— By Kevin Drum
Over at the Daily Standard, Andrew Ferguson says that Dinesh D'Souza — who thinks Barack Obama harbors a neocolonial rage toward all things Western — is either a hysteric or a cynic. Or maybe both. In any case,
Ferguson has seen it before:
Throughout the nineties I heard mainstream Republicans describe the president as a shameless womanizer and a closeted homosexual, a cokehead and a drunk, a wife beater and a wimp, a hick and a Machiavel, a committed pacifist and a reckless militarist who launched unnecessary airstrikes in faraway lands to distract the public’s attention from all of the above.
At gatherings of conservative activists the president was referred to, seriously, as a “Manchurian candidate.” Capitol Hill staffers speculated darkly about the “missing five days” on a trip Clinton had taken to Moscow as a graduate student. Respectable conservatives in the media—William Safire, Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh—encouraged the suspicion that Clinton’s White House attorney, a manic depressive named Vincent Foster, did not commit suicide, as all available evidence suggested, but had been murdered by parties unknown, to hush up an unspeakable secret from the president’s past.
So what happened? How did the left-wing, coke-snorting Manchurian candidate become the fondly remembered Democrat-you-could-do-business-with — “good old Bill,” in Sean Hannity’s phrase?
Barack Obama is what happened. The partisan mind — left-wing or right-wing, Republican or Democrat — is incapable of maintaining more than one oversized object of irrational contempt at a time. When Obama took his place in the Republican imagination, his titanic awfulness crowded out the horrors of Bad Old Bill; Clinton’s five days in Moscow were replaced by Obama’s three years in that mysterious Indonesian “madrassa.”
It's true: having a Democrat in the White House does this to conservatives. But here's a question: are liberals any different? Was Bush hatred any different from Clinton hatred or Obama hatred?
It's a serious question. A few years ago there were liberals who were convinced that Bush would declare martial law before the 2008 election and stay in the White House forever. There were liberals who thought Bush knew about 9/11 beforehand and allowed it to happen. There were liberals convinced of a gigantic conservative conspiracy to rig the voting machines in Ohio to steal the 2004 election. I sat across the table one day from a friend of my mother's, a lefty but a mild-mannered one, who was genuinely afraid that Bush was turning America into a fascist state. Another friend called during the 2008 campaign convinced that Sarah Palin had faked Trig's birth.
In other words, there are bizarro ideas on both sides of the fence. No argument there. And yet, there are differences. Here's my list: (1) Conservatives go nuts faster. It took a couple of years for anti-Bush sentiment to really get up to speed. Both Clinton and Obama got the full treatment within weeks of taking office. (2) Conservatives go nuts in greater numbers.
Two-thirds of Republicans think Obama is a socialist and upwards of half aren't sure he was born in America. Nobody ever bothered polling Democrats on whether they thought Bush was a fascist or a raging alcoholic, but I think it's safe to say the numbers would have been way, way less than half. (3) Conservatives go nuts at higher levels. There are lots of big-time conservatives — members of Congress, radio and TV talkers, think tankers — who are every bit as hard edged as the most hard edged tea partier. But how many big-time Democrats thought Bush had stolen Ohio? Or that banks should have been nationalized following the financial collapse? (4) Conservatives go nuts in the media. During the Clinton era, it was talk radio and Drudge and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. These days it's Fox News (and talk radio and Drudge and the Wall Street Journal editorial page). Liberals just don't have anything even close. Our nutballs are mostly relegated to C-list blogs and a few low-wattage radio stations. Keith Olbermann is about as outrageous as liberals get in the big-time media, and he's a shrinking violet compared to guys like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
more on Drum's four points:
<...>
think numbers 3 and 4 are the most compelling, in large part because I think the fundamental problem with right-wing hysteria is that it's so darn mainstream. In Democratic circles, 9/11 Truthers, Code Pink, Diebold folks, and the like can't get any establishment attention at all. Members of Congress won't return their phone calls or even be seen in public with them. On the right, however, there's practically nothing a right-wing extremist can say or do to be exiled from polite company.
There's a clear and impermeable line between the progressive mainstream and the left fringe. The line between the Republican Party/conservative movement and the far-right fringe barely exists. Whereas Dems kept the fringe at arm's length, Republicans embrace the fringe with both arms. Both sides have nutjobs; only one side thinks their nutjobs are sane.
That said, Kevin added that there's "something different about left-wing and right-wing craziness that goes beyond just the ideological differences," and I know what he means. His list is very strong -- I can't think of anything he missed -- but there seems to be more going on here.
<...>
While Benen and Drum are correct about the RW nuts, they're comparing apples to oranges. In order to make the comparison valid, one would have to ignore the evidence, which is what the RW does best.
For example:
Is there evidence that Obama is an American?
Is there evidence that Bush lied and Iraq had no WMD?
If you read through the comments to both pieces, a few of them are pointing out the incongruities.
In response to Benen:
Actually, we Code Pinkers do get calls back. And we ain't the same as Truthers...
In response to Drum:
I dunno - war crimes, illegal wars and torture are kinda a gig deal in my book. But hey the left is just like the right.
Nationalizing the banks in response to the financial crisis was not a crazy position. Arguing that the banks should just be allowed to collapse to usher in a new age of fairness and barter was a nutty left-wing position (and I saw some fringe lefty magazines supporting it), but favoring (temporary) nationalization rather than the bizarre half nationalization that left us with gigantic profits for the recently bailed out and the ongoing mortgage crisis, was actually a reasonable position.
Which is what we have in this country. The highest ranks of the right-wing party are nuts, and the highest ranks of the "left-wing" party don't support sane center-left policies like temporary nationalization of failed banks in a financial crisis or single-payer health care.
The US is a center-right nation, with a center-right wing party and a ultra-right wing party. That is part of the reason left-wing craziness is so much more tamped down. Right wing craziness is at the edge of political respectability, while left-wing reasonableness is off the table from the start.
The phone-jamming of 2002 resulted in felony convictions. The election irregularities of 2004 aren't fiction. The U.S. Attorneys' scandal wasn't a left-wing conspiracy theory.
Still, how many pundits on the left embraced these injustices and tried to focus attention on them? Answer: The only ones that are doing so today with the Chamber of Commerce. Most mainstream left columnists and pundits aren't going to invest a lot of time vetting these issues. They may mention these injustices, but during the Bush administration how many mainstream pundits called out Bush for war crimes and demanded an investigation? None of them ever declared Bush a war criminal.
More Benen, and to Drum's point about polling:
DON'T CALL IT A MOVEMENT.... Describing the Tea Party crowd last week, Karl Rove told a reporter, "There have been movements like this before -- the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the pro-life movement, the Second Amendment rights movement."
The observation was based on a dubious premise. As Rove and other Republicans see it, there's a Tea Party "movement," somehow distinct-but-not-really from the GOP base, with a set of grievances and priorities that is every bit as clear as those real political movements.
But the reason I put "movement" in quotes every time I write about the Tea Partiers is that it's an amorphous group of activists with no clear agenda, no leadership, no internal structure, and no real areas of expertise. Its passionate members, while probably well meaning,
appear to have no idea what they're talking about. Genuine political movements -- civil rights, women's suffrage, labor unions -- have, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) recently put it, a "
coherent vision." The Tea Party has rage and a cable news network, but that's not much of a substitute.
With that in mind, the
Washington Post did something quite interesting -- over the course of months, the paper tried to identify, find, contact, and poll literally every self-identified Tea Party group in the country. It is, to my knowledge, an unprecedented media project.
The result,
Amy Gardner reported today, painted a portrait of "a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process."
Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general. <...>
The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated. The Atlanta-based Tea Party Patriots, for example, says it has a listing of more than 2,300 local groups, but The Post was unable to identify anywhere near that many, despite help from the organization and independent research.
In all, The Post identified more than 1,400 possible groups and was able to verify and reach 647 of them. Each answered a lengthy questionnaire about their beliefs, members and goals. The Post tried calling the others as many as six times.
There can be little doubt that these activists exist, and that the political world takes them quite seriously. But beyond this, groups and members of this "movement" don't necessarily even agree with one another about their priorities or beliefs. This even applies to the basics -- "less than half" the Tea Party organizations identified "spending and limiting the size of government" as a top concern.
It's something to keep in mind the next time someone compares these folks to a real political movement. At least for now, that's not even close to being true.
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