The American Spectator

Political Hay

(Page 2 of 3)

How else to compare the taunting by left-wingers of JFK-supporter Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat, as "Jew" Lieberman and the mind-boggling anti-Israel sentiments of the Left than with the Dallas reports of "Jewish stores...smeared with crude swastikas"? And who could possibly miss the bowing and scraping of Democratic presidential candidates, Senators and Congressmen to the likes of the Daily Kos and MoveOn.org in Manchester's description of the Mayor of Dallas as being "as respectful of the prevailing political winds as any German functionary"? Ditto does Manchester's portrayal as the deliberate decision of elected Dallas officials in general to display "an astonishing indifference" to radical excesses compare in stunning fashion to entire swaths of elected Democratic officeholders on today's stage.

And need it be said that Manchester's evocations of the Dallas Morning News of 1963 are instantly recognizable viewing today's Internet creations such as the Daily Kos and sites like Media Matters?

There is one other significant change here as well. Manchester went to great lengths to paint a portrait of Dallas as a freakish exception, with the larger world of American politics and its polished and prominent participants rejecting such vapors. Startlingly, this is not the case with the virus sweeping the Democratic Party and the liberal movement today.

COME WITH ME NOW to the la-la land of political hatred that liberals once scorned as a place filled with a population of moronic yahoos and dangerous primitives. Listen to the political language of today as used by our liberal friends.

* George Bush is leading a "deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States way of governing." -- PBS Commentator and former LBJ White House aide Bill Moyers. Moyers, by the way, was advancing JFK's stop-that-would-never-be in Austin, Texas that November 22nd as flyers were circulated in Dallas accusing JFK of "treason" and "betraying the Constitution." One wonders whether Moyers ever reflects on the dangers of becoming what one once most justifiably despised.

* The Bush White House is staffed by "the Taliban wing of American politics." -- NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

* "Like Fredo, somebody ought to take him out fishing and pfffttt." -- Air America hostess Randi Rhodes, conjuring up the murder scene of Fredo Corleone from The Godfather, replete with the imitation of a gunshot.

* George Bush is a "thug" and a "killer" -- Actress and current co-host of the ABC TV-show The View, Whoopi Goldberg.

* "The Bush administration and the Nazi and Communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear....Indeed the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries....our open society is being endangered by the policies followed by the Bush administration." -- Financier and Democratic Party Fundraiser George Soros.

* If Bush is elected "rape will be legal." -- Actress Cameron Diaz

* Bush is an "unelected (expletive) OILMAN!" who is "squatting" in the White House. Novelist Nicholas Baker in Checkpoint, his novel about assassinating Bush.

What makes one stop and shake one's head in wonder is the distance liberals have traveled from November of 1963 to the 44th following November. Instead of JFK's assassination serving as a warning of the dangers of extremism, the lessons learned by modern liberals is not only to imitate the behavior Manchester chronicles in the Dallas of 1963, but to nationalize it. Note the kind of people who are out there with their Bush-hatred as compared to those quoted by Manchester. In 1963 we were talking about local officials and anonymous citizens. Having been around at the time I have no memory of former White House aides, prominent political leaders, national radio hosts, or popular actresses on popular TV shrieking such crazed lunacy into any available microphone or television camera. Much less a prominent novelist scribbling them into "fiction." The quotes above are not only not the rare exception, they are so much the rule they have acquired a nickname: BDS, or Bush-Derangement-Syndrome.

p>William Manchester ends his book by imagining a trespasser stumbling upon a box containing both the wedding dress of Jacqueline Kennedy and the bloody pink suit she wore that day in Dallas. Manchester posits the trespasser as someone from the distant future, from a "land so remote" that he has no understanding of who they belonged to. The author concludes: br> /p>

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