THE ELITISM BEHIND LEFTIST HATE

The following email from a reader shows the relationship between Leftist arrogance and Leftist hate. Any questioning of their self-assumed authority can only be attacked, not reasoned with or accepted as a legitimate alternative viewpoint. So sign of any humility at all

"I met a leftist at a dinner party the other day who began spouting a bunch of anti-Bush conspiracies, with a lot of focus on Cheney (no idea why they hate him so much.) I of course made the mistake of saying that I actually liked Cheney and was glad of him.

Anyhow, she insisted that the whole war was "about oil" and "stealing the oil." And I acted rather fascinated and said, "Really? What evidence to you have to support such a charge? Seems that this would be big news and the basis for legal action."

She REALLY got upset. "YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY BELIEVE WHAT YOU'RE SAYING!"

And then I continued, "I know all sorts of people in the military, some of a fair degree of importance.. not one of them that I know of agrees with your analysis."

"Well of course they are going to spout the party line! And the rest of course only get one perspective on things!"

"Don't you think that's kind of an arrogant thing to say?"

That really UNGLUED her. I was even called an asshole!"






A 2004 CATALOG OF HATE SPEECH FROM THE LEFT

By Jeff Jacoby


As it does every year, the empty folder I labeled "Liberal Hate Speech" in January had grown to a thick sheaf of clippings by December. 2004 wasn't even a week old when two videos explicitly comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler appeared on the website of the liberal group MoveOn. They were entries in a contest soliciting "really creative ads" that would help voters "understand the truth about George Bush."

And so began another year in which liberals engaged in, and mostly got away with, grotesque slanders and slurs about conservatives -- the kind of poisonous rhetoric that should be unheard-of in a decent society. Once again, too many on the left -- not crackpots from the fringe, but mainstream players and pundits -- chose to demonize conservatives as monsters rather than debate their ideas on the merits.

As in years past, Republicans were almost routinely associated with Nazi Germany. Former Vice President Al Gore referred to GOP activists as "brown shirts." Newsday columnist Hugh Pearson likened the Republican National Convention to the "Nazi rallies held in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler." Linda Ronstadt said that the Republican victory on Election Day meant "we've got a new bunch of Hitlers." Chuck Turner, a Boston city councilor, smeared National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as "a tool of white leaders," akin to "a Jewish person working for Hitler."

Even a federal judge, Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, couldn't resist a Third Reich comparison. Bush became president because of an "illegitimate" Supreme Court ruling, he told the American Constitution Society. "That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in." (Calabresi later apologized.)

Such Nazi labeling is no less disgusting when it comes from Republicans. According to Bob Woodward, Secretary of State Colin Powell described Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith as running a separate government out of his "Gestapo office." Commentator Ralph Peters, writing in the New York Post, accused Democrat Howard Dean of using the tactics of Hitler and Goebbels to silence his competitors. Too many conservatives and libertarians refer to antismoking extremists as "tobacco Nazis," or to the humorless critics of fast food as "food Nazis." Whether it comes from the right or the left, language like that is vile.

Overwhelmingly, though, political hate speech today comes from the left. It has increasingly become a habit of leftist argumentation to simply dismiss conservative ideas as evil or noxious rather than rebut them with facts and evidence.

That is why there was no uproar when Cameron Diaz declared that rape might be legalized if women didn't turn out to vote for John Kerry. Or when Walter Cronkite told Larry King that the videotape of Osama bin Laden that surfaced just before the election was "probably set up" by Karl Rove. Or when Alfred A. Knopf published Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," a novel in which two Bush-haters talk about assassinating the president. "I'm going to kill that bastard," one character rages.

Bill Moyers warned a television audience on election day that if Kerry won narrowly, "I think there'd be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. . . . The right wing is not going to accept it." Chevy Chase, hosting a People for the American Way awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, slammed Bush as a "dumb [f-word]" and "an uneducated, real, lying schmuck." A cartoon by the widely syndicated Ted Rall described Pat Tillman, the NFL athlete who gave up his career to enlist in the Army and was killed in Afghanistan, as a "sap" and an "idiot."

So many examples, so little space. A political flier in Tennessee, depicting Bush as a mentally disabled sprinter, bore the message: "Voting for Bush is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded."

The St. Petersburg, Fla., Democratic Club took out an ad calling for the death of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Then there's Rumsfeld who said of Iraq, 'We have our good days and our bad days,' " the ad read. "We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say, 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger.".....