And let's not forget Eric Alterman:
Or Janeane Garofalo:
Joe Conason is on the left...
Posted on 10/15/2003 3:18:27 PM PDT by kattracks
Back in March of this year, way before Rush Limbaugh and ESPN, Esquire ran an interview with a liberal journalist – an interview that, outside the Internet, made only a few ripples.In the exchange with Esquire, Eric Alterman, who writes a column for the Nation, a far-left political magazine, charmingly told the interviewer, “I hate to say it, but I wish the guy [Rush Limbaugh] would have gone deaf.” Call me crazy, but when Alterman says, “I hate to say it,” I have the funny feeling that he really means “I love to say it.”
Anyway, it’s not just Rush Limbaugh that he’d like to see go away. It’s also all those hopelessly ordinary, not-too-smart Middle Americans who find Rush so interesting that Alterman has no use for, either. America, Alterman tells Esquire, “would be better without Rush Limbaugh and his 20 million listeners.”
The interview gives no clue as to whether Alterman wishes the 20 million Americans would also go deaf – or just drop off the face of the Earth. But we do learn that in Eric Alterman’s America there’s no place for Ann Coulter, either. “I debase myself every time I say her name,” he told Esquire.
At about the same time, he was telling the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t have to my house for dinner anyone who’s not pro-choice, pro-gun control … pro-campaign finance reform.”
If Eric Alterman (who later apologized for the shot at Limbaugh) were the only liberal who forgot how to be liberal, this would merely be amusing. But he’s not. He is part of a new kind of liberal: smart, well educated, articulate … but mostly angry – the kind that is doing far more harm to liberalism in America than Rush Limbaugh could ever do.
Once liberals were like John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. They were upbeat and enthusiastic – and mainstream. These days they’re more like Eric Alterman and Michael Moore and Al Franken. They’re closed-minded and nasty - and fringe.
Speaking of Mr. Franken, he’s got a new book out called "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them." As I understand it, I am one of the liars, along with the president of the United States, the vice president, Bill O’Reilly, the aforementioned Ms. Coulter and tons more. Joe Conason, a left-wing journalist in New York, also has a new book out, and his too is about a bunch of liars (again, of which I am one). But this one isn’t just about your run-of-the mill little lies; it’s about Big Lies.
Liberals are mad as hell these days, and they’re not going to take it anymore. A lot of them detest President Bush, whom they believe stole the election that put him in the White House. They despise Attorney General John Ashcroft, whom many are convinced is a bigger menace to America than Osama bin Laden.
They hate the fact that even though their ideological brothers and sisters control the editorial page of just about every big-city newspaper in the country, some Americans actually like to watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Janeane Garofalo, another angry voice of the new liberalism, has shed some darkness on the subject with these observations: “The Republican Party, their message and their politics of exclusion … appeals to the dumb and the mean. There is no shortage of dumb and mean people in this culture. ... The dumb and the mean find a nice home in the GOP.”
Just in case that’s not clear enough, she went on to say, “What you have now [are] people that are closet racists, misogynists, homophobes … identifying [themselves] as conservative.”
Ms. Garofalo is a tough act to follow, but I’ll give it a try: Here’s a word of caution for the Left: You’re driving a stake right through the heart of liberalism. You’re betraying everything liberals supposedly stand for.
Conservatives, basically, are about smaller government and lower taxes and individual responsibility. Liberals, on the other hand, are supposed to be about the free exchange of ideas, without the name-calling. Liberals are supposed to be the good ones, the smart ones, the sophisticated ones and mostly the better ones. I know this, of course, because my liberal friends keeping telling me how good and smart and sophisticated and better they are.
Too often we talk right past each other in our culture, and no one has clean hands on this one – not liberals or conservatives. Incivility is a two-way street. Still it seems to me that liberals – the very people who take such pride in seeing themselves as compassionate and open-minded – have, in a sad kind of way, become precisely what they have long accused conservatives of being: mean-spirited and closed-minded.
Which brings us back to Rush Limbaugh, who got into trouble with the P.C. police for suggesting the media were cheerleading for a quarterback because he’s black. Right or wrong, does that make him a member of the Klan? Well, yes it does, as far as some liberals are concerned. A cartoon in the Dayton (Ohio) News and reprinted in Newsweek shows a man in KKK regalia at the ESPN desk, the anchorman next to him saying, “That was Rush Limbaugh with his color commentary.” There were others just like it. Liberals should be embarrassed at this kind of vile, but the best I can figure, they’re not.
The fact is that liberals, more than anything else, need to remember how to be liberal - and not let the angry fringe hijack a philosophy that once, a long time ago, was something to be proud of.
Bernard Goldberg is the author of "Arrogance: Saving America From the Media Elite" (Warner Books) and "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" (Regnery).
No they don't. They have show trials with outrageous confessions of conspiracies against the State. Then they are taken out and shot.
"What we really need to do around here, is to shoot a few more intellectuals." - Nikita Kruchev.
Regards,
Wow! You absolutely nailed it! Thanks for the picture you so eloquently painted, even if the subject was ugly. And your personal page rocks too!
110 Million people murdered by the left last century, and Hollywood to the best of my knowledge hasn't touched the subject in a movie. Why do you suppose that is?
You're not alone. There are plenty here that would follow the same course of action. Myself included.
That's the reason that the Dimocrats will never succeed in taking America commie. Dimocrats are not willing to die for their stupid cause!
He has been snippy and all out of sorts…at Bush he's really p*ssed
Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist
He has had migraines and he has had cramps…oh, why must these pains persist
Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist
Out of control…he's an a-hole
He writes his B.S. in the Nation…Eric needs new medication
Down on his kneepads when Clinton would call…he'd say "If you insist"
Poor Eric Alterman needs a new gynecologist
Out of control…he's an a-hole
He writes his B.S. in the Nation…Eric needs new medication
Girly man Eric warns FReepers they'll get…a slap with his limp wrist
Poor Eric Alterman needs a…he's desperate and needs right away
A new gynecologist
"They despise Attorney General John Ashcroft, whom many are convinced is a bigger menace to America than Osama bin Laden."
"Liberals" are a greater danger to America than Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaida, and all America's foreign enemies combined, because they are the enablers.
So funny how liberals love to think of themselves as the smart ones. There are piles of smart liberals, but they're only smart enough to screw everything up. They're smart enough to question the old dogmas -- the ones that conservatives hang on to -- and to view them as retrograde, but they're not smart enough to understand why the old dogmas are good. This is because even simple-seeming dogmas are good for very complex reasons, more complex than even smart liberals understand.
Here's an analogy.
"Eat your vegetables: doing so will keep you healthy" is a time-honored piece of understanding about nutrition. Conservatives will accept this as true and live accordingly, even if many can't explain the science behind why eating vegetables has positive effects on the body -- the phytochemicals, the anti-oxidants, the effects on the endocrine system, the cumulative systemic effects of the enzymes, etc, etc..
A liberal will then come along and accuse the conservative of being dogmatic, stuck in the past, blockheaded, etc. Why, "eat your vegetables" is a simplistic relic of the past! We have progressed to new things -- multivitamins, beta-blockers, man-made insulin! We don't have to eat our vegetables any more because we have drugs and things that'll force the body to be healthy!
And he'll think he's smart. But he's really only smart enough to have caused complex new problems. The drug solution appears to be superior to the old "eat your vegetables" approach -- drugs work instantly and save you the labor of preparing vegetables and the drudgery of eating them -- but drugs have unintended side effects and ultimately they degrade and undermine the body. The catch is that onset of the side effects and the degradation may be delayed, or it may not be immediately evident that they are the result of eating pills rather than vegetables, and so the liberal will continue to believe in his wisdom.
This is where true intelligence and wisdom steps in -- the knowledgeable conservative. He knows that the old "eat your vegetables" approach lacks the instant gratification and appearance of progress that comes with drugs and vitamins, but he knows that, in the end, the discipline of eating your vegetables will be of the greatest benefit, that the good effects might be slow to manifest themselves but that they will be systemic and real, and that the most fundamental -- the most real -- requirements of the body will be satisfied. He understands that the body is massively complex, full of fragile interdependent chemical relationships and finely-tuned self-levelling feedback loops that rely on the presence of certain nutrients and compounds -- things that vegetables will supply but pills will not. In other words, the old "eat your vegetables" dogma is correct for very complex reasons.
The perfect real-life example of this is affirmative action. Joe Conservative says affirmative action is bad because it's a form of institutionalized descrimination, that, instead, all men should be equal before the law, that the government should be colorblind -- in other words, he posits the old dogmas. A liberal then comes along, tells Joe Conservative he's dumb or reactionary or whatever and that progress requires the government to force race relations in a certain direction, which means abandoning old notions of equal treatment under the law. He'll consider himself very clever for this. But the intelligent conservative will understand that there are all sorts of unintended negative consequences that come with using the coercive powers of government to change society's behavior, that the true solution is will be systemic and will require work and deep-seated changes in attitude and probably some risk-taking by the society itself, from within itself in order to fix itself -- i.e. that people will have to suck it up and learn to establish healthy relationships with each other -- i.e. that society will have to *eat its vegetables*. The reasons for problems in race relations are complex and deep and must be corrected with deep sytemic solutions, not government quick fixes which seem clever -- and which require that we jettison our traditional understanding of things -- but which really are pretty dumb.
< / odd ramble about vegetables >
It was SO working for me until I came to your last line. You see, I think it is possible for the American electorate to be duped. After all, they voted for Clinton (yes, and even Gray Davis) not once, but TWICE. We must be vigilant - because there is another Clinton on the horizon...and she's drooling, so intent is she to get back into a position of magnitude. American voters not co-dependent enough to elect her? I hope you're right....but I'm not convinced.
And let's not forget Eric Alterman:
Or Janeane Garofalo:
Joe Conason is on the left...
My sister reacted with considerable huffiness and offense at being called on her behavior and hung up on me. I have not heard from her since, and, frankly, it's feeling pretty nice. I rather wish I had called her out a long time ago (though my eventual reaction was based on one especially egregious lie on her part which I simply could not allow to stand).
I have noticed that people who lie all the time and insult other people (overwhelmingly liberals in my experience) mostly get away with it and really ARE insulted and angry when challenged. My sister, who has lied and manipulated successfully since childhood, is but one example.
LOL !
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