Nothing personal
Posted in Jefferson D.C. by R Lee Wrights on September 14th, 2009 by Peter Orvetti
“I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to Hell,” minister Steven Anderson told his Arizona congregation last month. “I’d like to see him die of natural causes. I don’t want him to be a martyr; we don’t need another holiday. I’d like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer.” Anderson said these things about a “socialist devil murderer” who happens to be president of the United States. The minister, who brags on his website that he “holds no college degree but has well over 100 chapters of the Bible committed to memory,” was delivering a sermon called “Why I Hate Barack Obama”. That must have made for a heck of a church sign.
“You lie!” shouted Rep. Addison Graves Wilson during a joint session last week, when Obama asserted that a plan that would not finance the health care of illegal immigrants would, well, not finance the health care of illegal immigrants. Wilson was also in attendance at another joint session of Congress six years ago, when another president said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” That actually was a lie, but there was nary a peep from “Joe”.
An Oklahoma state senator said of Obama’s bland address to returning students, “It gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.” The head of the Florida Republican Party said the speech was a sly attempt “to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.” One member of the school board in suburban - and solidly Democratic - Montgomery County, Maryland, said one parent complained, “This is Marxist propaganda.”
An attendee at a “TEA Party” rally, interviewed by CBS News, said of Obama, “I think his agenda is to actually destroy this country.” Like the “birthers”, she seems to think the president is a sort of Mombasian Candidate, sent to infiltrate America from Darkest Africa in order to turn us into… France.
Obama is also being compared to Hitler, doubtless making him the 13th consecutive American president to be tastelessly compared to the vilest man who ever lived. (Well, maybe Gerald Ford avoided the link.) Obama has been tarred as Adolf because he wants to expand the government’s role in health care. I guess comparing him to former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson doesn’t pack the same punch.
Making wild accusations against those in power, and tossing crazed slurs their way, is a great American tradition. It dates back at least as far as the claims in the Philadelphia Aurora, a newspaper edited by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, that President John Adams was plotting to crown himself king. But in the age of cable television and the Internet, the tradition has grown uglier. Bill Clinton was accused of drug-running; George W. Bush was accused of planning and profiting off of 9/11. Bush was booed by Democrats during his 2005 State of the Union address - not over the emotional issue of the war in Iraq, but over his plans to reform the government pension system.
This sort of thing is cleverly stoked by the professional agitators of both left and right. Ann Coulter, a supporter of “sending liberals to Guantanamo,” says “a baseball bat is the most effective way” to talk to a liberal. The woman who said U.S. military power should be used to invade Muslim countries to “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” once said, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
On the other side, Michael Moore called Bush “a deserter, an election thief, a drunk driver, a WMD liar, and a functional illiterate.” He wrote in 2003 that these “bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control.” On September 12, 2001, Moore said the victims of the attacks the day before “did not deserve to die” because they lived in “the places that voted AGAINST Bush.”
As Penn Jillette said in 2004, “The problem I have with Michael Moore is the problem I have with a lot of people who are fanatical and push really hard on things, which is not being willing to say the other side is wrong. They have to be evil.” Progressive columnist Molly Ivins, a veteran Bush critic, wrote of her bête noire that “he is by and large perfectly affable. You would have to work at it to dislike him personally.” Ivins sardonically added, “Did you know that it is quite possible not to hate someone and at the same time notice their policies are disastrous for people in this country? Quite a thought, isn’t it? Grown-ups can actually do that — can think a policy is disastrous without hating the person behind it.”
All four of the major party presidential and vice presidential nominees last year are folks I would not mind having as neighbors. Obama is a smart guy who is devoted to his wife and daughters, John McCain is witty and good-natured, Joe Biden is an avuncular man known for being committed to his friends, Sarah Palin is energetic and fun-loving. They are all good people. I did not vote for any of them.
But for many angry Americans on all sides, the political has become far too personal. A supporter of Obama’s health care proposals bit off the finger of an opponent earlier this month in California. Protestors are showing up at Obama events toting guns - perfectly legal, but an odd and aggressive act. One man who brought two guns to an Obama speech in Arizona is a member of Steven Anderson’s congregation.
Obama is offering sweeping proposals that would substantially alter American life, but he is not inviting Armageddon. We should debate these proposals on their merits, as the founders of the Republic intended. As Ivins said, we need to be grown-ups.
Peter Orvetti was an early political blogger in the United States, running his Orvetti.com political news report from 1997 through 2002. He is a past editorial writer for the Cato Institute, served as Deputy Director of Communications for the Libertarian Party in the lead-up to the 2000 party convention, and has published commentaries in several major newspapers. Contact Mr. Orvetti at peterjorvetti@gmail.com.
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