Perpetual Negativity

The Kerry campaign has repeatedly refused to release a transcript of a fundraiser it conducted among Hollywood stars in New York City last month, after attendees reportedly called President Bush a "cheap thug who sacrifices our young," "a liar" and "a killer." Michael Moore further fueled left-wing rage with Fahrenheit 9/11, and protests outside the Republican Convention later this month are expected to air a good deal of liberal dirty laundry.

In the March 2001 issue of TAE, Balancing Act, Blake Hurst reflects on similar outbursts from the left during the 2000 election.

Left-wing Trash Talk: A reply from America's hated heartland
By Blake Hurst

I’m stupid, and if you’re reading this, you probably are too. Chicago Sun-Times columnist William O’Rourke has named the great center of America—the part represented in red on all of the TV maps of the recent election that, like my fellow Missourians, voted for Bush—as the Yahoo Nation. O’Rourke describes the heartland as “primarily the Deep South and the vast lowly populated upper-far-west states that are filled with vestiges of gun-loving, Ku Klux Klan sponsoring, formerly lynching-happy, survivalist-minded hate-crime perpetuating, non-blue-blooded, rugged individualists.” He goes on to say that, except for disputed Florida, “not one major city, nor primary center of creative and intellectual density” voted for Bush, who “will not have won one center of the thinking America.”

Slate examined the intellectual heft of the candidates in the recent election, and found George W. Bush wanting, but the magazine wasn’t content to let the matter rest there. In fact, according to presidential historian William Leuchtenburg, quoted in another article in Slate on the same subject, the last time the Republicans ran a candidate who could compare intellectually to the Democrats’ standard-bearer was 1928.

Gore admirer and New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz has his own doubts about our President’s intellect and ended a recent column by calling George W. the village idiot. Since Bush’s SAT scores ranked him at about the 97th percentile of the nation when he took the test, it’s clear to anyone not on the most snobbish fringes of the Left that Bush’s brainpower is clearly up to the task of being President. If the intellectual Left believes we ought to elect a left-winger with a genius I.Q., then why not make the Unabomber President for Life and be done with it?

Not to be outdone, columnist Paul Begala has also weighed in on the states that voted for Bush. In a famous rant he now claims was taken “out of context,” Begala writes, “You see the state where James Byrd was lynched-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart—it’s red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay—it’s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees: red. The state where an army private thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they’re all red too.”

So, not only am I stupid, but I’m bigoted, and probably have a chain in the back of my pickup truck. Actually, I do, but only to pull city folks out of snow banks. I guess that explains why Al Gore always talks so slow—he wants to make sure I can keep up.

But both Begala and O’Rourke are clearly on to something. The 2000 election was one in which the best predictor of your vote was not your income, or your sex, or your occupation, but your zip code. Not that most Bush voters can remember their zip code, but I have mine written down, along with my kids’ names, my wife’s birthday, and short, concise directions to the nearest Klan klavern.

This condescending attitude toward the middle of the country is not new, but it’s never been quite as pronounced as it is now. Begala and O’Rourke are so over the top it’s hard to take them seriously, but they are not alone. One New York Times columnist was appalled that the Florida Agricultural Director was on the election commission for the state. She didn’t elaborate, but one can only assume that New Yorkers don’t hold farmers’ intellects in high regard. When a Florida judge decided against the Gore campaign, the correspondent covering the story on Fox News—which is normally better than this—pointed out that the judge, although a Democrat, was also a Baptist. I can’t imagine what possible bearing that might have had on his decision, except that Baptists are likely to be found in the Yahoo Nation, as everybody knows.

The Omaha World-Herald sent a reporter along with the press corps covering President Clinton’s December visit to Nebraska, and the national reporters’ comments were quite revealing. They compared rural Nebraska to Siberia, poked fun at the small town cops patrolling the route the presidential motorcade followed, adopted cowboy accents to ridicule the locals, and refused to sample Nebraska’s favorite food, the runza sandwich. The last is unforgivable, as runzas really are good, and the reporters’ provincialism prevented them from enjoying one of the main reasons to visit the home of the Cornhuskers.

Left-wingers often let their rhetoric slop over the line from their normal condescension toward what can only be described as a sort of hate speech. Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), whose very existence should argue against a stupid monopoly on the right, has let it be known that a vote for a Republican candidate is a vote for fascism. Or as he puts it: “If you’re a student of history, as I am, you study history. The fact of the matter is, we’ve always battled the right wing. There’s always been a fascist kind of crowd in every society.” Other Democrats on the fascist watch filled the pre-election ether with e-mails targeted at Jewish voters accusing the Bush family of being Nazi sympathizers during World War II. The party of the Kennedy family, those self-proclaimed students of history, ought to be a tad slower to accuse their opponents’ ancestors of hidden Nazi sympathies, given their patriarch Joseph Kennedy’s infamous German-friendliness as U.S. Ambassador to Britain in the 1930s.

Once you are on the lookout for intemperate speech from the Left, you can fill volumes with nothing but Bryant Gumbel quotes. In fact, picking a favorite Gumbelism is almost impossible. My personal choice is a remark by Gumbel that “‘family values,’ as you well know, was for a long time a code word for intolerance.” More famous, perhaps, is the film clip of Gumbel calling a conservative guest a “f**king idiot.” That, however, may well be excusable, because any conservative who opens himself to Mr. Gumbel’s tender ministrations deserves to have his judgment called into question.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post was likewise worried about the malign influence of wide open spaces and deer and antelope playing when he helpfully reminded us, after Dick Cheney’s nomination for Veep, that “the West, too, brings certain baggage that could hurt Bush in suburban America: militias and gun enthusiasts, big oil and mining, and deep conservatism—as reflected in the fuss over Cheney’s voting record. The fact sheet passed out at Cheney’s high school didn’t mention another alumnus: Matthew Shepard, the gay man murdered down the road from here in 1998.” Now, there’s a leap of logic not readily followed, but the most gratuitous logic chopping against the Red Zone candidate may be from Patricia Williams, writing in The Nation, who asked, “Is it fuzzy math or fuzzy brain that keeps Americans from noting that Bush’s margin of victory is about the same as the number of people he has executed in Texas?” There’s certainly something fuzzy here, but I’m afraid it’s Ms. Williams’ logic—even though the Nation is printed in the intellectually superior part of the country.

The Democrats’ most pronounced disdain is for the religious beliefs prevalent in the part of the country that rejected Al Gore. Thirty-seven percent of white Americans with advanced degrees, according to a recent poll, are “intensely antagonistic” toward Christians, observes Princeton’s John DiIulio in a review of a book by science historian Richard Rhodes. Rhodes earns a special place in any compilation of anti-Christian rhetoric by blaming at least a portion of the violence committed in America on “the old dogma that the child is inherently evil and requires violent subjugation to chasten.” So, according to Rhodes, violence is a result of “fundamental and evangelical” religious belief.

The same sort of anti-religious bias is present in Jane Alexander’s recent memoir of her time in Washington, where she headed the National Endowment for the Arts. She credits Gorbachev with single-handedly ending the Cold War, a feat that, according to her, he would have accomplished in an even shorter time without the irrational distrust of Gorby by born-again Christians. According to Alexander, religious conservatives’ distrust of Gorbachev stems from their being “convinced that Gorbachev was of the devil because of his birthmark.”

Conservatives can be consoled that the media are always on the watch for religious backsliding by either party. Again, our old friend Bryant Gumbel, in a question to Hugh Hefner: “In a macro-political sense, do you think the Gore preoccupation with morality is a frightening turn for the party?”

Yes, sneers and hatefulness seem to flow easily from the lips and pens of those who think every non-liberal is a hatemonger, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has noted in his annual round-ups of left-wing hate speech. Consider a few examples from his last collections: “For hypocrisy, for sheer gall, Gingrich should be hanged” (Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen). “George Will can just take his hood and go back wherever he came from” (Democratic Senator Carol Moseley-Braun). “Beneath the dullness [of Independent Counsel Ken Starr] lies pure evil” (Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales). And then there’s Paul Conrad, a Los Angeles Times cartoonist who sketched the man who shot up a Jewish community center, then killed a Filipino mailman; the bigoted murderer was labeled “a faith-based compassionate conservative.”

The party of the intellectuals and the sophisticates was presented with something of a problem in the recent Florida dust-up, as their main argument for a change in the outcome was, as far as I could tell, that their voters were too stupid to vote their ballots correctly. Of course, the quotations compiled here don’t suggest the Left believes it can build a majority while only attracting those with high SAT scores or graduate degrees. Instead, the elite exhibits a rather poorly hidden impatience with the middle of the country, which refuses to acknowledge the superiority of the chattering classes. Gore won the popular vote while losing that vast area of the map shaded in red, because his margin in the 647 counties he won was so much greater than the amount by which he lost the 2,434 counties of the Yahoo Nation.

The great middle of the country is ridiculed for its mulish adherence to church, family, and community, but the irony is that this characteristic loyalty benefits the Left—because many rural and small town voters maintain traditional ties to the Democratic Party. But the obvious and public derision on the part of our betters in the “intellectual centers” of our nation is dissolving those bonds, and someday, perhaps, the Yahoo Nation will repay that disrespect with the kind of margins for the “Red” party that Democrats now enjoy in their most solidly one-party urban precincts.

TAE contributing writer Blake Hurst drives a red pickup with a chain in the back to the First Baptist Church on Sundays. His hometown, Tarkio, Missouri (pop. 2,000), may well be the center of the Yahoo Nation.

----But the obvious and public derision on the part of our betters in the “intellectual centers” of our nation is dissolving those bonds, and someday, perhaps, the Yahoo Nation will repay that disrespect with the kind of margins for the “Red” party that Democrats now enjoy in their most solidly one-party urban precincts.----

The bottom line.

Let the left-wing bigots continue to be bigots! They can keep huddling in their myopic circles, telling one another endlessly juicy campfire stories about conservative boogeymen; meanwhile, we'll be busy winning elections. Sounds like a fair arrangement to me.

-Dan

They can keep huddling in their myopic circles, telling one another endlessly juicy campfire stories about conservative boogeymen; meanwhile, we'll be busy winning elections.

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Those who accept the patronizing label of "poor" want to patronize the middle class morally in order to extort money from it.
But that does not make the Republican Party "the party of the rich." To the contrary, if you scrutinize the map of red and blue counties you will see that the Democrats won wherever you would look to find the rich or the poor - in the inner cities and in the toney suburbs. Those who think themselves above the middle class want to patronize it financially, by advocating taxation which oppresses the middle class but which the rich boast of being able to afford.
The Republican Party is the party of the middle class.

"who sacrifices our young"

Bush is "sacrificing our young" .. but the dems love of abortion and late-term abortion is NOT SACRIFICING OUR YOUNG .. Sure .. that's logical.

Of the 40 million babies the democrats have dumped in the toilet .. how many of them had been gifted by GOD with a cure for some of our most terrible diseases or afflictions ..??

You're right .. we'll never know .. but if we just look at American history .. we can presume that a certain percentage of that 40 million would have been exceptional in their life. Maybe some of them would end up being great in education, music, art, or any of the sciences. Maybe one of them was a future President.

And .. while the dems are cheating by every hook or crook, if they hadn't signed on to abortion .. THEY MIGHT HAVE 40 MILLION MORE DEMOCRATS. They have killed their own inheritance. They have diminished themselves by their own hand.

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