Posted on 06/21/2008 12:51:38 PM PDT by goldstategop
When someone starts yammering about transcending partisanship, renouncing “hatred and venom” and “bringing us together” – head for the hills. He’s talking capitulation on the right, with long lines of defeated, dejected conservatives in tattered uniforms being marched away to political POW camps.
Former Bush flak Scott McClellan, author of a tell-all book on his White House service, is worse than a rat fink. He’s worse even than a fawning sycophant craving the establishment’s favor. He’s a defeatist who bids his party to stand with him in the middle of a four-lane highway at rush-hour. Can we say “road-kill”?
Here’s an excerpt from an interview Bill O’Reilly did with the weasel on June 2.
O’Reilly: “OK. Now when you come to the realization that what you write in your book see it being used by people who absolutely want the worst for this country and this administration, doesn’t that give you pause at all.”
Doing a passable impression of Uriah Heep, McClellan responded: “But the whole thing about the book (his book – “What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception”) is that there are a lot of good people on both sides. We’ve got to get rid of the venom and hatred on both sides and find out how we can come together. I’m a centrist. I believe in working together to solve the problems we’ve got. And we need to get rid of the venom in the political atmosphere in DC. It’s a poisonous atmosphere.”
Note the weasel renounced “venom” not once but twice, thereby establishing his sensitivity and sincerity.
Three observations are in order:
First, McClellan is begging for the establishment’s approbation, particularly the mainstream media.
When an ostensible Republican starts whimpering that we have to overcome enmity and work together, he’s asking to be loved. He’s telling the world that he’s not one of those mean, cranky old reactionaries sowing seeds of discord wherever they go. He’s enlightened, compassionate and reasonable, and wants to build bridges to those who seek our annihilation.
Two: By calling himself a “centrist,” McClellan acknowledges that he has few principles – and those are negotiable. Tell me what a man will fight for, and I’ll tell you what he’s made of. McClellan is a big cipher.
Three: A call to non-partisanship is a call to surrender. It’s a truce only one side will honor. It’s akin accepting a wolf pack’s invitation to dinner, with the menu to be determined later.
What’s needed in national politics is more partisanship not less (partisanship here defined as adherence to principle).
Liberals are loathsome and deserve to be despised. With the left ascendant everywhere this year, venom should be delivered in stainless steel drums by the truckload.
Most of the cutting-edge issues that divide us are incapable of a negotiated resolution.
· Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is threatening to veto a partial-birth-abortion ban – for the second time. How do you split the difference between jamming surgical scissors into the base of an unborn child’s skull and suctioning out its brain, and not committing this gruesome act? Suctioning out only part of the brain? But do we really need more Democratic voters?
· What’s the centrist position in dealing with Iraq – let Hitler-wannabe Ahmadinejad have a few nuclear weapons and short-range missiles capable of hitting only Israel and certain parts of Europe, in lieu of a stockpile and ICBMs that can strike the U.S.?
· Is civil unions the compromise position on gay marriage – give homosexuals all of the privileges of marriage but reserve the name alone for normal relationships? In civil-union states, activists are pushing just as hard for same-sex marriage.
· How do we work together to counter spiraling gas prices? Environmental-wackos (that is, a majority of Congress) are adamantly opposed to off-shore drilling, exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (mustn’t disturb the caribou), the development of nuclear power and building more refineries. In the meantime, they insist on strict enforcement of the Kyoto Treaty, which will raise energy costs for producers and consumers alike. If we ask them really nicely, maybe they’ll let us drill on Mars – assuming there are no caribou there.
· How about hate crimes laws and campus speech codes? How do you compromise with censors who want to gag you and punish dissent from liberal orthodoxy?
· How about a deal on judicial rape of the Constitution? Activist judges agree to only misinterpret the First and Fourteenth Amendments, but not the Second and Fifth? Judicial autocrats can only legislate from the bench on alternate days of the week?
· We’ve reached the following arrangement with the Red Chinese: They’ll continue to engage in massive human rights violations, enforce their maniacal one-child-per-family policy, augment their war machine, hack our computer networks, and rattle their sabers at Taiwan, and we’ll continue to trade with them, resulting in an annual deficit approaching $300 billion for the U.S. The lead-poisoning is a bonus.
· Similarly, the Israelis have agreed to keep surrendering land and releasing jailed terrorists (what Condeoleezza Rice calls “confidence-building moves”). In return, the Palestinians have agreed to keep firing rockets into the rest of Israel, promoting terrorism and inciting anti-Semitism.
“Get rid of the venom and hatred”? But the left deserves to be hated; it merits our derision and scorn.
Obama, Clinton, Gore, Reid, Pelosi, Kennedy, Carter, Soros, Huffington and the rest of the loathsome lot are destroying our country -- ruining our economy, pulverizing the middle class, undermining national security, and attacking Judeo-Christian morality at every turn.
How should we respond: By asking them if they’re having a bad hair day? By announcing “Somebody needs a hug!”
Ted Kennedy is the quintessential representative of the American left.
A member of the United States Senate for longer than most Americans have been alive, Kennedy has spent the last 46 years raising taxes and piling regulations on productive Americans, attacking business, pushing racial preferences, advancing abortion, blocking votes on judges who will defend the Constitution, promoting amnesties for illegal aliens, and working diligently to make America less free, less safe and less decent.
After his successful surgery to remove a malignant brain tumor (in which he benefited from the best health-care system in the world), the Senator announced that he couldn’t wait to join Barack Obama in campaigning for socialized medicine.
Just as Kennedy’s fiscal policies are intended to ensure that members of the middle class will never amass the Kennedys’ wealth, his push for national health care is intended to guarantee that ordinary Americans one day enjoy the medical services of Canada, the United Kingdom and North Korea, while Kennedys continue to get the best care money can buy.
Two possibilities arise: Liberals are unbelievably stupid – so dumb that they need help tying their shoes and not walking into walls – or they’re malicious malcontents consumed by envy and animated by a lust for power – in a word, evil.
You don’t compromise with evil, negotiate with it, sign truces with it, or look for a middle way. You expose it and oppose it.
If heeded, McClellan’s entreaty to disavow what he calls “hatred and venom,” would result in a unilateral disarmament in the war of words.
The left will continue to call us fascists, racists, hateful, selfish and heartless, greedy, superstitious, Neanderthals, anti-science, paranoid, delusional, hypocritical and war-mongers.
In his book, “Makers And Takers,” Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer notes the way conservatives are routinely libeled by the left.
In “Conservatives Without A Conscience,” John Dean (a weasel from a previous Republican administration) described conservatives as “arrogant, condescending and self-righteous” – unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, who’s humble, down-to-earth (her autobiography should have been titled, “Here’s Looking Down On You, Kid”) and non-judgmental.
Howard Dean, head of the Democratic National Committee, calls conservatives “evil,” “corrupt,” and “brain-dead.”
Humorist Garrison Keillor (who’s as funny as genital herpes) prefers the subtle approach, describing Republicans as “swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown-shirts in pinstripes, sweat-shop tycoons, aggressive dorks …”
Clinton advisor Paul Begala engages in what the late Ayn Rand termed the broad-brush smear, writing: “You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-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 … and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads (as opposed to the multi-cultural skinheads?) murdered two African Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: They’re red too.”
You see the state where a disabled woman was denied nutrition and water for 6 days, until she literally starved and dehydrated to death, it’s red too. Wait, I forgot, Begala and company condone that particular murder.
The point of Begala’s pointless drivel is guilt by association -- indicting the average red-state (conservative) voter as a violent bigot and militia nut-case.
Apparently, there is no racism, anti-Catholicism or senseless violence in blue states. In true-blue Illinois (with a governor and two U.S. Senators from Begala’s party) the average sermon at the Trinity United Church of Christ --which Obama attended for 20 years -- oozes hatred for whitey and America.
Chicago is also the home of the Nation of Islam, an organization not noted for preaching brotherhood and tolerance. Hollywood -- the citadel of anti-Catholicism – is located in a blue state.
Blue states generally have higher rates of violent crime (including murder), divorce and addiction – and lower rates of charitable giving and church-attendance– than their red-state counterparts.
Liberals are masters of the fine art of the political smear. They don’t want a debate. They can’t debate. Their idea of a dialogue is invectives strung together with ad hominems, with a few jeers and catcalls thrown in for good measure.
Get beyond the hatred and the venom? For the left, that’s all there is. Since reality contradicts their worldview –- because they are incapable of using logic or making rational arguments – hatred and venom are all they have.
Demonizing the opposition has been SOP for the left -- from the French Revolution, to Leninism and Stalinism, to the nihilism of the ‘60s New Left, to the anti-Americanism and reverse racism that dominate our college campuses today, to the defamation of Christianity and Middle America emanating from Hollywood, academia, the mainstream media and the Democratic Party.
McClellan is an intellectual fraud and a poseur. His call to eschew “hatred and venom” and “find out how we can come together” is an invitation to suicide on the right – imbibing slow poison just to show how nice we are.
mark
Am I wrong but if you describe yourself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, would this not be “libertarian?”
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if, only, by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged, 965-966
It's time for Atlas to shrug - and pick up a gun.
Meh. I don’t know if I’d agree with “hate” in the truest sense of the term but I DO agree there should be MORE partisanship.
After all, no one can honestly say that Bush’s “uniter not divider” rhetoric and actions worked in any way whatsoever or that compromising with Dems ever really works to advance the Rightist agenda, can they?
At some point you have to stop trying to be loved and respected by people who compare you to Hitler all while giving a pass to the REAL Hitlers of the world and those that have consistently taken up the cause or sympathized with not only the enemies of our country but of freedom and humanity itself.
I saw him speak on queer marriage on Boston Common during a rally, very powerful.
Don Feder makes some very salient points about the leftwing. He characterizes them as dangerous to our liberty and absolutely ruthless in pursuing their goal of political domination that would result in the collapse of our nation as it is clearly based on communist principles.
Don Feder says the left is loathsome and he explains why the left is loathsome. Feder promotes a much harder counter-attack against smears from the left. The 'me too' John McCain policy of appeasing leftists is totally futile and many conservatives are sick of it.
That you stoop to attempting to use Christianity as a means of obliquely criticizing conservative disgust with not only the political left but Republican politicians that attempt to 'co-exist' with it is telling. This is not a religious or spiritual matter. Feder makes it abundantly clear that, in his and most conservative's opinion, the political left is inherently evil and that it's time conservatives stopped trying to sugar-coat that fact and vigorously attack the terribly destructive and often stupid ideas coming from the political left (global warming hoax, for instance) with truth and fight against what really is America's enemy...the political left-wing.
If you can't grasp that, you're probably at the wrong website.
He’s a very, very sharp writer. I’ve been reading his columns for many years.
I don't know if Don despises people like you, but he probably would like you to get out of the way so he can return the enemy's fire.
Ouch.
In one of his book interviews, I heard him say that he did this to help "end the partisanship and bring the parties together", or some such nonsense. That crap is an obvious lie, it's meant to do exactly the opposite, to increase animosity toward the GOP. Straight out of the Dem Commie Talking Points Playbook.
Excellent piece. Thanks for posting it.
I think, from your attitued, you come from further back on the beef. Fedor is striving for action on the part of conservatives and when he describes people like you, he hits the nail squarely in the CENTER.
Bush is, broadly speaking, a centrist. (Source: The Economist, p. 13 Jul 3, 1999)
Ol' Scotty should've been a happy camper! There's plenty of old stuff out there about the POTUS being a centrist when he sought the nomination.
Maybe, but my socially ‘liberal’ positions are probably more conservative than a true libertarian. Abortion bad, some drugs ok, a sparse social safety net. People should have both the freedom to succeed and freedom to fail.
But that is tangential to the topic. I answered your question, now I ask you: What purpose does it serve to be a red meat conservative and espouse hate?
At best, it makes your voice louder, but at a great cost. Namely, it makes you not rational. As a conservative, do you make big decisions based on emotion? Probably not, but that is what hate is.
I’m not going to choose government representatives based on who can stir up the most vitriol. I’m going to choose them based on my assessment of whether or not they can make headway towards the issues I care about.
Don Feder is speaking the truth. The Marxists and Communists are hiding under the labels of "liberal", "leftist", "progressive", and "socialist".
If I remember correctly the "two-minutes of hate" in Orwells "1984" was not about truth. It dealt with crowd manipulation and manufactured emotion orchestrated by a lying government and the lying people in that government.
Sorry, Don, I’m a right leaning centrist, one of those loathesome creatures you despise.
Does this mean compromising our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and a free economy? If so then I loath this philosophy and will do **everything** legally possible to stop it.
I don’t believe hate is productive at all. If you want to see perpetual hatred take a good look at the gangs of LA, or Darfur, or any other situation where the violence is unending.
It is **always** productive to hate sin, but to love the sinner. Ditto for anything or anyone who is evil.
And, how does hating people because of their beliefs mesh with your so-called Christian principles?
Again:
It is **always** productive to hate sin, but to love the sinner. Ditto for evil.
“Well, they do it to us!” is not a good response. A childish one perhaps, but aren’t conservatives supposed to be the grownups?
A Christian must never use the behavior of others to gauge his own actions.
It is important for **all** Christians to tell the **truth**! It is one of the Ten Commandments. We must **never** bare false witness! If a philosophy or action, or person, or thing is evil, if and action is sinful, we **must** be truthful. We must call sin a sin, and evil, what it is. How others see us is irrelevant to all except God.
How is it possible to compromise on truth? It isn't. If abortion is evil, then we must fight it. If the communists in our nation are hiding under the false name of liberal, we must **use** the words communist and Marxist!
>“Well, they do it to us!” is **not** a good or morally sound reason to act. Truth is what should motivate all Christians. Fighting evil is what should motivate Christians.
Take a good look at leftism's destructive march through our society over the past 50 years and tell me why "expousing hate" (I call it defining your opponent), as you put it, works for them.
And don't bother saying it hasn't.
BUMP for excellence.
That homosexual crackhead Obama MUST be defeated and humiliated.
I think you're a liar. What's more, I suspect that you fully intend to vote for that homosexual crackhead Obama.
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