Anti-Clinton Madness
I won't link to Drudge, the Weekly World News of the Internet (which I will link to, you'll note), but by now you may have heard that he's reporting that a new book about Hillary Clinton by Ed Klein alleges that Chelsea was conceived in an act of rape committed by Bill against Hillary.
Now, I keep saying that I'm going to quit harping on the craziest of the crazies, but I just can't resist this one. This is the kind of thing that illustrates how unbalanced a significant minority of the right has become. Five years and two elections after Clinton left office, they are still so obsessed with him that they can't quit making up utterly insane allegations against him. Rabid anti-Clintonism is one of the things that pushed me more firmly into the Democratic camp. I've never seen anything like it in the Democrats. He's a rapist, he's a drug runner, he's a murderer... My god, these people really are--and I use the term in its literal sense--insane.
As I've written before, a large minority of the American right seems unable to resist demonizing their opponents and deifying their own politicians. The result, over the last twelve plus years, is that they have somehow convinced themselves that Bill Clinton--the only really good president of my lifetime--is the devil, while George W. Bush--one of the worst presidents of the last 75 years--is Churchillian (their word--no kidding). Of course these are the same people who said--with a straight face--that Ronald Reagan was "the greatest president since Thomas Jefferson." What does one say to people with such a radically skewed view of reality?
Note that I'm NOT saying that this is true of all conservatives. But the sane conservatives DO have to own up to this problem. A significant minority on their side is plagued by a peculiar kind of madness, and any sane and self-respecting conservative has got to be concerned by that.
I won't link to Drudge, the Weekly World News of the Internet (which I will link to, you'll note), but by now you may have heard that he's reporting that a new book about Hillary Clinton by Ed Klein alleges that Chelsea was conceived in an act of rape committed by Bill against Hillary.
Now, I keep saying that I'm going to quit harping on the craziest of the crazies, but I just can't resist this one. This is the kind of thing that illustrates how unbalanced a significant minority of the right has become. Five years and two elections after Clinton left office, they are still so obsessed with him that they can't quit making up utterly insane allegations against him. Rabid anti-Clintonism is one of the things that pushed me more firmly into the Democratic camp. I've never seen anything like it in the Democrats. He's a rapist, he's a drug runner, he's a murderer... My god, these people really are--and I use the term in its literal sense--insane.
As I've written before, a large minority of the American right seems unable to resist demonizing their opponents and deifying their own politicians. The result, over the last twelve plus years, is that they have somehow convinced themselves that Bill Clinton--the only really good president of my lifetime--is the devil, while George W. Bush--one of the worst presidents of the last 75 years--is Churchillian (their word--no kidding). Of course these are the same people who said--with a straight face--that Ronald Reagan was "the greatest president since Thomas Jefferson." What does one say to people with such a radically skewed view of reality?
Note that I'm NOT saying that this is true of all conservatives. But the sane conservatives DO have to own up to this problem. A significant minority on their side is plagued by a peculiar kind of madness, and any sane and self-respecting conservative has got to be concerned by that.
posted by Winston Smith at
7:02 AM
18 Comments:
Winston -
C'mon, already. Is Clinton demonized to the same extent as Nixon (who, despite being a Republican, pursued more "traditional" Democratic policies than Clinton)? What are Clinton's creds as a "really good president" (beyond the sickeningly partisan, "he's the only Democrat to hold the office in the past 25 years")?
I believe in being uniformly critical of all politicians, regardless of their party affiliations. When are people going to wake up to the fact that partisan politics is, almost by definition, biased politics?
Winston, get a grip. Your posting here tells us more about you than it does about the R's. If you do five minutes of googling you can surely find examples of D's who say that:
1) Bush = Hitler;
2) Guantanamo bay is as bad as to the Soviet gulag;
3) Ronald Reagan ignored AIDS because he wanted gays to die.
Of course the D fringe say these things. That's why they're the fringe. My question is, why does the R fringe bother you more than the D fringe?
Anonymous,
What you're referring to as the R fringe isn't the fringe. It's the R center. You won't see Democratic house and senate members or prominent liberal authors with six-figure book deals saying that:
1) Bush = Hitler (which incidentally is false, but Bush does tend to be Hitler-like)
2) Guantanamo bay is as bad as to the Soviet gulag;
3) Ronald Reagan ignored AIDS because he wanted gays to die.
However, you will find Republican house and senate members and prominent conservative authors with six-figure book deals saying insane things.
This point has been made before and I'm tired of making it again.
"Bush does tend to be Hitler-like"
You are part of the D fringe.
My mother was born in Germany, long enough ago to have lived under Nazi rule. She's always telling me how much the way the Bush administration lied to get us into war reminds her of how the Nazis sold their wars to the public.
Chris is, I think, exactly right, and this is a point we have to keep making over and over again:
There IS a wacko lefty fringe that thinks, e.g., that Bush knew about 9/11. But the wacko righty "fringe" is far less fringe-like.
A large chunk of conservatives think (literally) insane things about Clinton. A relatively small chunk of liberals thinks equivalently crazy things about Bush.
Furthermore, Bush has done far, far, far MORE to warrant the disgust than Clinton ever did. (Clinton is, perhaps, a cad, but he didn't lie us into wars, wasn't involved in stealing an election, was a centrist not a radical, etc., etc.)
So just pointing out that SOME of the anti-Bush crowd is as nutty as SOME of the anti-Clinton crowd is radically misleading, ignoring the numbers and influence of the respective groups as it does.
For the sake of affability, I'll call Ann Coulter and Michael Moore a push. But Chairman/Gov/Dr. Dean is the Farrakhan of the Democratic Party. (Joe Biden just rebought some credibility with his gentle rebuke of him. I could vote for him in a pinch.)
My party threw Pat Buchanan out long ago. Hannity makes me uncomfortable with his cementheadedness, but I don't think even he has crossed the rhetorical line ("This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good.") that the C/G/D has.
I mean, that's not right, folks. It's OK to disagree without demonizing. We're all Americans here.
Bill Clinton remains a fond whipping boy for some on the right, sorta like some lefties who could never let go of the good old days when they had Nixon to kick around. It's nice clean and dirty political fun.
But it's been my observation that the Bushies have been almost letter-perfect in letting President Clinton off the hook for virtually everything from the Loral/China tech sales to his not-so-great War on Terror to the fishy pardons to the missing "W's" on the White House keyboards. (I did catch Ashcroft whining in testimony before Congress once.)
A look at Instapundit shows the VRWC giving this stuff a wide berth. Good. It's National Enquirer stuff and if Mrs. Clinton weren't in the political game right now, the Enquirer would be where this would be published, as a sort of celebrity morbid curiosity, after the diet tips on page 28.
oh my god. You know, I really can't believe what I just read.
Clinton--the rapist/drug-runner/murderer--is the "fond whipping-boy"? Michael Moore and Anne Coulter are equivalent?
Either one or both of our perceptions are vastly screwed up here.
There is no real lefty equivalent of Coulter or Liddy or North. Those folks are extremists, evil, and very popular. (The latter two are actually traitors--a charge the right loves to use...but there are no wildly popular lefty pundits who actually ARE traitors).
There is no Democratic equivalent of Nixon (who tried to use the power of the state to crush his enemies), Reagan (who conducted an illegal war in violation of U.S. law), or Bush II (who in essence stole and election) (Johnson is the equivalent of W in having lied us into a war, however).
If Dean is the worst Dem you can come up with, I'm afraid you lose this round. The Dems have no DeLay, no Grover Norquist, no Karl Rove, no Dick Cheney... Dean is just a goofy blowhard who your side should love...he's on track to help the Republicans keep Congress...
There's just simply no equivalence today. Insty &co. (thought Not all on the right) ARE suggesting that righties stay away from the rape charge against Clinton...but c'mon...just because some of them decided to stay away from one of the crazier charges hardly makes 'em sane.
tvd, your side has a BIG problem. You gotta face up to it, man.
"There is no real lefty equivalent of Coulter or Liddy or North"
Oh for Pete's sake. Coulter's equivalent is Ted Rall. Liddy's equivalent is Noam Chomsky. Moore's equivalent is Rush Limbaugh. North's - well, you've got a point there. He successfully covered up Iran/Contra, which could have become the next Watergate. No lefty counterpart to that. But that doesn't support your point about the relative influence of the fringes.
You should read the Nation and see relatively mainstream D's who actually believe that America is as evil as the former Soviet Union, or witness the TWO commenters in this very thread who think that it is fair to compare Bush to Hitler. (No US president - not even Nixon, the very worst - is even remotely in that league.)
D's are just as sick as R's in this regard, which is why I remain politically independent.
Interesting. But remember one important claim here is that, while there may be nuts on both sides, the nuts are popular and influential on the right, while relatively more obscure on the left.
I'm not familiar enough with Ted Rall. He bugs me, so I ignore him. So you could be right. Thing is, he's easy to ignore. Unless you seek him out, you won't encounter him. He's fairly obscure. Maybe 1% of the U.S. even knows about him. Coulter, on the other hand, was on the cover of Time, and you have to work hard to ignore her.
Has Rall ever seriously fantasized about killing conservatives? Because Coulter has done so about liberals. She has, as you might remember, basically said that killing a few would be good for the country.
So I stick to my claim that they're not equivalent in inflence, and I doubt that they're equivalently bad.
I have to confess, Chomsky also annoys me, so I ignore him. Again, it's very easy. Chomsky at least knows something about what he's talking about even if I often disagree with him. I believe that Liddy is mentally unstable. Also, whereas Chomsky often gets CALLED a traitor, Liddy really IS one.
For what it's worth, I think you're most interesting comparison is the Moore/Limbaugh one. That seems wrong to me, but it COULD be true. I really am willing to consider this, and if you're right, that would show me that (as I fear!), my perceptions are radically skewed. Perhaps this deserves a post of its own, but it seems to me that Moore is way, way less bad than Rush. Rush is basically a stream-of-consciousness bullshit artist...is Moore that bad? I thought that Farenheit 9/11 was pretty good...what I really need to see is Bowling for Columbine. On that issue I apparently disagree with Moore, so it'll give me some perspective.
Thanks for the comment, A, though I mostly disagree.
"...letting President Clinton off the hook for... the missing 'W's' on the White House keyboards."
The missing "W" keys rumor was just that: a rumor. The claims of White House vandalism by the leaving Clinton staff members were false.
The General Accounting Office stated that they "had found no damage to the offices of the White House's East or West Wings or EOB" and Bush representatives said that "there is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration."
Just thought I'd point that out, since no one else mentioned it.
Quoth our host:
what I really need to see is Bowling for Columbine. On that issue I apparently disagree with Moore, so it'll give me some perspective
What, pray tell, is the stance on the 'issue' Michael Moore takes in Bowling for Columbine? If you think it's "guns are bad, they should be banned," you're a little bit wrong. It's more nuanced than that. A good hunk of BfC is about Barry Glassner's "Culture of Fear" thesis, and not about guns being inherently evil.
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