A few weeks ago, I wrote in The Daily Caller that the media has become a bunch of girly men. When Sarah Palin’s non-campaign campaign bus ran a couple red lights, the fourth estate acted like Palin had used her RV to crash the gate at Disney World.
Now it’s conservatives’ turn. Palin, Rush Limbaugh, The Media Research Center, Big Journalism, Drudge and The Daily Caller have criticized Jimmy Hoffa Jr. for describing tea partiers as “sons of bitches” and calling for a war against them.
Conservatives need to cowboy up. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but in case anyone is still uncertain, I’ll make it clear: The left hates our guts. They do not see us as political opponents. We are not their debating partners. Liberals — and I can’t believe after 40 years of this I still have to explain it — think we’re evil. Remember “The Exorcist”? To the left, we are the thing inside of Regan. I say, let the left go wild. Let them vent. Encourage their primal screams. It will only provide more evidence that liberalism has become a religious cult.
Indeed, it’s not surprising that liberals would refer to us as sonofabitches, considering that we’re a threat to their religion. Anyone who has liberal friends or family members knows that in private it is much, much worse. Waiting around for liberals to change, or thinking that we can reason with them, is a colossal waste of time and energy. Their political philosophy is this: The state will provide more and more benefits for more and more people, using more and more taxes to do it; science and medicine will ultimately conquer human suffering, which has no meaning or value or purpose; and the government will continue to pass anti-pain legislation until the final third-grade bully in the last private school is reprogrammed to officiate gay weddings. We will become gods. It is a religion, and we are Satan.
In 1948, communist defector Whittaker Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In his testimony, he outted a number of progressives as communists or former communists. The backlash from liberals was intense. In his autobiography “Witness,” Chambers reflected on what had caused that backlash: “When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.” That ice cap has now been inching for at least six decades.
When “Witness” was released, some critics, including conservatives, were confused by the religious tone of the work. Good and evil? The soul of man? Dante? Please, conservatives — grasp this reality. Understand it. Repeat it to yourselves: The left is a religion that considers conservatives evil. Say it again. And again. I believe that many folks on the left have lost the ability to reason about politics. If you want to slow the rate of growth of government spending by 1%, you’re a Nazi. If you think abortion should be decided by individual states, you are Maddowed — a term meaning to degrade a person or idea by ignoring facts that don’t support your argument, going heavy on the smug and snark, and using apocalyptic rhetoric. Incompetent teachers should be fired? Hitler! Without some kind of cult de-programming, we simply cannot expect the left to use any other kind of language.
It reminds me of a Doonesbury cartoon from the Reagan years. A man goes to confession. I’m an asshole, Father, he says. You’re being too hard on yourself, the priest replies. But I voted for Reagan/Bush, the man says. I still recall the punch line: Why, you are the very orifice itself!
This is usually the part of the argument where the left says, “But look at the rhetoric of the tea party!” It’s true — there are a few folks who show up at tea party rallies who are extreme in their views of President Obama. But in general, conservatives police their bomb-throwers more than liberals police theirs. Google “conservatives criticizing conservatives” and you find the following: Newsbusters going after both Christine O’Donnell for walking off Piers Morgan’s show and Judge Andrew Napolitano for his “truther tendencies”; Bill Kristol reproaching Glenn Beck for “hysterical rhetoric” about Egypt; and former Bush speechwriter David Frum condemning his fellow conservatives for, well, everything. When Dinesh D’Souza came out with a book claiming that the American left was responsible for 9/11, well-known conservative journalist John Podhoretz literally threw the book across the room (the book was gonged in The New Criterion, National Review, The Weekly Standard and other right-wing outlets). And Charles Krauthammer, our best thinker, routinely jabs at his own side.
Then there was this, from a 2010 Huffington Post article:
The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.
On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, “An Attack that Goes Too Far.” Author Paul Mirengoff called Cheney’s effort to brand DOJ officials the “Al Qaeda 7,” “vicious” and “unfounded” even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.
Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.
For my part, I’m willing to call Joe Scarborough an asshole, although I think blockhead is the more accurate moniker. I’m also willing to turn my back on Mel Gibson, a Catholic whose films I once defended but whose anti-Semitism is now beyond debate.
What liberal has disowned Jane Fonda? Did The Nation or MSNBC ever torch Sean Penn for his Hugo Chavez sleepovers? How about going after Michael Moore, who sat with Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention? The premier of Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a dishonest piece of garbage, was attended by the leading lights of the DNC. Has anyone on the left rejected Keith Olbermann, a mental patient? Or told Andrew Sullivan that he is a sick and tormented bully whose assaults on Sarah Palin are more revealing of his own self-hate than of any kind of Palin fault? Has anyone on the left told Chris Matthews that he is, indeed, an asshole?
I heard Daily Caller staffer Mary Katherine Ham on the radio yesterday morning, and she struck a perfect tone (at least during the few minutes I heard before having to get out of my car). In response to a comment that Hoffa’s remarks could cause violence, Ham just shrugged. “I’m not worried about that,” she said. “What bothers me is the fact that the left won’t get its wrist slapped the way the right does whenever our side says something stupid.” Yes, by all means, let’s call liberals and the media (same difference) on their hypocrisy. But enough with the hissy-fits about being called names. The whimpering and whining is best left to liberals.
They hate us, friends — they really, really hate us. Letting them call us the devil is a wonderful clarifying agent.
Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.