by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n What is weird about the liberal hysteria to the obstreperous (and occasionally rude) town meetings is the complete amnesia about what constitutes reckless public discourse.<\/p>\n <\/em>At one time not so long ago, those on the Left, and mainstream Democrats as well, apparently believed inflammatory language, Hitler parallels, and perverse expressions of real hatred were acceptable means to the noble end of discrediting the Bush presidency.<\/p>\n <\/em>During the bleak days of Iraq, demonstrators carried swastikas and Hitler portraits of Bush habitually. Nicholson Baker wrote a novel in which characters are contemplating killing Bush. Films were praised imagining the assassination of the president. Michael Moore, courted by the Democratic elite, lamented that bin Laden on 9\/11 had hit a blue state \u2014 and once compared the killers of Americans in Iraq to Minutemen.<\/p>\n <\/em>Al Gore customarily used excessive language like “brown shirts.” Senators Durbin, Kennedy, and others compared our soldiers to Saddamites, Pol Pot\u2019s killers, and Nazis. Ward Churchill compared the victims in the Twin Tower to \u201clittle Eichmanns.\u201d Sen. Robert Byrd likened Pres. George W. Bush\u2019s policies to what transpired in Nazi Germany. Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros agreed with Fidel Castro, the Iranians, and North Koreans in comparing Bush to Hitler.<\/p>\n <\/em>Jonathan Chait wrote in the\u00a0New Republic<\/em>\u00a0on why \u201cI hate George W. Bush.\u201d Garrison Keillor likened Bush\u2019s Republicans to \u201cbrown shirts in pinstripes.\u201d Even old hero Sen. John Glenn said of the Bush agenda: \u201cIt\u2019s the old Hitler business.\u201d In 1984, the Guardian\u2019s Charles Brooker declared:<\/p>\n On November 2, the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. 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 Hinckley Jr. \u2014 where are you now that we need you?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Democrats were furious that Rush Limbaugh wanted Obama\u2019s agenda to fail, but I think it was their National Chairman Howard Dean himself who went way beyond Limbaugh when he said publicly, \u201cI hate the Republicans and everything they stand for,\u201d and, \u201cThis is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.\u201d<\/p>\n Didn\u2019t NAACP chairman Julian Bond once declare\u00a0of the Bush administration, \u201cTheir idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side?\u201d<\/p>\n In comparison to all that, the outrage of a few private citizens \u2014 none of them in government, prominent in the arts, or political commentators \u2014 seems rather mild. In truth, the 2000s marked the liberal reversion to the hateful speech of the 1950s extreme Right, but with a twist. In the 1950s, there were liberal humanists who rose up to deplore the cheap slurs of Joe McCarthy & Co.; by 2001, there were none to object to the above sort of speech.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner What is weird about the liberal hysteria to the obstreperous (and occasionally rude) town meetings is the complete amnesia about what constitutes reckless public discourse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[653],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-BN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4353,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hitler-hitler-everwhere\/","url_meta":{"origin":2343,"position":0},"title":"Hitler, Hitler, Everwhere","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was not alone when he recently compared American behavior at Guantanamo Bay to that of \"Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings.\" Tarring Bush\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2005"","block_context":{"text":"June 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/june-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4452,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/little-eichmanns-and-digital-brownshirts\/","url_meta":{"origin":2343,"position":1},"title":"“Little Eichmanns” and “Digital Brownshirts”","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 18, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Deconstructing the Hitlerian slur by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The effort to remove fascists in the Middle East and jump-start democracy, for all its ups and downs, has been opposed not just by principled critics who bristled at tactics and strategy, but also by peculiarly vehement cynics here\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "March 2005"","block_context":{"text":"March 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/march-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3507,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-legacy-of-the-bush-administration\/","url_meta":{"origin":2343,"position":2},"title":"The Legacy of the Bush Administration?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 24, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson The American This article appears in the \"Geopolitics\" section of the recent issue of\u00a0The American. By October, 15 months before his presidency would end, George Bush\u2019s approval ratings still hovered around 30 percent. His administration will go down, say historians such as Columbia\u2019s Eric Foner and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2007"","block_context":{"text":"October 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/october-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2164,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-if-mr-president\/","url_meta":{"origin":2343,"position":3},"title":"What If?–Mr. President","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Not in Good Form Based on a few of President Obama\u2019s statements, this was not a particularly good week for the administration. In a disturbing pattern, we are beginning to learn far more about Obama in his impromptu moments, in periods of national crisis,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2009"","block_context":{"text":"November 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/november-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9649,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/9649-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":2343,"position":4},"title":"From an Angry Reader: Hello\u2026","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"From an Angry Reader: Hello Mr Hanson. I read your articles on Townhall.com and have a question on something you wrote in Enemies Of Language. In your article you refer to Nazi Germany as having been \u201cright wing.\u201d This is a question that I have been wanting to pose so\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Angry Reader"","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6763,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-moral-decline-of-oprah\/","url_meta":{"origin":2343,"position":5},"title":"The Moral Decline of Oprah","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0NRO's The Corner\u00a0 Multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey, after her surreal $38,000 handbag \u201cracism\u201d encounter in Switzerland, has just weighed in again on race and the presidency, as yet the nth way of\u00a0hyping her new film: \u201cThere\u2019s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mainstream Media"","block_context":{"text":"Mainstream Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/mainstream-media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/2246359642_4c2a25af98-300x297.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2344,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}