Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the seemingly coordinated effort by Democrats to lately play the insanity card against conservatives?
Well, Jon Stewart is planning what he claims will be a huge rally next weekend called the “Restoring Sanity” demonstration. Odd, really, since Jon Stewart comes across as always a few screws short of a full brain. Nevertheless, Stewart says his rally will be the national antidote to the Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” rally, which drew nearly half a million cheerful Americans to the nation’s capitol in August.
It might behoove a sentient American to ponder whether Jon Stewart considers qualities like cheerfulness, religiosity, a penchant for cleanliness, and a love of American liberty — which were on ample display during Beck’s rally — to be signs of mental illness.
It would seem so and that puts Jon Stewart right in the same league with the old Soviet regime and the way they treated their own dissidents. The Soviets were infamous for declaring any vocal dissident “insane,” putting them in psychiatric “hospitals,” turning the shock therapy machines to full voltage, and throwing away the keys.
Now, Stewart makes it all come off as though he were making a huge, political joke out of this. He is, after all, a comedian, whose entire career has been aimed at convincing America’s youth that he is giving them hard news with just a little entertainment thrown in the mix. But when a significant portion of American young people use Stewart’s comedic routines as their primary source of news, it ought to at least worry the greater public a bit when Stewart deems those Obama dissidents as “insane.”
To add government support for Stewart’s claim on the “insanity” of bucking Democrat policies, President Obama has just announced that he plans to appear on Comedy Central with Stewart to rev-up the “Restore Sanity” crowd. In this unseemly — and extremely unpresidential — appearance, Obama would seem to be throwing the entire weight of the U.S. government into this old Soviet tactical slander against dissidents.
Hopefully, we’re still far removed from the day when an American president will use his power to round up Tea Partiers and have them thrown into psychiatric hospitals for their treatment and reeducation. But anyone with a cautious eye towards state power ought to be trembling a bit at the awful similarities here.
The president has been hurling accusatory, mocking verbal arrows at Fox News and conservative talk radio since taking office. In his very first sit-down with Republican legislators in early 2009, Obama insisted that they “couldn’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to get things done.” Since then, Obama has used the world’s most powerful bully-pulpit to harass any news outlet which bothered to shine a flashlight of scrutiny onto his otherwise hailed-as-brilliant policies.
Now, comes the firing of Juan Williams from NPR. And the most worrisome aspect of this firing is that it appears to have been a retribution not really for making “bigoted” comments about Muslims. Instead, it was a clear message about the “insanity” of Juan for appearing on Fox News. The CEO of NPR actually went on national television and declared that Mr. Williams “ought to keep those feelings between himself and his psychiatrist.” Even though she has since apologized and walked back the remark, it ought to serve as a warning sign to all Americans that this Soviet-styled attack on a dissenter’s mental health is entrenched among the elites and easily springs to their minds when being asked to explain their free-speech-chilling firing decisions.
From where I’m sitting, all of these seemingly coordinated efforts by Democrats and their press minions to label Party dissidents as “insane” are not only creepy, they smack of tactics widely used by the most repressive, most brutal tyrannies the world has ever known.
They smack of Soviet-style, scientific tyranny in the worst way imaginable.
Pulling the insanity card may seem cute when Jon Stewart plays it with that cockeyed grin of his, adding a boyish smirk for good measure, but it may not all end in fun and games for those against whom it is being employed.
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