Demonic (6 page)

Why had liberals hated Bush again? A normal person, not under the sway of groupthink, would say U.S. presidents are different in important respects, in ways that can help or harm the nation—but not 180 degrees different. It’s not Jesus Christ vs. Josef Stalin. (Except in the case of Martin Van Buren, who may have been Stalin.)

Both Bush and Obama went to Ivy League schools, had traditional families with a wife and two girls, claimed to be Christians, said Islam is a religion of peace, kept Guantánamo open, killed civilians in the war on terrorism, bailed out banks, opposed gay marriage, and sought amnesty for illegal aliens. Their most readily apparent difference is that Obama knows how to pronounce “nuclear” correctly and Bush knows how to pronounce “Pakistan.”

Conservatives probably liked Reagan about 70 to 80 percent of the time, Bush 50 to 60 percent of the time, and Obama 5 to 10 percent of the time (admittedly, mostly when he continued the Bush policies he had campaigned against). With liberals it’s 100 percent burning hatred for Reagan and Bush and 100 percent adoration for Obama—which
briefly fell to 98 percent in 2010 when the Justin Bieber movie
Never Say Never
was released. If you ask the right liberal and he doesn’t have time to do the math in his head, he’ll tell you that his hatred for Reagan sometimes went up to 120 percent.

Only the mob mentality of the liberal explains such infantile, black-and-white thinking.

Indeed, anyone a liberal doesn’t care for will be compared to the worst monsters of history—as Bush was to Hitler. With no explanation whatsoever, the
Washington Post
’s Lonnae O’Neal Parker said award-winning author Shelby Steele, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, activist Ward Connerly, and journalist Armstrong Williams reminded her of the groveling slave, Fiddler, from the movie
Roots.
⁶⁴
She provided no quotes or positions from the beastly men to explain the resemblance; indeed, the bulk of the passage is about Parker’s sister straightening her hair and watching MTV.

There is a scene [in
Roots
] where kidnapped African Kunta Kinte won’t settle down in his chains. “Want me to give him a stripe or two, boss?” the old slave, Fiddler, asks his Master Reynolds.

“Do as I say, Fiddler,” Reynolds answers. “That’s all I expect from any of my niggers.”

“Oh, I love you, Massa Reynolds,” Fiddler tells him. And instantly, my mind draws political parallels. Ward Connerly, I think to myself. Armstrong Williams. Shelby Steele. Hyperbole, some might say. I say dead-on.

“Clarence Thomas,” I say to my Cousin Kim. And she just stares at me. She may be a little tender yet for racial metaphors. I see them everywhere.

Parker was so proud of this sparkling gem, she included it in her book, which—like the column—contains not another word about these horrid men, such as, for example, what she didn’t like about them.
⁶⁵
Parker was following Le Bon’s playbook for whipping up crowds: Use images, not words.

In the days before Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown won a Massachusetts special election to replace Teddy Kennedy, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann repeatedly raged that Brown was “an irresponsible,
homophobic, racist, reactionary, sexist, ex–nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

Three days earlier, Olbermann had never heard of Scott Brown. With the soul of an actress, Keith borrows other people’s opinions, adds the sanctimony and indignation, and delivers speeches in a deep baritone, wearing glasses so morons think he’s a genius. (For the huge segment of Keith’s audience that watched just to laugh at him, his firing was heartbreaking.)

NPR’s Nina Totenberg famously said of Republican senator Jesse Helms, “If there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.”
⁶⁶

We had important Democratic elected officials, Democratic contributors, and
Vanity Fair
writers calling Bush a Nazi; Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists calling him a devil; network anchors slandering him with dummied documents, and award-winning movies gleefully portraying his assassination. But liberals see a sign at a conservative rally depicting Obama as a monkey and act as if they’re staring into the eyes of Lee Harvey Oswald (who happened to be a communist, by the way).

There are other hard comparisons to be made. Conservatives don’t threaten to leave the country if a Democrat becomes president. Liberals do every four years. In 1992, Barbra Streisand said she’d leave if the first George Bush were reelected and then, in 2000, with stunning originality, a whole slew of liberals made the same threat if Bush’s son were elected—director Robert Altman, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Alec Baldwin (as quoted by his then-wife), and Kennedy press secretary/ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger.
⁶⁷
In 2008, Susan Sarandon said she’d leave if McCain won. The only one to ever leave was Salinger, who was merely moving back to France, though some believe he left out of embarrassment after falling for the Internet hoax that TWA flight 800 had been downed by the U.S. Navy.
⁶⁸

True, these are mostly just actors—except Barbra Streisand, who was a key Gore policy adviser. (In 2000, Streisand told
TV Guide
that Gore had “called me from Air Force One” for advice, but “I couldn’t take the call. I was in the middle of something.”
⁶⁹
Just as soon as she learns how to spell “Iraq,” she’ll be getting calls from Obama.)
⁷⁰
But the Democrats
certainly don’t dismiss them as mere actors. Hollywood celebrities tour with Democratic candidates, headline their fundraisers, record robo-calls, and donate millions of campaign dollars to their campaigns.

The Left’s “blind submission” to their leaders and “inability to discuss” their beliefs—consistent with Le Bon’s characterization of mobs—leads to one of their most peculiar debate gambits: the appeal to authority. They will cite a prominent conservative’s liberal position on the odd issue and brandish it as if that ends the argument. Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens! William F. Buckley supported legalizing pot! Goldwater supported abortion! Case closed, QED, let’s all go home.

Conservatives are always left dumbfounded at the triumphalism of such nonarguments. We like Republicans, we liked many things about Buckley, Reagan, and Goldwater. They’re not God. Not even Reagan.

Only liberals use the sarcastic line “last time I checked” so-and-so is “not a socialist”—as if it matters.

Obama pitched his government takeover of health care by saying Bob Dole and Bill Frist supported it and—“last time I checked they’re not socialist.”
⁷¹
Democratic congressman Gerald Connolly thought he made a devastating point at a hearing on Obama’s failed economic policies by saying, “By the way, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve bank chairman here in the United States, announced to us last week at a luncheon that he believes the stimulus here is working—and not a wild-eyed liberal, last time I checked.”
⁷²
And Democratic strategist Alicia Menendez thought she had cornered O’Reilly when she responded to his question about government spending to the point of nearly bankrupting states like California by saying, “The last time I checked, California had a Republican governor.”
⁷³

There are, of course, great men who change the course of history and seem to have the spirit of the divine working through them. Most of our founding fathers are among them. Reagan is among them. We honor them. We view their service with reverence. We don’t have sex dreams about them. We’re not a mob.

THREE
CONTRADICTIONS:

YOU CAN LEAD A MOB TO
WATER, BUT YOU CAN’T
MAKE IT THINK

L
iberals’ renowned indisposition to analogies is another classic example of mob thinking. Where normal people see blinding contradictions, liberals see only placid consistency. Le Bon explains that mobs are perfectly capable of holding completely contradictory ideas at the same time because according to circumstances, “a crowd will come under the influence of one of the various ideas stored up in its understanding, and is capable, in consequence, of committing the most dissimilar acts. Its complete lack of critical spirit does not allow of its perceiving these contradictions.”
¹

Only the Democratic Party could contain a senator who killed a girl at Chappaquiddick—and then spent the rest of his career digging into other people’s pasts.

Only the Democratic Party could lyingly claim credit for the Civil Rights Act—supported by more Republicans than Democrats—while having a former Klansman as their senior senator.

Only the Democratic Party could produce a string of presidential candidates who oppose school choice and vouchers while sending their own children to lily-white private schools.

Only the Democratic Party could hysterically denounce a Supreme Court nominee for allegedly making unwanted sexual advances in the workplace and then applaud a president who was receiving oral sex from a White House intern while discussing deploying American troops with a congressman on the phone. Indeed, only the Democrats could oppose Clarence Thomas, actually block Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg (for marijuana use), and then run Bill Clinton for president.

Only the Democratic Party could produce a junior senator from New York who denounced George Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence as “cronyism”—just six years after her husband, Bill, sold a pardon on his way out of office to Marc Rich.
²

Only liberals could sponsor college speech codes but say that anyone who doesn’t want to subsidize
Piss Christ
hates free speech.

Only liberals could love George Soros—convicted of felony insider trading in France
³
—Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett while claiming to detest Wall Street and “the rich.”

Only liberals could tolerate a windbag like Al Gore lecturing the rest of us about our carbon footprints while he flies his private jet from energy-guzzling mansion to energy-guzzling mansion—just one of which consumes 20 times the energy of the average American home.
⁴

(The alleged myth-busting site
Snopes.com
claims that that estimate on Gore’s house gives only a “mixture” of truth, because Gore’s Tennessee mansion actually uses—I quote—“more than 12 times the average for a typical household in that area.” Ah! We stand corrected! And how much more compared with the Pentagon? Can’t he move? Wouldn’t you move if you thought you were murdering the Earth with your insatiable energy demands?)

“Liberal” is the definition of people who can’t grasp if/then forms of logic.

Immediately after Jared Loughner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Americans were lectured on civility by the likes of Keith “the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party”
⁵
Olbermann.

But the media turned to one man more than any other to discuss how rhetoric can lead to violence: Al Sharpton—someone whose rhetoric actually had inspired violent mobs. In the immediate aftermath of
the shooting, Sharpton was interviewed on NBC’s
Meet the Press
, on National Public Radio, on CNN, and repeatedly on MSNBC. The
Washington Post
ran an op-ed on the shootings by Sharpton.

It was an in-your-face move for the media to turn to Sharpton for counsel as they were blaming “rhetoric” for the Arizona shootings.
That’s right, we’re going to have Al Sharpton on to discuss ugly rhetoric that can lead to violence. Do something about it
.

From 1987 to 1988, Sharpton was libeling innocent men in the Tawana Brawley hoax, falsely accusing them of a sickening rape. A long and expensive grand jury investigation determined that the entire case was a hoax. New York attorney general Robert Abrams concluded that Sharpton had engaged in “abominable behavior, deplorable, disgraceful, reprehensible, irresponsible.”

A few years later, in 1990, all was calm at the trial of the Central Park jogger’s rapists—except, according to the
New York Times
, when Al Sharpton arrived.
⁶
Saying the proceedings were “just like the old Scottsboro boys case,”
⁷
he even brought hoax perpetrator Brawley to the trial. He said she was there to “observe how differently a white victim was treated and how the accused in this case have been mishandled a lot differently from the people she [Brawley] accused.”
⁸

The stunt with Brawley, the London
Guardian
reported, turned the Central Park rape trial into a “racial showdown.” Venomous mobs outside the courtroom destroyed television equipment and punched cameramen and reporters. Those who tried to argue with the protesters got their faces smashed. The Sharpton supporters chanted, “The jogger’s a whore!” “Slut!” “The jogger’s a drug addict!” “The jogger’s an actress!” “Lynch the boyfriend!” “Lynch all her boyfriends!”
⁹
When the frail, off-balance jogger showed up at court one day to testify, the mob chased her van to continue hurling abuse at her.

In the courtroom, Sharpton’s supporters jeered and cackled at defense witnesses and screamed “Liar!” at the prosecutor.
¹⁰
Only when Sharpton was absent for a few weeks on account of his own trial for fraud and larceny was the courthouse calm, according to the
Times
, with spectators consisting mostly of “young college and law students and four rows of reporters.”
¹¹