Friday, October 08, 2004
The silence continues
This morning on Morning Edition, Nina Totenberg tut-tutted the Bush campaign for kicking out people who show up for rallies bearing Kerry-Edwards paraphernalia. But still nothing on that show about the violence against Republican campaign offices.
Meanwhile, CNN.com has this Robert Novak piece on the Kerry operative who disrupted the premiere of the film Stolen Honor. Turns out he'd served time for manslaughter.
Via Instapundit, Stanley Kurtz's round-up on the Climate of Fear.
Now, I would never say that this sort of behavior is typical of Democrats or approved by the Democratic Party. (Well, okay, maybe the Party, but not its individual members.) What is truly frightening about these acts -- and what would be truly frightening about them even if it were Republicans attacking Democrats -- is the extent to which hatred of the opposition has enabled politically active people to do literally anything to win. When the enemy is subhuman, monstrous, evil -- as Bush-haters undeniably view him -- then any action taken to defeat him is not only permissible but necessary. And given the rhetoric we've heard in the last two years, from ANSWER to Ted Kennedy's bloviations to Michael Moore's preposterous fictions to the Democratic National Convention, it was only a matter of time before Bush's avowed enemies would stoop to violence.
Of course, we've seen violence in elections before. But it's usually been in other people's elections. During our lifetimes, for the most part, elections in the US have been civic activities civilly pursued. We've watched election violence from afar, in places like Panama and Haiti. We expect armed thugs to try to influence elections in third-world sewers. Now we may be seeing the (re)emergence of the same phenomenon here in the US.
Bush-haters not scary enough for you? Then picture this:
Kerry wins the elections and pulls our troops from Iraq (whether immediately or further down the road makes little difference). Terrorists, who had been biding their time from the moment the last vote was cast in the US, launch massive attacks, in the vacuum created by the US pullout, against the interim government or whatever has replaced it. Iraq falls apart and truly becomes a new breeding and training ground for international terrorism once again. In the US, millions denounce Kerry as a "traitor of democracy" for abandoning Iraq. And with millions thinking of Kerry as a traitor, the elections of 2008 become the most violent in US history -- only this time, it's Kerry-haters as the aggressors.
We have to stop this violence. And the only way to stop it is to expose it to the light of public scrutiny. Nina Totenberg does our democracy no service by giving people more reason to hate Bush, without also examining the consequences of that hate.
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Meanwhile, CNN.com has this Robert Novak piece on the Kerry operative who disrupted the premiere of the film Stolen Honor. Turns out he'd served time for manslaughter.
Via Instapundit, Stanley Kurtz's round-up on the Climate of Fear.
Now, I would never say that this sort of behavior is typical of Democrats or approved by the Democratic Party. (Well, okay, maybe the Party, but not its individual members.) What is truly frightening about these acts -- and what would be truly frightening about them even if it were Republicans attacking Democrats -- is the extent to which hatred of the opposition has enabled politically active people to do literally anything to win. When the enemy is subhuman, monstrous, evil -- as Bush-haters undeniably view him -- then any action taken to defeat him is not only permissible but necessary. And given the rhetoric we've heard in the last two years, from ANSWER to Ted Kennedy's bloviations to Michael Moore's preposterous fictions to the Democratic National Convention, it was only a matter of time before Bush's avowed enemies would stoop to violence.
Of course, we've seen violence in elections before. But it's usually been in other people's elections. During our lifetimes, for the most part, elections in the US have been civic activities civilly pursued. We've watched election violence from afar, in places like Panama and Haiti. We expect armed thugs to try to influence elections in third-world sewers. Now we may be seeing the (re)emergence of the same phenomenon here in the US.
Bush-haters not scary enough for you? Then picture this:
Kerry wins the elections and pulls our troops from Iraq (whether immediately or further down the road makes little difference). Terrorists, who had been biding their time from the moment the last vote was cast in the US, launch massive attacks, in the vacuum created by the US pullout, against the interim government or whatever has replaced it. Iraq falls apart and truly becomes a new breeding and training ground for international terrorism once again. In the US, millions denounce Kerry as a "traitor of democracy" for abandoning Iraq. And with millions thinking of Kerry as a traitor, the elections of 2008 become the most violent in US history -- only this time, it's Kerry-haters as the aggressors.
We have to stop this violence. And the only way to stop it is to expose it to the light of public scrutiny. Nina Totenberg does our democracy no service by giving people more reason to hate Bush, without also examining the consequences of that hate.
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