President, people! What is to become of us when we don't trust the individual elected by way of a thorough, legitimate democratic process to lead our country? I see this as the logical conclusion of a longstanding propaganda campaign that has reached its critical mass of "catastrophic success." After all, it was Reagan who famously opined that "Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem." Strange words from a man who invested so much to become the head of "government."
George Herbert Walker Bush also spoke to the kiddies when he held the tiller of our ship of state. Again, liberal parents didn't grab up their young'uns and head for the hills. Did liberals agree with the policy agenda of G. H. W. Bush? No, we didn't. Did we ascribe wisdom and clarity to his philosophy of governance? Not a chance. But neither did we attribute to him powers of persuasion so acute that he could, in the course of one speech, brainwash our little ones. Indoctrination is a long, drawn out, tedious affair carried out over years through a program that encompasses every level of society. One speech cannot possibly accomplish what these pitiful conservative parents hold in their fevered imaginations. That is giving President Obama way too much credit. One begins to think that in their minds, Obama has crossed over into some mythic realm of existence wherein all are rendered powerless to withstand his flights of oratory and his natural charisma and charm. Lighten up folks, he's just a guy like the rest of us. Seriously folks, it'll be alright. The children are OK. Really they are.
Finally, there's W. On that fateful day in September 2001, he was reading to school children when the planes hit the buildings in New York and Washington. Even though this same president would leave office when the nation's financial future was teetering over the abyss, when we were engaged in wars on two fronts, and all other economic indicators were flashing red, I still can say that the little ones to whom he read "My Pet Goat," received a rare historical treasure. If I disagreed with the father's policies, I abhorred the son's. That's to be expected in the adult world of politics. Yet few of us, including I suspect, President Obama, are capable of allowing politics to compel us to meddle with the innocence of a child. I have no trouble imputing integrity on this question to Republicans just as I do to Democrats. We have come to a sad and sorry pass when it becomes impossible to see our political opponents as decent human beings, or as being incapable of restraining themselves from tampering with the minds of other people's children. We forget at our peril that those on the opposite side of the aisle are not only our political opponents: they are Americans, too.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Civility Strikes Back!
“This President has, I think, exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is [...] I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. He has a…This guy is, I believe, a racist."~ Fox television host, Glenn Beck
Sometimes things happen in the world of American politics that give me hope. In response to the irresponsible, and incendiary comments above, spoken on the air by Glenn Beck during a segment of the FOX & FRIENDS news program, advertisers are pulling commercials and the millions they represent from Beck's show. Some of the companies pulling the ads carry a lot of clout in American business: Wal-Mart, Geico, Proctor & Gamble, and Radio Shack are just a few of more than 20 such businesses, and the list continues to grow.
ColorOfChange.org is spearheading the effort to put these and other businesses on notice for providing financial backing for the purveyors of corrosive and inflammatory language. The results have been surprising to say the least in a time when the public has become inured to hyperbolic commentaries which have slowly become the norm in our discourse. I am proud to say that I am a signatory to the petitions that ColorOfChange.org has forwarded to the business community. And the effort has paid off in another way, Beck has been asked by News Corp, the Rupert Murdoch owned company that runs FOX, to "take a week off." Like I said, sometimes there is cause for hope.
While this story may represent a refreshing example that civility is not yet dead in our public discourse, it would be premature to think that on its own it can bring us out of the dark place at which we've arrived. It has taken us a decade or more to get here, and it will take a lot of hard and sustained work to get back to civility and mutual respect. The way ahead won't really become clear to us if we fail to understand the steps that have brought us to this sorry pass.
Those wanting to retrace the steps that have placed our public conversation in peril will be doing themselves a favor if they read "The Eliminationists," by David Neiwert. The book's subtitle indicates that it is both a cautionary tale, and a rallying cry for restoring the respect and decency that has gone missing from our political discourse: "How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right." In the reading, it proves to be an accurate, chilling rendering of recent developments in culture and politics that have led inexorably to the situation we find ourselves in, one in which hate speech no longer exists on the fringes of public life, but has taken up residence comfortably in the mainstream.
Neiwert provides a quietly irrefutable gathering of evidence drawn from news reports, scholarly works, and interviews which make the case that extremist language has for years been drawn from the darkest, hate-filled corners of society, repackaged for mass consumption, and released into the mainstream. The effects can hardly be denied. Frankly, the fallout resulting from Beck's stupid irresponsibility has been stunning not because it was well deserved, but because it happened at all. That is how desensitized we have become to rhetoric and demagoguery that in times past would have been worthy of the strongest condemnation.
Neiwert's book is important in that it identifies a poisonous element in our public discourse that has not only been allowed to flourish by all of us, but has actually been encouraged by some really bad actors in the fields of media (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter), culture (Robertson, Falwell, Dobson), and from those in positions of political leadership (Lott, Tancredo, Palin). Once the source has been identified, it becomes the duty of every citizen, be they Republican or Democrat, to stamp out this infection wherever it rears its head in public life. Our very ability to preserve democracy depends on good citizens standing up for civility. That is precisely what ColorofChange.org has done.
It needs to be the beginning, not the end of the fight to restore the public square that hatemongers have stolen from us.
Update: Since this post was first published, the number of businesses that have pulled their ads down from Beck's show has grown to at least 50.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Difference Between Liz and Dad? Lipstick
"America needs a commander-in-chief, not a global community organizer."~Liz Cheney from a speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia
The French have a term that describes monstrous children; l'enfant terrible. But in the case of Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice President, one gets the feeling that in Dick Cheney's eyes, the more monstrous the child, the better. Indeed, the comment above and others uttered by the younger Cheney in defense of torture, sketchy wire taps, and the glories of Guantanamo, surely must warm the cockles of dad's heart. Or whatever Cheney has that passes for one.
Liz Cheney's fallacies are easy enough to dispatch. Left unsaid in her outrageous statement is the fact that if America has a President, then by definition she has a Commander-In-Chief. Someone please inform Liz that his name is Barack H. Obama. What Cheney is really signaling is her own preference regarding the style in which the office is handled.
Problem is, we've seen that style and its less than desirable results for the past eight years. The consensus among most intelligence agencies in the aftermath is that these policies have left us less safe. It stands to reason that if the American President is frequently the source of angry protests throughout the world, and in fact is often burned in effigy at such demonstrations, it does not bode well for our security. Conversely, when Germans waved hundreds of American flags when Barack Obama spoke in Berlin in 2008, I felt safer.
This apparently doesn't penetrate Cheney's one-dimensional (and aggressive) worldview. Thus, in interviews and panel discussions she continues to channel dear old dad by advocating the American President if you will, as a sort of "Global Community Destroyer." This was clearly one image of our country and its leader that the world, and more importantly the American voter recently rejected. But Cheney will not be deterred by the mere facts of an election.
She is fond of trumpeting the canard that the Bush administration "kept the country safe for eight years," conveniently omitting 2001, the year that they didn't. Remember, 3000 innocent Americans died on their watch. By that measure alone, Obama's doing a better job. And don't even get me started on the Bush/Cheney non-response to Hurricane Katrina.
Yet instead of feeling humbled or shamed by these failures, both Cheney's continue making the rounds demanding a respect that is hardly deserved, all the while impugning the patriotism of citizens and leaders who are doing a better job than did they in the field of foreign policy and diplomacy. So how does one wrap this up as politely and as succinctly as possible?
Liz Cheney is full of crap....Yeah, I think that works for me.
d.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Home Is Where The Heart Is
When my young family lived in the Dallas area during the early to mid-80's, I could only go three to four months at a time without feeling an urge, almost a positive obsession to see, of all things, pine trees! I spent half of my youth growing up amid the concrete, glass and steel of the metro-plex and the other half here among the rolling green hills and forests of East Texas. Perhaps because I was surrounded by these verdant woods when I was born, this is the place that I identify with most. It's home.
But home is not always the most welcoming of places if in your politics, your religion, and I suppose just in your overall view of reality itself, you tend toward the liberal outlook. In that sense, I would have to say that I don't fit the profile of a home grown East Texan. That said, I am absolutely committed to claiming my place at the table here at home.Somewhere along the way I escaped the insular mind-set so typical of East Texas, but I didn't escape, nor would I wish to escape, the natural beauty of this place. So "loving it or leaving it" is simply not an option here. No, I am absolutely inclined to stay and claim my rightful place as a native son, and raise my voice loud and clear and speak my piece. Furthermore, I would suggest that other liberal East Texans stand up and do the same. After all, what good is American free speech if Americans are too timid to use it.
Here in East Texas its common upon entering restaurants, book stores, doctor's waiting rooms, and coffee houses to find ubiquitous televisions tuned to FOX news. There is an unspoken assumption here that the public is OK with news that is so slanted to the right as to no longer deserve the title of "news." I have on occasion raised objections with businesses just to let them know that the "assumption" at least from my point of view was off base. I wonder how it might level the playing field of our public spaces if other liberals quietly, yet firmly spoke up.Believe it or not, I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 (I'm not proud of it, but there it is). At the time I was a fundamentalist Christian and I wholeheartedly bought into the idea making the rounds in those days that "Good Christians" voted Republican. Time has changed my view considerably. Now, after being a practicing Buddhist for some 24 years, I would find it quite difficult (if not impossible) to vote that way again.
But liberals who happen to be Christians obviously can
(and do) vote Democratic. Let's face it, the GOP did quite a number on religious people for a number of years by co-opting the Christian message in order to win elections. But ownership of the "Values Vote" has come into serious question in the wake of a rash of high-profile sex scandals of late, and the light being admitted into the room seems to be waking religious Democrats to the truth that they have (and have always had) values aplenty. I don't think we'll be falling for that one again, and that's good for liberals. It's good for America. As Linda Seger writes in her 2006 book "Jesus Rode A Donkey," no one has a corner on Christ.
We live in a place caught in a moment of transition between the rural values of a fading past, and the new exigencies of a fast paced global environment. The landscape features farmlands, antiquated water towers and derricks, as well as microwave towers and satellite dishes affixed to thousands of rooftops. We attend our various houses of worship on Sundays and spend our evenings surfing the web. Liberals have a stake in making our home welcoming and comfortable for everyone regardless of their particular set of values, opinions, and loyalties.Sure, East Texas will always bear the marks of the conservative values and families who settled and developed the land, but liberals have been here all along and have worked and contributed mightily as well. We should never accept second class status in our own home. Conservatives may outnumber us, but we liberals are free to speak our minds and to stand firmly on principle when it's called for. Know that, and live accordingly.
d.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Barack Obama, Social Democrat?
"I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement – the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same."~Barack Obama
Consider this: If Brian Coulter in his Longview News Journal July 25 column was correct in insistencing that President Barack H. Obama is a socialist, then in November 2008, the American people elevated a socialist to the highest office in the land. If you find such an odd scenario to be highly unlikely, I'm with you. If you believe, as does Coulter and others on the increasingly hysterical right, that Obama achieved the presidency by hiding his "socialism" under a cloak of deception and guile, then you come perilously close to being relegated to the conspiracy obsessed fringe that has variously labeled the President a "Stealth Muslim," a "Manchurian Candidate," or an "alien born," illegitimate usurper ensconced in the Oval Office. Let us know how that works out for you.
The socialist tag is not new, in fact its "sell by" date has long since passed. That train has left the station. Yet Coulter et al. cling to the fallacy with a desperation that defies all evidence to the contrary. The smear emerged with a vengeance during the 2008 campaign, along with other rather transparent attempts at "Swift-Boating" then candidate Obama. Their spectacular failure, aided in no small part by the ineptitude and down right silliness of the McCain/Palin ticket, was given resounding emphasis in the margin of the President's victory.
Also dragged out to make the rounds in Coulter's column are the fusty old campaign ghosts of William Ayers (another socialist out of the woodwork?) and ACORN. Again, if these failed PR stunts didn't seriously damage Obama back then, what could motivate their use now? Apparently it's the same type of fixation that drives those coteries of conspiracy which disbelieve that we landed men on the moon, that the government has been completely forthcoming about Area 51, or that Elvis has indeed "left the building."
It bears asking, how could John McCain, a respected long time Senator and war hero, lose the presidency (and our country) to a socialist? The answer is, he didn't. He lost to an American Democrat, no more socialist than Franklin D. Roosevelt, who enacted one of the most lasting, effective governmental programs in our history; Social Security. At the time of his administration, Roosevelt also endured specious accusations of fomenting a socialist dismantling of capitalism and the nation. Yet amazingly, here we are decades later, functioning as a capitalist society. To the extent we are locked, as Coulter writes, in an abysmal cycle of governmental growth, unemployment, and precipitously increasing debt, is it really feasible that in less than one year, Obama has caused all the chaos? Not very likely.
The non-existent governance of the previous administration still bears the lion's share of responsibility for our present plight. Recall that the bailout of the financial institutions was an idea that sprang Athena-like from the head of George W. Bush. And by the way, if Obama is so anti-capitalist, why did he endorse a plan spawned by the unquestionably capitalist Bush administration? Bush was so fixated on war and terrorism that he neglected to govern. The mess Obama inherited has been the driving force behind the more controversial (and necessary) of his policies, not a blind commitment to socialist ideology as Coulter persistently and wrongly claims.
I take exception to one comment from Coulter's column which really gets us to the crux of the matter: "That Obama could cherry pick attractive collectivist elements of the socialist platform and enact them never occurs to Anderson..." Wrong. In fact, that idea is not difficult to attribute to Obama at all. If an idea is attractive to Obama, I suspect it is so because he believes that it will ultimately help, not hurt the country. And the President has proven his openness to all solutions, and shown a remarkable penchant for synthesizing seemingly disparate ideas into fresh approaches. Like Bush, Coulter seems averse to "nuance." His deficiency in knowledge about the diversity of thought on the left is revealing, as is his projection onto the left of the same monolithic lockstep that characterizes the right.
If you must have a label for Obama's economic philosophy, it could more precisely be called, Social Democracy, which is a specific anti-socialist movement born out of the left's response to the ascendancy of Capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. In a Summer 2009 essay in DISSENT magazine, Columbia University associate Professor, Sheri Berman provides the proper placement of Obama's economic philosophy in historical terms. She writes that the success and resilience of Capitalism long after its emergence caused the left to split into three distinct camps. The first (and the first to fall in the face of Capitalism's success) was Leninism, which advocated the use of force to advance its economic/social model. Other leftists, uncomfortable with such violence, chose to keep to a democratic path.
It was a further schism in this second faction that would lead to the economic model that comes closest to Obama's ideas: Social Democracy. Unlike the other two factions of the left, represented by classic Marxism/Leninism and Democratic Socialists, the Social Democratic division believed in a compromise between the best of Capitalism and Socialism, and sought to reform the former rather than eagerly awaiting or even hastening its demise. The "Unheralded" battle between these factions of the left, Berman writes, is the great untold political story of the 20th Century.
Social Democracy, far from attempting to dismantle Capitalism, actually seeks both to strengthen and reform it. This has been in Berman's words, a process of "encouraging [economic] growth while at the same time protecting citizens from capitalism's negative consequences." In fact, the model has proved to be successful in Denmark and Sweden, and Berman believes American leftists should strive to emulate it.
Of course Coulter will concede none of this because it wouldn't advance and preserve his prejudices to do so. His all encompassing obsession seems to be the libeling and maligning of the executive. Meanwhile President Obama, and I might add we as Americans, have serious problems to face down and conquer. We must leave naysayers like Coulter to do what they do best, which is to complain rather than offer realistic solutions.
d.
Read Coulter's column in its entirety at: http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/07/25/07252009_forum_coulter.html
Consider this: If Brian Coulter in his Longview News Journal July 25 column was correct in insistencing that President Barack H. Obama is a socialist, then in November 2008, the American people elevated a socialist to the highest office in the land. If you find such an odd scenario to be highly unlikely, I'm with you. If you believe, as does Coulter and others on the increasingly hysterical right, that Obama achieved the presidency by hiding his "socialism" under a cloak of deception and guile, then you come perilously close to being relegated to the conspiracy obsessed fringe that has variously labeled the President a "Stealth Muslim," a "Manchurian Candidate," or an "alien born," illegitimate usurper ensconced in the Oval Office. Let us know how that works out for you.
The socialist tag is not new, in fact its "sell by" date has long since passed. That train has left the station. Yet Coulter et al. cling to the fallacy with a desperation that defies all evidence to the contrary. The smear emerged with a vengeance during the 2008 campaign, along with other rather transparent attempts at "Swift-Boating" then candidate Obama. Their spectacular failure, aided in no small part by the ineptitude and down right silliness of the McCain/Palin ticket, was given resounding emphasis in the margin of the President's victory.
Also dragged out to make the rounds in Coulter's column are the fusty old campaign ghosts of William Ayers (another socialist out of the woodwork?) and ACORN. Again, if these failed PR stunts didn't seriously damage Obama back then, what could motivate their use now? Apparently it's the same type of fixation that drives those coteries of conspiracy which disbelieve that we landed men on the moon, that the government has been completely forthcoming about Area 51, or that Elvis has indeed "left the building."
It bears asking, how could John McCain, a respected long time Senator and war hero, lose the presidency (and our country) to a socialist? The answer is, he didn't. He lost to an American Democrat, no more socialist than Franklin D. Roosevelt, who enacted one of the most lasting, effective governmental programs in our history; Social Security. At the time of his administration, Roosevelt also endured specious accusations of fomenting a socialist dismantling of capitalism and the nation. Yet amazingly, here we are decades later, functioning as a capitalist society. To the extent we are locked, as Coulter writes, in an abysmal cycle of governmental growth, unemployment, and precipitously increasing debt, is it really feasible that in less than one year, Obama has caused all the chaos? Not very likely.
The non-existent governance of the previous administration still bears the lion's share of responsibility for our present plight. Recall that the bailout of the financial institutions was an idea that sprang Athena-like from the head of George W. Bush. And by the way, if Obama is so anti-capitalist, why did he endorse a plan spawned by the unquestionably capitalist Bush administration? Bush was so fixated on war and terrorism that he neglected to govern. The mess Obama inherited has been the driving force behind the more controversial (and necessary) of his policies, not a blind commitment to socialist ideology as Coulter persistently and wrongly claims.
I take exception to one comment from Coulter's column which really gets us to the crux of the matter: "That Obama could cherry pick attractive collectivist elements of the socialist platform and enact them never occurs to Anderson..." Wrong. In fact, that idea is not difficult to attribute to Obama at all. If an idea is attractive to Obama, I suspect it is so because he believes that it will ultimately help, not hurt the country. And the President has proven his openness to all solutions, and shown a remarkable penchant for synthesizing seemingly disparate ideas into fresh approaches. Like Bush, Coulter seems averse to "nuance." His deficiency in knowledge about the diversity of thought on the left is revealing, as is his projection onto the left of the same monolithic lockstep that characterizes the right.
If you must have a label for Obama's economic philosophy, it could more precisely be called, Social Democracy, which is a specific anti-socialist movement born out of the left's response to the ascendancy of Capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. In a Summer 2009 essay in DISSENT magazine, Columbia University associate Professor, Sheri Berman provides the proper placement of Obama's economic philosophy in historical terms. She writes that the success and resilience of Capitalism long after its emergence caused the left to split into three distinct camps. The first (and the first to fall in the face of Capitalism's success) was Leninism, which advocated the use of force to advance its economic/social model. Other leftists, uncomfortable with such violence, chose to keep to a democratic path.
It was a further schism in this second faction that would lead to the economic model that comes closest to Obama's ideas: Social Democracy. Unlike the other two factions of the left, represented by classic Marxism/Leninism and Democratic Socialists, the Social Democratic division believed in a compromise between the best of Capitalism and Socialism, and sought to reform the former rather than eagerly awaiting or even hastening its demise. The "Unheralded" battle between these factions of the left, Berman writes, is the great untold political story of the 20th Century.
Social Democracy, far from attempting to dismantle Capitalism, actually seeks both to strengthen and reform it. This has been in Berman's words, a process of "encouraging [economic] growth while at the same time protecting citizens from capitalism's negative consequences." In fact, the model has proved to be successful in Denmark and Sweden, and Berman believes American leftists should strive to emulate it.
Of course Coulter will concede none of this because it wouldn't advance and preserve his prejudices to do so. His all encompassing obsession seems to be the libeling and maligning of the executive. Meanwhile President Obama, and I might add we as Americans, have serious problems to face down and conquer. We must leave naysayers like Coulter to do what they do best, which is to complain rather than offer realistic solutions.
d.
Read Coulter's column in its entirety at: http://www.news-journal.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2009/07/25/07252009_forum_coulter.html
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