The Hunting of the Liberals

A couple months back, I was excoriated by über-neo-conserva-monster David Horowitz for an aside I wrote in this post: "Do we also have to start rounding up the college professors and putting them in camps? David Horowitz is this close to being that explicit." I wrote that because Horowitz maintains a database of dangerous people, including many prominent academics alongside Osama bin Laden and Dennis Kucinich. Plus, Horowitz is the figurehead of CampusWatch, which empowers conservative college students to dialog with any professors they don't agree with using such time-honored conflict-resolution techniques as red stars.

Perhaps the idea of putting people in camps was slight hyperbole. Perhaps, though, if you follow what David Neiwert is talking about, you can see how it is not such a far-fetched possibility. Go and read that please, and then come back.

I mean, really, can someone please explain to me how the kind of rhetoric that you regularly hear from Savage and Coulter and Limbaugh and now Rove doesn't even merit an eyelash-blink? And worse, how is that the media is willing to equate this kind of "round up the libruls" lies and distortions with less inflammatory and esentially true words. Take the local rag (please!):

Among the more notable headline-grabbers, Democratic Party leader Howard Dean called Republicans "pretty much a white, Christian party" and said "they all behave the same, and they all look the same." Vice President Dick Cheney's comeback? "Maybe (Dean's) mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does."

That's a low blow, even on the playground. Good thing Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin evened the score in the Senate, comparing conditions at the Guantanamo prison camp to Soviet gulags, Nazi Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodian regime.

At least he smartly apologized. Not enough politicians do.

This week's big zinger came from White House adviser Karl Rove, who thought it smart to say liberals would "offer therapy and understanding" to the 9-11 hijackers rather than go to war. The Democrats could have turned the other cheek, but instead they clamored in vain for Rove's resignation.

It's hard to know where to start here: First, this same paper bent over backwards to tell us that Bush was re-elected on the efforts of Christians and similar "values voters." So Dean was wrong . . . how?

Second, Durbin's description of the "American Gulag" is accurate and disturbing: Conservatives can continue to defend U.S. policy at Gitmo and elsewhere, but they have to go through all sorts of contortions to explain how holding people without charges, attorneys, access to courts and so forth for three or more years is reasonable. Durbin's apology was a cop-out, especially after conservatives and the media inaccurately accused him of calling U.S. soldiers Nazis.

Third, Cheney's and Rove's remarks were not even remotely like Durbin's and Dean's. Cheney went after Howard Dean's mother, for crying out loud. Although, I guess that's not as bad as his dropping the f-bomb on the Senate floor. And Rove set out to paint all liberals--your humble folkbum included--as being soft on terrorists. Everyone else has already pointed out the factual errors in Rove's speech (and Hunter today noted that perhaps it's Bush who's soft on terror), so I will instead take issue with the editorial's assertion that Democrats should have "turned the other cheek." To that, I have to drop a big old Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: When the second most powerful man in Washington (next to Dick Cheney, of course) paints roughly half of the U.S. population with an innacurate and inflamatory brush, the only reasonable response is to ask for his resignation. My frigging tax dollars are paying this man's salary, and I refuse to allow such modern-day red-baiting on my dime.

At any rate, when they do start rounding us up, all I ask is that I be given a nice low number. I don't do pain well, and if they're going to tattoo it onto me, I'd like it to be short.