"Tone down the rhetoric," the Left pleads- while brandishing a gun

When I wrote this entry on the movie The Death of a President, which I happened to see last week, I wasn't particularly thinking of the hypocritical Leftist attempts to somehow blame the Right for the lack of political civility which supposedly resulted in the recent massacre in Arizona. Imagine my surprise to discover that Leftist columnist David Corn- the man who, the day after conservative Robert Novak merely mentioned that Corn's friend Valerie Plame was " a CIA operative," actually became the first to publicly reveal that she was an undercover agent in the process of accusing Novak of having made that revelation- has had the unmitigated gall to suggest that the American Right is somehow more "extreme" than the American Left. Strident Leftist columnist Paul Krugman has written in much the same vein.

Corn- whose hysterical personal attacks on President Bush leave him little room to chide anyone for lack of civility- attempts to demonstrate his dubious premise by quoting an assortment of isolated and very unrepresentative people on the very, very far Right indeed- coupled with a very occasional example of incivility in an elected Republican official which, while regrettable, is no different than the kind of excessive rhetoric which politicians on both sides of the aisle have occasionally engaged in since the founding of the Republic.

Corn gets upset- and rightly so- when Republican members of Congress like Michelle Bachman suggest that their Democratic colleagues are somehow "anti-American." But such  rhetoric (comparaviively mild compared to some of the things Democratic members of Congress have said about President Bush), comes nowhere near being as universal as the Bush-hate was among Democrats and other "Progressives"during the last administration, and remains to this day.  Nor is it nearly as vitriolic.

Former Rep.Paul Kanjorski, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was defeated for re-election this year. He wrote a moving and very reasonable piece in the New York Times the other day calling for civility in the face of the Arizona shootings.

During the campaign, he had this to say about Florida's new Republican governor,  Rick Scott:

That Scott down there that's running for governor of Florida. Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and he's running for governor of Florida. He's a millionaire and a billionaire. He's no hero. He's a damn crook. It's just we don't prosecute big crooks.

I am willing to acknowledge that there are a great many people on my side of the aisle who are not only uncivil, but stone crazy. I am embarrassed by those who humiliate all of us on the Right by inane charges that President Obama was not born in America, is a Muslim, and so forth. And I am mortified by isolated nut jobs such as the ones Corn quotes as his contribution to the hypocritical efforts of Democrats and their allies to somehow turn the lack of civility in our national discourse into an issue that can somehow work for rather than against them.

But consider the following inane comment by Corn:

There is indeed over-the-top talk on the left. During the Bush years, far-left protesters at anti-war rallies referred to Bush and Dick Cheney as fascists. Conspiracy theorists on the left claimed the Bush-Cheney crew had started the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to enrich their pals in the oil and contracting industries. Some lefties (and righties) accused the president of having staged 9/11 -- or of allowing it to happen -- so he'd have a pretext for war. It was hateful stuff. But this rhetoric tended not to imply violence or insurrection. More to the point, such excessive rhetoric was not adopted and/or accepted by Democratic leaders

Mr. C, are you for real? John Kerry, for example, is not "a Democratic leader? How about that Florida Democratic official who called for Donald Rumsfeld to be physically assaulted?

Where were you during the years when Leftist commentators and Democratic leaders were routinely calling for physical violence against members of the Bush administration and leaders of the Republican Party- and sometimes the actual assassination of the President? For crying out loud, the rank-and-file still are calling for violence against Mr. Bush, Sarah Palin and other Republican leaders! 

Do you remember the public prayers for Rush Limbaugh's death when he was hospitalized a while back? Do you recall that in several Blue State venues, the announcement of Ronald Reagan's death was cheered?  Do you actually pay any attention to the rhetoric of your own people?

What truly concerns me about the rhetoric of the Left is not  the kind of nonsense Corn is talking about- or even for example, the  lies about Mr. Bush's National Guard record, discredited within days of first being spoken back in 2000 but repeated by Democratic politicians and even by their 2004 nominee for President for eight years even so. It's not the slanders Corn himself, among others, have aimed at Mr. Bush due to their malicious refusal to believe that Mr. Bush (and every intelligence agency in the world) could have been mistaken about the state of Saddam Hussein's WMD program, rather than intentionally deceptive. "Bush lied" has a nice ring to it, in a hysterical sort of way. But it won't  pass as a slightly more malicious version of  the the garbage espoused by the "Birthers or the other nut jobs on the Right whose crazy rhetoric Corn quotes. The malicious rhetoric about Bush  wasn't limited to the Democratic fringe.It was the stock in trade of pretty much the whole Democratic party.

It's not even the absurd whining about the allegedly "stolen" elections of 2000 and 2004, which  the Democrats lost fair and square- but as a group, and not merely in the case of extreme individuals, could summon neither the maturity nor the grace to accept in the absence of any credible evidence to support their whining. This cannot be stressed enough: the  rhetoric of petulance and hate was not merely indulged in by extremists in the Democratic party during the Bush years; not only was it precisely the bread-and-butter of Democratic officials and office holders, but at times, it seemed  to be virtually their party's entire program.

Nor is it even the near unanimity of the Left's ugly bile and malice- a commodity far, far more universal on the Left than it ever was on the Right- that disturbs me. True, at times  there's a specific kind of rhetoric which is particularly significant in light of the Arizona massacre- and which, whether Corn and Krugman and the rest see fit to acknowledge it or not, is predominantly to be found on the Left.

I hold no brief for the haters of either party, and I freely acknowledge the ugliness of the hate some feel toward President Obama. But it is nowhere near as universal or as consistently extreme among Republicans as the rhetoric you guys engaged in- and still engage in- not only toward Bush, but toward Republicans and conservatives generally. At least Corn had the grace to admit at the end of his regrettable piece that there is no evidence that the Arizona gunman was motivated by politics of either the Right or the Left. But surely even Corn and Krugman and the others can see that their own rhetoric in the face of precisely that admission is an appalling example of the malicious rhetoric at which the Left excells. It even tries to make conservatives responsible for an event they parenthetically admit cannot as yet even be linked to partisan politics of any kind!  

Corn claims that the hateful rhetoric of the Left toward President Bush was "not intended to imply violence of insurrection." I commend to him this article by Jay Nordlinger of the National Review. A brief exerpt:

Even before Bush was elected president, the kill-Bush talk and imagery started. When Governor Bush was delivering his 2000 convention speech, Craig Kilborn, a CBS talk-show host, showed him on the screen with the words “SNIPERS WANTED.” Six years later, Bill Maher, the comedian-pundit, was having a conversation with John Kerry. He asked the senator what he had gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry answered that he had taken her to Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” (New Hampshire is an early primary state, of course.) Kerry said, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” (This is the same Kerry who joked in 1988, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”) Also in 2006, the New York comptroller, Alan Hevesi, spoke to graduating students at Queens College. He said that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”


A columnist in Britain’s Guardian, Charlie Brooker, wrote, “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?” Betty Williams, the Irishwoman who won the Nobel Peace Prize, said, “I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence,’ because I don’t believe that I am non-violent. . . . Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.” A novelist, Nicholson Baker, was so filled with rage at Bush, he wrote a novel mulling the question of assassinating him. In Britain, there was a TV movie — a “fictional documentary” — that was a kind of fantasy: on the assassination of Bush. (It was called Death of a President.) Etc., etc.

I rented the video of that regrettable film out of curiosity. But only the most self-deceived can doubt for a moment that its attraction for the greater part of its audience is as an exercise in wish-fulfillment.

I know of no Republican member of Congress who has ever jokingly suggested that he should kill President Obama. John Kerry had the bad taste to joke about killing President Bush. The worst excesses of Rush Limbaugh have never involved suggesting, as an Air America radio radio personality once did, that it would be well for somebody to take Mr. Bush fishing and, while out on the boat with him, put a bullet into his brain ala Fredo Corleone. I am unaware of any Republican party official to ever suggest that any Obama administration official be physically beaten, as an official of the Democratic Party of Florida suggested be done with Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago.

I seriously doubt that when Sarah Palin- a hunter whose personal mage is wrapped up in the imagry of the great Alaskan outdoors and the culture of hunting- uses "lock and load" as a metaphor for girding one's loins for political battle, or even uses a symbolic target as a way of marking districts (including Rep. Giffords' district) which she is "targeting" in an election on a map, that many people- however crazy- are encouraged thereby to start shooting Democrats. On the other hand, had she (or someone else) come right out and said, in so many words, that Rep. Gifford should be assassinated, that would be another issue.But when Palin used the word "blood libel" to confront the lie that the rhetoric of the Right was somehow responsible for the Safeway massacre (even Corn admits that his motivations and even his politics are murky at this point), the nutroots responded as they are in a habit of doing.Within hours, Twitter was awash in suggestions that Palin be "assassinated" or "shot." And hey- I have never heard of a conservative film maker making a movie about the assassination of President Obama!

When it comes to the rhetoric of violence and assassination, Mr. Corn, we are discussing a phenomenon far more of the Left than of the Right. And on those occasions when it happens on the Right, it tends to be confined to a relatively few extremist nut cases.

The scary thing is not just that it seems to happen a great more on the Left. It's that even presidential nominees and political commentators seem to feel such little compunction about the popular Leftist game of calling for the murder of people they disagree with.

Yeah, it's often done "jokingly." But it isn't funny- and the side of the political aisle that does most of it has no business trying to blame the other side for whatever atmosphere of violence may be developing because of it.

Note that we're not talking about the exercise in Chicken Little rhetoric Democrats engaged in during the Tea Party demonstrations a while back, when they complained about violence and threats of physical harm by demonstrators which they were unable to document even in a single instance. Whining about being picked on by the "violent" Right is a standard tactic for the snarky Left. We're talking here about the very words of Democratic leaders and elected officials

Pots and kettles, to use the politically incorrect metaphor.

But Corn is right about one thing: it simply will not do to suggest that both sides are equally engaged in overtly homocidal rhetoric. Its predominance on the Left is overwhelming. Yes, I know all about that tiny minority of Tea Partiers who had gun-related innuendoes on their signs during the Washington demonstration- during which the  victim of the only documented case of actual violence against a member of Congress was conservative Republican Eric Cantor. And yes, I know about the militias.There is no shortage of really scary nut jobs on the fringes of conservatism.

But when actual threats of violence and appeals that their political opponents be killed- "joking" or not- come so disproportionately from Rush Limbaugh's equivalents on the Left, and from Democratic presidential nominees and party officials, any attempt to evade the obvious fact that the rhetoric of violence is far more pervasive on the Left than on the Right is simply disingenous.

And perhaps the scariest thing of all is that a columnist of David Corn's stature can be so out of touch with reality that he doesn't realize it- and in fact denies that his side even engages in such garbage.

Get a clue, Mr. C!