More chutzpah from the MSM
I've blogged before about chuzpah- that marvelous Yiddish word classically definied as "that quality exhibited by a man who murders both of his parents, and then pleads for mercy on the ground that he's an orphan."
"Chutzpah" is very much a characteristic of the anti-Bush Left. For six years- unable to mount a coherent case against him on the issues, and frustrated beyond measure by that inability- the President's opponents have engaged in name-calling, personal attacks, insults about his personal appearance and intelligence (in spite of his having had better grades in college than the man he defeated in 2000, and a higher IQ, as indicated by military tests, than the man he defeated in 2004) outright lies about his military record (after witnesses came forward to remove all doubt about his National Guard service, the claims that he'd been AWOL continued to be repeated, and even alluded to by John Kerry himself), and outright slander of every description. The members of his administration have been subjected to the same barrage of non-stop garbage, though in less concentrated form.
It hasn't been about disagreement with the President, or opposition to his policies. It's been about sheer, unadulterated, raw, ugly, and highly personal hate.
When not engaging in slander, personal attacks, and character assassination, the Left and its more outspoken supporters in the MSM have whined that the President and Karl Rove are mean to people.
Amazing.
And now, Joe Conason dares write this.
Chutzpah. Sheer, unadulterated chutzpah.
HT: Real Clear Politics
"Chutzpah" is very much a characteristic of the anti-Bush Left. For six years- unable to mount a coherent case against him on the issues, and frustrated beyond measure by that inability- the President's opponents have engaged in name-calling, personal attacks, insults about his personal appearance and intelligence (in spite of his having had better grades in college than the man he defeated in 2000, and a higher IQ, as indicated by military tests, than the man he defeated in 2004) outright lies about his military record (after witnesses came forward to remove all doubt about his National Guard service, the claims that he'd been AWOL continued to be repeated, and even alluded to by John Kerry himself), and outright slander of every description. The members of his administration have been subjected to the same barrage of non-stop garbage, though in less concentrated form.
It hasn't been about disagreement with the President, or opposition to his policies. It's been about sheer, unadulterated, raw, ugly, and highly personal hate.
When not engaging in slander, personal attacks, and character assassination, the Left and its more outspoken supporters in the MSM have whined that the President and Karl Rove are mean to people.
Amazing.
And now, Joe Conason dares write this.
Chutzpah. Sheer, unadulterated chutzpah.
HT: Real Clear Politics
Comments
I have to ask if you've paid attention to any of the Left's qualms with Bush besides the obviously small-minded ones, which are not coincidentally the least credible. Believe it or not, there is more to our hatred (yes, unfortunately it is hatred) than his stupid looks and "Bushisms."
Not to say that I necessarily would have agreed with most of the criticisms of Bush. This blog records my opinions on most of them. And I have a strong hunch that I would turn out to regard many of the objections you regard as substantial as being rather small-minded as well.
But this is the second consecutive administration whose opponents have personalized their opposition, and hated rather than opposed. It's not a healthy thing, no matter who's doing the hating. And the ugliness has effectively prevented your criticisms of the President's policies from even being heard. I'm personally convinced that it was the bile from the other side that, more than anything else, got him re-elected.
Here's to the day we can debate policy instead of insulting one another, eh?
Thanks for stopping by.
But it is exemplified most in the way Bush and co. react to opposing views: with accusations of treason and sympathy for terrorists. This goes above and beyond anything that happened during Clinton -- and it shows contempt for the American people's ability to decide for themselves.
Criticism of Bush's overreaching, arrogance and law-breaking are not at all small-minded, they are in the interest of this country remaining the paradigm of liberty that it once was. Thanks to Bush, we can now embrace torture, illegal pre-emptive war, fiscal disaster and a long list of other very much un-American practices as everyday U.S. policy.
Bush has broken the law. Repeatedly. And when he hasn't broken it, he's dodged it with signing statements. Whether you agree with his ideology and vision for this country or not, there is nothing small-minded about expecting our leaders to behave as leaders and holding them accountable.
Your assertion of a "strong hunch" that you would regard my objections as substantial shows that you are not at all familiar with any of the left's qualms. If you're willing to get out of your comfort zone a bit, give it a try. If you're just looking to have your views reinforced, don't. But if you choose the latter, don't pretend you understand the substance of our malaise enough to discredit it.
My reference to my "strong hunch," first of all, was meant to politely leave room for the unlikely possibility that you might yourself have been available to offer a coherent alternative to the complaints and ravings about Mr. Bush which the Left has been spouting so loudly that nobody could possibly be ignorant of them- "qualms," as you oddly put it, which I find almost completely without merit. You are free to access the archives of this blog for more than two years of details. Kind of an arrogant assumption on your part, don't you think?
Certainly revealing classified secrets in time of war and going beyond criticism of policy to giving aid and comfort to the enemy is indeed disloyal, and may at times well- under the relatively narrow definition of the term deliberately given by the Constitution- have been treasonous. Accurately putting the case instead of viewing these matters through the lenses of ideological extremism which assumes at the outset that America is to blame for everything that is wrong in the world does not show contempt for the American people or their ability to decide; quite the opposite. Nor has the President by any means accused all who oppose the war, or even most of them, of treason.
I guess you guys just can't help yourselves. No substance; just hate and slander.
"Overreaching, arrogance and lawbreaking" are characterizations by you of actions you happen to disagree with. Bush has not, in fact, broken the law- though I agree that hysterical claims to the contrary from extremists on your side of the aisle are routine. You have, after all- as I said earlier- little else, however thoroughly you may have convinced yourself that your slander and name calling are substantial arguments.
Your own lack of objectivity is shown by your contining to speak of torture even after it has been banned with the President's consent. Before that, in continuing the policy with regard to torture which has de facto been the policy of the United States under presidents of both parties from time immemorial, the President did nothing new.
Nor is enforcing the terms of the armistace which ended the First Gulf War in any sense "preemptive." Those terms required Saddam Hussein to destroy the WMD's he admitted having and even catalogued under UN supervision within ninety days. The invasion more than a decade later. He still hadn't complied.
In the meantime, the UN Security Council passed no fewer than seventeen resolutions calling upon him, not to let Hans Blix conduct a scavenger hunt (which was no part of his brief), but once again to destroy the WMD's he had cataloged under Blix's supervision. He never did. Instead, he kicked the inspectors out of the country for an entire year. Not even that moved that most impotent of organizations to take decisive action against him.
We've been finding caches of those WMD's ever since. That the MSM doesn't report the news doesn't change that fact. And yes, these are the very WMD's- the ones from 1991- which the
treaty which ended the First Gulf War required he destroy under UN supervision. So you see, you don't even have to get to those new WMD's every intelligence agency in the world said he was accumulating (and he probably was; the evidence is that he shipped them out of the country in the weeks leading up to the invasion) to make the case. And no law binding upon the United States was violated by the invasion.
Fiscal disaster? The economy is booming. It's part of the hallucination the Left lives in that it's never been able to admit that. The deficit is the result of the necessity, in the wake of 9/11, of remedying the utter ruin our military, intelligence and homeland security capacities had fallen into under Bill Clinton.
It is indeed small-minded to hysterically speak of lawbreaking where there has been none, and to become so overcome with one's own overheated rhetoric that one mistakes it for substance.Your "malaise" is self-discredited, originating pretty close to entirely from an excess of partisan hot air and ill founded malice. And how, in any case, can anyone who lives in this country have missed the ad nauseum recitation of your "grievences?" What they lack in coherence and factuality they more than make up for in ubiquity. All one has to do is to watch the network news to have your "qualms" laid out in all their distorted, partisan, and factually inaccurate glory.
Please don't blame me for your lack of a coherent case to justify your own umbrage, for the zany, extremist assumptions which cause you to imagine that you have such a case to make- or for your own inability to distingish slander and ridicule arising from the personal hatred you yourself admit for arguments of any real substance. And have the courage to accept responsibility for your own side's incoherence. Believe me, nobody could have missed your arguments; it's just that for the most part they're either malicious lies or honest delusions based on an irrational world view.
Keep looking.
Spent four years in sem being inundated with them, actually. Played a key role in my ceasing to be one of those who held them. And, as I say, your friends in the MSM make sure that none of us can avoid being exposed to them.
Keep trying to come up with a few more of them that can bear logical scrutiny.