Kirchick: Left-Wing Hatred Out of Control for Years

We’ve been documenting the extreme hatefulness (racism, antisemitism, hate speech, conspiracy theories, you name it) that is overwhelmingly common among left-wingers and Obama supporters for years, and the New Republic’s James Kirchick points out the abysmal hypocrisy of the media—where this vitriolic nastiness has been completely ignored in their rush to demonize the McCain campaign: Who are left-wing haters to point fingers at John McCain?

Since 9/11, major anti-war rallies have included people holding signs and puppets comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Leftist writer Naomi Wolf, who has expressed fears that the feds were monitoring her children’s letters from summer camp, recently published a book titled, “The End of America,” which likens the Bush administration to a fascist junta.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann spews over-the-top, hateful rhetoric in his “Special Comments” on a regular basis. He has said that the Bush administration threatens America with a “new type of fascism,” referred to the GOP as the “leading terrorist group in this country” on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and has said that Fox News is “worse than Al Qaeda” and “as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was.”

Have the journalists now bemoaning the low tactics of the McCain campaign and its supporters never set eyes upon the wildly popular Huffington Post? That Web site hosts countless angry rants, many examples of which are too vulgar to document in a family newspaper. In 2004, Nicholson Baker wrote a novel imagining the assassination of President Bush. Last week, Fox’s “Family Guy” depicted Nazis donning McCain-Palin buttons.

If these fringe (and most of them are hardly fringe) individuals don’t speak for American liberalism writ large – as most “respectable” liberals will tell us when confronted by the examples enumerated above – then the stray hecklers at McCain-Palin rallies cannot represent American conservatism.

(Hat tip:Nacy)

Did You Know ‘Socialist’ is a Code Word?

Did you know that “socialist” is a code word for “black?” No? Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist, sets you straight: Shame on McCain and Palin for using an old code word for black.

McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.

Shame on McCain and Palin.

(Hat tip: Killian B.)

Palin-Hatred Reaching Rabid Level

The media keep yammering on about John McCain and Sarah Palin’s imagined “subtle racism,” yet they don’t write a word about the ugly, in-your-face demonization and hatred you can easily find everywhere Obama supporters hang out. This morning’s example: A Truly Frightening Prospect.

(Hat tip:Charles the Obama supporter)

Spiegel Columnist: Sarah Palin is a Witless Racist

Article after article today denouncing Sarah Palin and John McCain, but especially Sarah Palin, for “injecting race” into the campaign.

By which they invariably mean: bringing up Barack Obama’s troubling long-term associations with hardcore radicals of one type or another.

Germany’s Spiegel Online gets into the act too with a venomous article by former TIME reporter Peter Ross Range: The Lone Ranger: Is Sarah Palin Playing with Fire?

In her witless way, Sarah Palin has re-injected race into the presidential campaign at just the time when it seemed to be sliding into insignificance. After all, you can hardly attach a racial narrative to the global financial crisis. Furthermore, polls have been suggesting a surprisingly high degree of acceptance by whites of a black in the White House.

Some commentators think “brownness” (immigrants) has replaced blackness as the new racial scarecrow in American politics. I think it is also true that as people have gotten used to Obama, they increasingly see not a black man, but a post-racial person (white and black, by birth) who calmly and coolly embodies the swirling ethnic mix that is modern America.

But Palin, with plenty of abetment from McCain, has gotten it going again with the theme that Obama “is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.” She’s selling Obama not as the black, but as the other. This obviously can appeal to racial fears and antagonisms.

(Hat tip:Our# 1 Contributor Charles Johnson)

WaPo Columnist: John McCain, Far Right Extremist

This is where the mainstream media has been headed ever since the nomination of Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate; E. J. Dionne is the latest journalist to claim that any and all criticism of Obama is by definition racist. But he takes it an extra step, saying that John McCain represents the reemergence of the far right.

Yes, really. John McCain, far right extremist. Wow. Meanwhile, Barack Obama associates with people who scream “God damn America,” and with people who are guilty of bombing the US Capitol, and gets a complete pass.

Are we witnessing the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger?

McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among things, a “decent person.”

Yet McCain’s own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama’s association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain’s attacks, she accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” What other “terrorists” was she thinking about?

Since Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and since even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association.

Notice how many mainstream journalists shamelessly parrot Obama’s talking points about William Ayers, word for word.

(Hat tip:Nacy)

Associated Press: A Full Court Press Against Sarah Palin

They’re relentless.

The latest Associated Press masterpiece of journalistic malpractice: a headline that goes right to the edge of saying Sarah Palin called Barack Obama a terrorist (which she did not): Palin defends terrorist comment against Obama.

They’re parroting Obama campaign propaganda, word for word, and doing eveything they can to minimize William Ayers’ terrorist acts.

But while Ayers and Obama are acquainted, the charge that they “pal around” is a stretch of any reading of the public record. And it’s simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts. Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weather Underground claimed credit for numerous bombings and was blamed for a pipe bomb that killed a San Francisco policeman.

Can you spot the world’s biggest straw man in that highlighted sentence?

(Hat tip:Chas)

Associated Press Hits Bottom, Digs

The Associated Press article on Sarah Palin’s comments about William Ayers is a Category 7 jaw-dropper. Apparently, now even criticizing Obama’s associations with white violent radicals is racist: Analysis: Palin’s words carry racial tinge.

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

Her reference to Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.

Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers’ radical views and actions. …

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as “not like us” is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

This really is the election in which the mainstream media have thrown all their claims to impartiality right into the sewer. It’s sickening to see.

(Hat tip:Chas)

The Reverend Wright Issue

At the Wall Street Journal, Laura Meckler writes that the McCain campaign is getting ready to open a can of Reverend Jeremiah Wright: ‘Attack by Association’ Viewed as Fair Game by McCain Camp.

Don’t be shocked if you see the McCain campaign pull the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of mothballs in new attacks against one-time parishioner, Barack Obama.

McCain advisers say that they see “attack by association” as fair game now, arguing that Obama’s campaign has been using that technique to go after McCain. In particular, the Obama campaign has hammered McCain on the stump and in TV ads on the number of one-time lobbyists working for his campaign. (The McCain campaign is also angry about a Spanish-language TV ad that ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, without ever saying that McCain took on Limbaugh and others to fight for comprehensive immigration reform.)

“They played it one way, we played it another way,” said one of McCain’s top advisers, Mark Salter. “Now we’re both going to play it the same way.”

If you’re not a fan of Obama, you’re probably thinking, “It’s about time.” It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict that Obama’s fans will shriek, “Guilt by association!” and claim that Obama’s relationship with Wright was nothing special.

But they’re going to have to explain this speech by Obama from June 5, 2007 at Hampton University, lavishing praise on Rev. Wright in a way that makes it very clear that Obama was a close personal friend.

This close friend of Barack Obama also joined Louis Farrakhan on a trip to Libya and met with Muammar Gaddafi in 1984, right around the time Obama would have first met Rev. Wright. Has anyone ever asked Obama for his opinion about that trip?

(Hat tip:Charles the Obama supporter@LGF)

Colbert King Plays the White Supremacist Card

The Washington Post’s Colbert King compares Clinton strategist Mark Penn to white supremacists, frantic to prevent Barack Obama from being elected: Memo From a Poison Penn.

Say you find yourself seated on the train behind two white supremacists who are beside themselves over the possibility that Barack Obama could become America’s first black president.

They are so fired up, they fail to notice you.

The men are discussing the urgent need to derail Obama’s candidacy.

The obvious strategist of the two says that Obama’s defeat can be brought about by hitting him hard, where it hurts the most.

We’ve got to launch an attack, he declares, on Obama’s “lack of American roots.” Paint him as a guy with an exotic background who’s present in mainstream society but isn’t really a part of it.

He asserts, with a snicker, that Obama has “a very strong weakness.” We’ll drive home the argument, he says, that Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited.”

Just one problem with King’s overheated scenario; the real white supremacists are very much in favor of Barack Obama.

So you think the chorus of white hate groups is seething with rage that Barack Obama could become president? Think again.

Members of the knuckle-dragging set are taking a rosier view, judging by their Internet posts. They say the possibility of a biracial president is helping their recruitment efforts.

“It will be a beautiful day when the masses look at the paper and truly realize they have lost their own country,” according to one of the postings spotted by Mark Potok, who monitors hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “White people aren’t going to do a thing until their toys are taken away from them,” says another. “So things have to be worse for things to be better.”

So much for the question of whether Obama will be able to reach beyond his core liberal constituency.

Even former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has taken time from his international network of Holocaust-deniers to blog: “Obama is a visual aid for white Americans who just don’t get it yet that we have lost control of our country, and unless we get it back we are heading for complete annihilation as a people.”

(Hat Tip: Charles the Cult Leader)