Accusing opponents of dangerous insanity has become so
commonplace in the Age of Obama that such discourse is now taken
for granted. Frank Rich devoted the entirety of his
Sunday New York Times column to insinuating that the
Tea Party movement is a paranoid aggregation motivated by
“frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage,” and
thereby complicit in the Feb. 18 crime of Andrew
Joseph Stack III, who piloted his Piper airplane into an Internal
Revenue Service office in Texas.
This rhetorical conflation of political protests and
Stack’s kamikaze crash required Rich to overlook the quite
specific grievances described by Stack in his profanity-strewn
suicide note. Stack alluded to a “$10,000 helping of justice”
— apparently a penalty for failure to file a tax return several
years ago — and blamed his accountant and the IRS for a more
recent audit involving $12,700 of his wife’s unreported
income.
Along with his strictly personal ax-grinding against the
IRS-CPA axis, Stack also ranted about “the vulgar, corrupt
Catholic church,” “the monsters of organized religion,”
“presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies,” the “rich” and
“wealthy.” None of that bears meaningful resemblance to the
politics of Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Glenn Beck or any of the
other name-brand figures swept up in Frank Rich’s
all-encompassing indictment of what he calls the “anti-government
right.”
Of course, there is no prominent conservative whom Rich
hasn’t similarly smeared in the 16 years since he forsook theater
criticism for political commentary. Like many another latter-day
liberal, Rich is fond of employing dead conservatives as sticks
with which to beat the living. He endorses William F. Buckley Jr.
for having repudiated the John Birch Society in the early 1960s.
(Were we tempted to play along with Rich’s guilt-by-association
game, we might ask whether he also now retroactively approves
Buckley’s early-'60s opposition to the Rumford Fair Housing
Act.)
This reckless invocation of Buckley’s ghost — imagine what
that departed spirit might actually have to say to Frank Rich —
is strictly a means of castigating the Conservative Political
Action Conference for having accepted the Birchers among a
hundred or so co-sponsors of this year’s gathering. CPAC’s
sponsors
represented a broad spectrum of belief from GOProud (gay-friendly
Republicans) to Focus on the Family (not nearly so gay-friendly).
With the conservative “Big Tent” evidently bursting at the seams
— a record 10,000 attended this year’s 37th annual conference —
perhaps the organizers figured there was room enough for the JBS
without being accused of pandering to conspiracy
theorists.
Political double standards being what they are, if CPAC
rents exhibition-hall booth space to any controversial group they
will face the charge that they thereby endorse that group’s
opinion. Meanwhile, we have been assured by the
bien-pensants of the respectable press, Barack Obama
spent 20 years in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church
without absorbing any of the reverend’s
radicalism. And don’t dare mention Obama’s association with
Weather Underground terrorist
Bill Ayers — how mean-spirited of you! — let alone young
Barack’s Marxist mentor, Frank
Marshall Davis.
Conservatives who attempt to turn the tables on the Left in
this manner inevitably discover the liberal concept of innocence
by association. There is no Democratic scoundrel who cannot
exculpate himself by supporting the liberal legislative agenda.
Ted Kennedy was a notorious philanderer whose most remarkable
career achievement was escaping justice for the death of Mary Jo
Kopechne, but he voted pro-choice and sponsored the Violence
Against Women Act, so Teddy was celebrated as a feminist hero.
What liberals celebrate as Democratic virtue, they condemn as
Republican hypocrisy. Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond were both
once segregationist Democrats, but while Thurmond became a
Republican, Byrd remained a Democrat and therefore receives
praise from the liberal press that Thurmond never got.
The only way any Republican can be redeemed is either to
follow the “centrist” path of Arlen Specter, or else die and
become one of those Buckley-type names with which liberals
conjure when condemning the living Right. Combining these two
redemptive strategies is a specialty of certain second-generation
ex-Republicans, among them Frank Schaeffer, whose late father was
a conservative Christian eminence. Last week, Schaeffer uncorked
a
video rant touting his status as “a 57-year-old
white guy who used to be a Republican” and interpreting Dick
Cheney’s CPAC cameo appearance as an expression of racism.
Applying his telepathic powers, Schaeffer declared:
[W]hat they really want to be saying is, “We don’t want a black
guy in the White House…. We’d rather see the economy go
down in flames than work with a black man.” And since
they can’t say that, they spout all this other B.S. But their
own audience knows perfectly well what they’re saying, which is
what Dick Cheney said at CPAC: “We want to make
this guy a one-term president.” He didn’t actually use the
N-word, but you look between the lines and it’s
there: “We don’t want this N in the White House.”
Conservatives could play the “look between the lines” game
and cite this video as evidence that Frank Schaeffer is nutty as
a fruitcake, but no matter how many kooks are attracted to
liberalism — remember
Peggy Joseph, who declared that Obama would pay her mortgage
and put gas in her car? — liberals never see these kooks as
representative of their own ideology.
There is no cure for the liberal disorder of
political psychosis, which erupts whenever it appears
conservatives are gaining ground. If present trends continue,
Republicans ought to make one concession on health-care reform —
free Xanax for Democrats on Nov. 3.
And don’t let Frank Rich get his hands on a pilot’s
license.
