Demonic (5 page)

Reagan’s Arms-Control Dream Is Nightmare for Conservatives

—Washington Post
, November 30, 1987

There would never be such unremitting criticism of Kennedy or Clinton—to say nothing of the angel Obama—from the Democratic base.

By September of Reagan’s first year of office, he was not even the most popular conservative in the country. According to a poll by the
Conservative Digest
of more than a thousand of its readers, the Reverend Jerry Falwell was No. 1 and William F. Buckley was No. 2. Then Reagan.
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By contrast, in Obama’s first year in office, he was consistently voted the most popular human on the planet. Even before becoming president, Obama was showered with awards. He won not one but two “Best Spoken Word Album” Grammy awards for his audiobooks,
Dreams from My
Father
(2006) and
The Audacity of Hope
(2008). (He then gave the least profanity-laced acceptance speech of any African-American Grammy winner in history.)

His concession speech after the New Hampshire primary was turned into a music video, which won an Emmy Award. In 2008, the Obama yard sign/bumper sticker became a status symbol accessory like a Prius, solar panels on your house, or an adopted Malawian baby.

Throughout 2009, headlines incessantly announced, “Obama by Far the Most Popular Political Leader in Europe and U.S.; No Other Head of Government Comes Close.” Liberals around the globe worshipped Obama, and suddenly America became the most admired country in the world, jumping six places to do so.
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Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize based on his first twelve days in office.

Like a first-time bestselling author obsessively checking Amazon rankings, liberals were transfixed by Obama’s sky-high popularity, commissioning poll after poll on the subject in February, April, May, and December of 2009. The last such poll taken seems to have come in April 2010, when Obama’s worldwide popularity began to sink. At home in the United States, the Dalai Lama beat Obama, who merely tied with Hillary Clinton at 57 percent. And so the poll was taken no more.
⁴⁰

Also during his first year in office, Obama was named “the sexiest politician in the world” by
OnePoll.com
.
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His wife Michelle was named one of the “100 Sexiest Women on the Planet” by
Maxim
magazine, which called her “the hottest First Lady in the history of these United States.” Obama was the runaway winner of Gallup News’s Most Admired Man poll in both 2008 and 2009.
⁴²
He came in fifth in
Jockey International
’s “Celebrity Dad Most Women Want to See in Their Undies” list, just behind Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Jackman, and Will Smith.
⁴³

Obama was more popular than Justin Bieber (and for my money, a hundred times dreamier!).

A few years into Obama’s failed presidency, liberals were still besotted.
Washington Post
readers got this crucial update in the October 12, 2010, edition: “The moment was vintage Obama—emphasizing his zest for inquiry, his personal involvement, his willingness to make the tough call, his search for middle ground. If an Obama brand exists, it
is his image as a probing, cerebral President conducting an exhaustive analysis of the issues so that the best ideas can emerge, and triumph.”
⁴⁴

Who knows what issue was being probed, what zestful inquiry instigated, or what tough call being made. For all we know, he was deciding which flavor ice cream to order during the next geopolitical crisis. The point was: Obama was a dreamboat.

The Left’s passionate adoration of President Obama—and Clinton, FDR, JFK, Hillary, Teddy Kennedy, and on and on—are the primitive emotions of a mob. These are sentiments generally associated with women, children, and savages, according to Le Bon. It’s not an accident that when Republicans of all stripes—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Christine O’Donnell—choose an epithet for Democrats, it’s to call them women. Everyone sees it: Democrats are a mob.

The flip side of liberals turning their own leaders into icons is that they also “consider as enemies all by whom [their dogmas] are not accepted.”
⁴⁵

Being a successful president, Reagan was detested by liberals. There were mob protests throughout Reagan’s presidency in all the usual hotspots—Germany, Spain, Italy, London, New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Madison. Month after month, filthy wastrels hurled paint and projectiles at police, smashed windows, burned Reagan in effigy, and vandalized military bases—pausing occasionally for a round of “We Are the World.”

Forget that liberal mobs are always on the wrong side—protesting, for example, Reagan’s bombing of poor, innocent Libya in retaliation for Moammar Khadafy’s murdering U.S. servicemen. One does not see conservatives out smashing windows, throwing rocks, or vandalizing buildings even in support of a good cause—such as bombing Khadafy.

Decades later, liberals would force one another to retract the mildest praise of Reagan. During the 2008 presidential campaign, for example, Obama cited Reagan’s “clarity” and “optimism,” and liberals reacted as if he had praised Hitler. Hillary instantly launched TV and radio ads accusing Obama of actually
liking
Reagan.

Obama was soon forced to deny that he had ever had any warm
thoughts whatsoever about Reagan. “What I said,” Obama bleated during a Democrat debate, “is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to.… I spent a lifetime fighting, a lifetime against Ronald Reagan’s policies.”

Meanwhile, Republicans issue constant, nauseating praise for FDR and Kennedy.

Depending on who’s in the White House, the enemy of the liberal mob is either the president or the people. Americans are either enlightened truth-seekers or racist, paranoid haters. “Dissent is patriotic” only when a Republican is president, and we must have “respect for the office” only when a Democrat is president.

After promising to unite us—following the horror of the Reagan years—President Bill Clinton blamed conservative talk radio for Timothy McVeigh.

When Clinton was caught ejaculating on interns, the First Lady of the United States responded by going on the
Today
show and claiming there was “this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
Newsweek
’s Jonathan Alter called Ken Starr and his assistants “sheet sniffing prosecutors,”
⁴⁶
and Geraldo Rivera called Starr an “investigative terrorist.”
⁴⁷
Margaret Carlson compared Clinton’s impeachment to the legal system in Saudi Arabia.

As the Senate began Clinton’s impeachment trial, Ellen Mendel of Manhattan matter-of-factly told the
New York Times
that she felt “the same despair that she did as a girl in Nazi Germany when the efforts of a stubborn group of leaders snowballed, crushing the will of the people.” (Clinton never got even 50 percent of the country to vote for him.) It was clear, she said, “that the bulldozing campaign by the Republicans will not end.”
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But as soon as George W. Bush became president, the only threat to the republic came from the White House itself. Every White House employee was an evil genius, knee-deep in dark conspiracies and cabals. Bush was the target of almost unimaginable calumnies—the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for people who disable detectors on
airplanes. Liberals were more sympathetic to Islamic terrorists than they were toward President Bush.

As Le Bon says, “A commencement of antipathy or disapprobation, which in the case of an isolated individual would not gain strength, becomes at once furious hatred in the case of an individual in a crowd.”
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Little did Le Bon know he was the first to discover “Bush Derangement Syndrome”!

Out of a cast of thousands, liberal financier and convicted felon
⁵⁰
George Soros, former vice president Al Gore, and
Vanity Fair
’s James Wolcott compared Bush to a Nazi. In the case of Soros, it was unclear if this was meant as a compliment; Soros had helped the Nazis identify Jewish homes in his native Hungary as a boy.
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(Hey, we all have to start somewhere. I was on the safety patrol at school when I was a little girl.)

Bookstores overflowed with anti-Bush books. The paper alone destroyed so many trees that Sting’s musical career was extended a full decade. A novel released in 2004 advocated the assassination of President Bush “for the good of humankind.” A mock documentary depicted President Bush’s assassination as a news event—and went on to win the International Critics Prize at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival (not to mention “Best Date Movie of 2006” by
The Nation
magazine).

Bush was heartily disapproved of by the world’s most fiendish tyrants—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, and Air America’s Janeane Garofalo.

Bush was called a “miserable failure” by Democratic congressman Dick Gephardt, a guy who ran for president two times without anyone noticing. Journalist Helen Thomas said Bush was “the worst President ever … the worst President in all of American history.”
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Forgotten 1950s calypso singer Harry Belafonte—not Louis Farrakhan, I mean the other forgotten 1950s calypso singer who hates America—called Bush “the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world.”
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Time
magazine’s Joe Klein said Bush’s foreign policy was one of “arrogance” and his domestic policy “cynical, myopic and cruel.”
⁵⁴
Washington Post
columnist William Raspberry, whose last name means “a rude sound effect made with the mouth to mimic a bodily function, used to express disapproval,” called Bush “a devil.”
⁵⁵

With critics like these, no wonder Bush was elected president of the United States twice.

After the
Washington Post
’s Dana Priest abetted America’s enemies by disclosing the government’s top-secret rendition program—for which she would win a Pulitzer Prize—NPR’s Nina Totenberg said of Bush’s rendition program, “It is the first time in my life I have been ashamed of my country.”
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Liberals spent a lot of time being ashamed of their country under George Bush, even when it later turned out the rendition program was started under President Clinton.
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CBS’s Dan Rather attacked a sitting president on the eve of his reelection with forged documents he used to accuse President Bush of shirking his National Guard duty. When the documents were exposed as phony, Rather attacked the bloggers who exposed the fraud as “powerful and extremely well-financed forces” who decided to “attack” him and destroy his “credibility.”
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Dissent was patriotic, but dissent from CBS News was not.

At a performance on the eve of Obama’s inauguration, hip-hop artist Young Jeezy shouted out, to huge cheers, “I wanna thank two people, I wanna thank the mother f**ker overseas that threw two shoes at George Bush and I wanna thank—and listen, listen—and I wanna thank the mother f**kers who helped dem move their sh*t up out of the White House. Keep it moving bitch because my president is mother f**king black, nigga!” Cheers and applause.
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And thus Obama ushered in a new era of attacking Americans who opposed the president and concluded the era of dissent being patriotic. Overnight, the soi-disant “adversary press” switched from being the people’s watchdogs to the government’s guard dogs. (Except at MSNBC, where they became the government’s lapdogs.)

Opponents of Obama’s health care nationalization were automatically deemed racists, thugs, and lunatics. CNN called them “teabaggers”—a crass sexual reference—as did Democratic senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), who also called Obama’s critics “birthers.”
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Senator Chuck Schumer called then–Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right teabagger.”
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(Ironically, liberals love actual, sodomitic teabagging, but use the term derisively when talking about ordinary Americans protesting a Democratic president’s policies.) Nancy Pelosi called opponents
of ObamaCare “Un-American”—and, again, this could have been a compliment. Speaking of “Un-American,” Harry Reid called them “evil-mongers.” Jimmy Carter said an “overwhelming portion” of the people opposed to Obama’s health care plan were racists.
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(And if there’s one guy who’s got his finger on the pulse of what the American people are thinking and feeling, it’s Jimmy Carter.)

The last time I heard this much race-baiting and crass invective I was … in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago listening to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

As a special bonus, mainstream pop culture—timeless classics such as
Law & Order
—portrayed Tea Party people as extremely angry, clearly dangerous, secession-leaning nutters who had the air of the Aryan Nation about them and talked like they were in the old movie
Sergeant York
. (“Ain’t that some kind of foreign name? We don’t cotton to feriners ’round here!”) When Republicans swept Congress in the 2010 midterm congressional elections, MIT professor Noam Chomsky said, “The latest election, a couple of days ago, you could almost interpret it as a kind of death knell for the species.”
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