If as the old cliche used to go – “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” – well Dr. K. points out that “charges of racism” (or as we like to say in the right wing blogosphere “raaaaacism”, always remember that there are five “a”‘s in the word) is the last refuge of a liberal. When you cannot win the argument on merits, bring out the “race card” (just like a portly blogger likes doing) and try to bludgeon your opposition into silence. Well guess what? If 72% of the nation thinks a Ground Zero Mosque is inappropriate yet 52% of the voters in November 2008 (foolishly) pulled the voting lever for Barack Hussein Obama , what we have here would be a classic case of political cognitive dissonance by our self anointed “betters” such as Joe Klein, David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, and the Old Media crowd. The fact that people oppose the persecution of the state of Arizona, the massive (and epic failure) stimulus bill, California’s proposition 8, the coming destruction of our Health Care system, and the construction of an “in your face” Mosque next to the ruins of the World Trade Center on grounds of fiscal sanity, principle and integrity, and common decency – never occurs to the loons at MSNBC, The New York Times and an obscure deranged blog. The more they toss around the race card – the more we know that they are losing and getting panicky.
by Charles Krauthammer
Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.
— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
— Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.
What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.
[…]
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?
The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.
Read the rest here: The last refuge of a liberal
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
