by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers
Angry Reader #4 wrote:
You know, I remember, before Pajamas media, when I respected some of the writers that are now here (such as VDH) — but they’ve all turned into crazy cranks.
This little virtual world they’ve built themselves is bad for their brains. They were already nuts before the midterms, but the midterms didn’t help. Everyone seemed to have taken the wrong lesson from it.
No one here can take the truth but it is:
1) The tea party is poison
2) the Birchers you stole your paranoid rants from are poison
3) the Ryandians are poison
4) those RINOs [Republican In Name Only] that you spend all your time excommunicating were responsible and respectable and the sane part of the public wants them back.”
VDH replied:
Note Mitt Romney was not a tea-partier. The John Birchers were discredited years ago by National Review and don’t really exist. I can’t think of anyone associated with Romney that was a devotee of Ms. Rand. In other words, your entire argument is mythical and a mere rant. Romney lost because between March and May, after a tough primary, he did not have the money to reply to a $300-million negative ad campaign, launched by Obama who simultaneously preached civility — one that reduced Romney to an outsourcing, felon, tax-cheating, plutocratic, near killer of the uninsured, whose elevator came at the expense of the poor. He never was able to recover from that, and the result was that millions of key working class voters in swing states simply stayed home — sick of Obama but worried that Romney was “one of them.”
But if you are looking for extremists, try these: the Rev. Joseph Lowery gave the benediction at Obama’s 2008 inauguration; a week before the election he gave another public address in which he stated that whites belong in Hell — to no comment from the president or his supporters.
We were told for much of 2012 that raising rates on the top 1% would solve the deficit program; now we learn that the President’s plan would raise about $80 billion to set against the $1.2 trillion that we borrow yearly. Yet, he refuses to raise taxes on anyone else, cut the budget, or deal with entitlements. He talks about the “Clinton tax rates” which he will return us to — sorta, kinda, because he refuses to go back to them on everyone, the only way to raise real money. Nor will he go back to the “Clinton spending cuts.” So we are left with demagoguery, nothing more.
Note the angry reader does not mention that Obamacare, which was promised not to raise taxes, will see both taxes and costs soar, which is why 2,000 corporations and unions, many of them campaign donators, have already received exemptions. No need to mention Benghazi, other than to suggest it dwarfs the Scooter Libby affair, which earned non-stop media attention and a special prosecutor. And on and on…
©2012 Victor Davis Hanson
