Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose!
Michael Gerson’s latest op-ed, “None Dare Call It Desperation:”
It is difficult to overstate how offensive elected Republicans find the sabotage accusation, which Obama himself has come very close to making. During the run-up to the midterm election, the president told a town hall meeting in Racine, Wis.: “Before I was even inaugurated, there were leaders on the other side of the aisle who got together and they made the calculation that if Obama fails, then we win.” Some Republican leaders naturally took this as an attack on their motives. Was the president really contending that Republican representatives want their constituents to be unemployed in order to gain a political benefit for themselves? No charge from the campaign more effectively undermined the possibility of future cooperation.The sabotage accusation, once implicit, is now direct among panicked progressives. Part of the intention seems to be strategic — to discourage Obama from considering Clintonian ideological triangulation. No centrist concessions, the argument goes, will appease Republicans who hate the president more than they love the country. So Obama should double down on liberalism, once again.
AdvertisementIt is very bad political advice. It also indicates a movement losing contact with political reality. When an ideology stumbles, its adherents can always turn to alcohol — or to conspiracy theories. It is easier to recover from alcohol. Conspiracy thinking is not only addictive, it is tiresome. It precludes the possibility of interesting policy debate or genuine disagreement — how can you argue with a plot?
In 1964, John Stormer, a sabotage theorist of the right, came out with the book “None Dare Call it Treason,” which asked: “Is there a conspiratorial plan to destroy the United States into which foreign aid, planned inflation, distortion of treaty-making powers and disarmament all fit?” Stormer’s progressive descendants are just as discrediting to the ideas they claim to serve.
Far left radio talker Mike Papantonio to MSNBC anchor/fellow leftwing talk radio host Ed Schultz:
Ed, when [Obama] came into office, remember what he did. We saw Geithner, we saw Summers, we saw Eric Holder, we saw all the folks who’ve been tied to the Chamber of Commerce forever. And what he’s forgotten is, when he makes nice with the Chamber of Commerce, you know what he’s really doing? He’s making nice with a bunch of inheritance babies, an inheritance, the billionaires who want politics in America to be run according to the American Crossroads agenda or the insane Heritage Foundation agenda. It’s the Koch family, the Richard Mellon Scaife group, the inheritance babies who could care less about democracy, all they care about, can we squeeze another dime out of the American public.
In his run-down yesterday of even more examples of vitriolic leftwingers melting down over their president’s losses at the polls this month, James Taranto caught a New York Times journalist making an inadvertendly revealing Freudian slip: “Real life has a way of intruding on Barack Obama’s presidency.”
Real life has a way of intruding on the left as well from time to time; the near-nuclear reaction it can cause can be quite astonishing to watch, except that the rest of us are caught in the crossfire. While the left are having meltdowns over the president’s losses last month, it’s worth remembering that his party still controls the White House, the Senate, numerous state houses, academia, Hollywood, the news media, two-thirds of the auto industry and increasingly, the health care industry. They’re playing a very long game, one that makes an occasional election loss surprisingly tolerable, media histrionics not withstanding.
Related: For the gals at the View, “National Opt-Out Day No Better Than a Terrorist Attack.”
Related: “MSNBC Inspires Left-Wing Hate Hoax.”
(Concept H/T: SDA.)
Update (11/27): Stacy McCain believes that “Michael Gerson’s invocation of John Stormer’s 1964 book None Dare Call It Treason is unfair to John Stormer, a patriotic American whom I interviewed in 1999.”
Not sure I get the moral equivalency argument about the “right wing conspiracy theorists”.
Does this include the works by David Horowitz, Roger Simon and Stanley Kurtz?
Sometimes when they say you are wearing a tin foil hat, it’s a ploy to discredit what you are really seeing.
I think I play fairly and decide issues based upon the information I receive. But I also believe that retreating or averting my gaze so that I won’t be marginalized by folks who refuse to acknowledge what is there to be seen. Or worse, want to hide it from view,
When there is a conspiracy of sorts, lurking in the shadows, when the information being given is distorted and warped, when the truth is bastardized, I don’t believe one has to back down, quiver and equivocate in pointing it out.
Gerson’s inclusion of Stormer in the piece waters down the point needlessly. It weakens the argument, it doesn’t make it “balanced”, it makes it lose equilibrium.
It suggests “people who see conspiracies on BOTH sides are nuts”.
This suggests that “Blacklisting Myself”, “The Shadow Party” and “Radical-In-Chief” are delusional works. That JournoList members didn’t exist. That the lapdog media doesn’t bury stories, distort the truth and shill for leftism.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But why bring up Bill Clinton.
Gerson is a hard-core rino / centrist / ruling-class guy. People like him are essentially principle=free. They are great at argument, but can take whatever side that suits their purpose today. Unfortunately, that sort of Republican, as you know, quickly shoved the Reaganites aside and took over the party. For them, everything is politics; the country be damned. Rove is another example. Karl could just as easity be a liberal as a conservative. Dick Morris, imo, has evolved differently. He was that type of person for decades, but now seems to have adopted principles as a life view (of course, many of these people are so slippery that Morris’ conversion could well be a tactic to sell more books.) Dubya was a lot the same, except when 9/11 alerted his patriotism.
I’m not saying the Gersons and Roves of the world aren’t useful. They certainly are. Rove is sort of a genius and Gerson may be as well. But they have to be viewed as hammers; useful for some purposes; dangerous when off-task.
“They’re playing a very long game, one that makes an occasional election loss surprisingly tolerable, media histrionics not withstanding.”
For sure.
From my perspective, the volcano of invective accusing the right of sabotage is pure projection. That is exactly what the left has been doing for about 70 years. It’s a fact, not an opinion.
And it ties into the long game. That game has been going on for three generations, at least, a fact that I have a hard time understanding. The way I see the world, human being’s horizon is about 2 or 3 generations. and is focussed almost exclusively on children and grand children. A person might want a different political system, but the reason for it is to improve life for oneself and one’s progeny. And I can’t reconcile that with the statism / hard left mentality, which I see is purely focussed on improving one’s own life. How on earth can anybody except a tiny fee hard-core ideological cadre thing that creating a w-class commissar / serf system can help one’s descendents. So I struggle to understand what a guy like Alinsky (or his disciples) was doing. He wasn’t going to be a guy at the top. What on earth are people like him thinking. Are they just so pristinely evil that they want to destroy the world? What on earth are they thinking.