Where Was the Left's Civility in the Bush Years?

The Left likes to claim that political discourse has become less civil since Obama's election. Have we forgotten how bad things were during the Bush administration?

Underlining the current concerns about political civility is the assumption that the discourse has become coarser since Barack Obama became president. However, on Tuesday, we were reminded of how things were when George W. Bush was president thanks to a report posted at ForeignPolicy.com.

The report described a speech given by The New Yorker’s famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. In the speech, he charged that during what he termed the “Cheney-Bush years,” American foreign policy was hijacked by a cabal of neoconservative “crusaders” within the former vice-president’s office. The report notes that Hersh expands on these views in a forthcoming book.  He asserts: “What I’m really talking about is about eight or nine neoconservatives, radicals if you will, who overthrew the American government.”

On Commentary’s blog “Contentions”, Max Boot remembers that in a 2005 Los Angeles Times column he called Hersh “the journalistic equivalent of Oliver Stone”.  Boot notes that these days, for wisdom like Hersh’s you’ve good to turn to the rants of individuals like Tucson shooter Jared Loughner. Boot has a good point. Hersh has said some very wacky things. In this most recent speech, for instance, Hersh asserted that Cheney wanted to turn all mosques into cathedrals, and that the Knights of Malta ran the US Joint Special Operations Command.

Still, by claiming that neoconservatives had taken over the Bush Administration, Hersh was hardly staking a unique position. Indeed, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, many if not most of Bush’s critics took the line that a small but evil group of neoconservatives had taken over the administration’s foreign policy. Furthermore, these critics emphasized that the neoconservatives were Jews and that they had diverted American policy to serve the interests of Israel rather than the interests of the United States. At one point during the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan, a critic of the war and the mother of a soldier who had fallen in Iraq harangued President Bush, asserting that her  "son was killed for a neoconservative agenda to benefit Israel.”

These statements fell on receptive ears because of the way Bush had been vilified since the very beginning of his presidency. After he had allegedly “stolen” the presidency, he was often portrayed as a buffoon. So why not believe that a cabal with less than noble intentions was able to hijack his foreign policy?

Shortly after the Tucson shootings, Jonathan Mark of New York’s Jewish Week, on his blog “Route 17”, noted that Australian Nobel peace laureate Betty Williams once said publicly, in front of hundreds of school children, “I have a hard time with this word ‘non-violent’, because I don’t believe that I’m non-violent. Right now I’d love to kill George Bush.” The audience laughed and applauded.

Similarly, as Mark points out, a columnist with Britain’s Guardian newspaper wrote in 2004: “The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinkley, Jr. – where are you when we need you?”

Why do we know so much more about what Palin said before and after the Tucson tragedy than we know about these other incidents? It’s because, with the help of a friendly press, left-wingers portray conservatives as constantly threatening democracy, tolerance, and peace, with themselves as the great protectors of these virtues. Last week, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote in the Huffington Post,

[Jack Kennedy’s] death forced a national bout of self-examination. In 1964, Americans repudiated the forces of right-wing hatred and violence with a historic landslide in the presidential election between LBJ and Goldwater. For a while, the advocates of right-wing extremism receded from the public forum. Now they have returned with a vengeance – to the broadcast media and to prominent positions in the political landscape.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger does not dismiss this rhetoric as mere “political calculation”.  Rather, he characterizes these words as a statement of “foundational belief”. However, one cannot overestimate how much cynicism and deliberate fear-mongering are contained in these words. The left wins support these days, by claiming an exclusive concern for social justice, tolerance and non-violence. Tarring someone as a racist or an inciter of violence is meant to have the same de-legitimizing impact that calling someone as a Communist had during the McCarthy era. As Jonathan Mark puts it, “The left always craves a Reichstag fire [which Hitler used to begin his sabotage of German democracy] to justify repressive measures.”

If the left was truly interested in combating hatred, intolerance and violence, it would condemn it in all its forms. Robert Kennedy Jr., and those who share his political views, should not be taken seriously as opponents of hate and violence, so long as they refuse, as Mark points out, to condemn the most flagrant purveyors of incitement:

There is one group of assassins that is never linked to incitement.

Moslems.

Islamic killers always act alone. We can’t blame Islam or Islamic incitement for the World Trade Center, or for the murders of Daniel Pearl, or Hillel Lieberman, or Alisa Flatow, or the more than 7,000 people killed and wounded by Islamic assassins in just the last decade.

There were whole articles, hundreds of words long, on the attempted bombing of two Riverdale [synagogues] that didn’t even mention that the would-be bombers were Moslems, or were inspired by anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist incitement. There were numerous journalists and politicians who refused to see a link between the Fort Hood shooter, the Times Square bomber, and the killer who burst into the offices of the Seattle Jewish Federation and Islamic incitement.

No all these killers acted alone. They all just happened to be Muslims. Coincidence.

You don’t have to support Sarah Palin’s political ambitions, or even like her, to acknowledged that she is being smeared for the most crass of political purposes.

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