Tom Friedman fears for his country because today’s political mood is so raw. It reminds the eminent New York Times columnist, he wrote this week, of the mood in Israel just before Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 — a time when “extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin.”
“The parallels to Israel then and America today turn my stomach,” Friedman laments, adding his voice to many calling for more civility in political discourse.
He’ll get no argument here about civility. From the boorishness of Joe Wilson and the fear-mongering of some radio talkers to the crackpot comparisons of the president to Hitler — not to mention the obsessive quest to prove Barack Obama is foreign born — some critics of the president have indeed leaped off the cliff.
But if Friedman considers the mood today a Petri dish for assassins, how would he describe the atmosphere during the previous presidency?
Midway through Friedman’s column we are told that the mood during George W. Bush’s tenure was bad, too — but never so bad, evidently, that it provoked the author then to suggest we were on the brink of a precipice and that liberals “who’d winked at it all” would find themselves complicit if a hothead picked up a gun to silence the commander in chief.
I happened to read Friedman’s column while angry e-mails were streaming into my box in response to a column in which I denounced KBDI-Channel 12’s decision to air 9/11 Truther documentaries. Scores of my correspondents defended the station, protesting that President Bush and his team had “sought a new Pearl Harbor to justify their proposed military conquests and arms buildup,” to quote a fairly typical passage. It was time for scum like me to examine the evidence, they demanded.
This is lunacy squared — a president and his buddies committing high treason by pulling off an incredibly complex plot to murder thousands of office workers — yet such is the hatred for all things Bush that millions of Americans believe it. Until recently, there was one even working in Obama’s White House.
And why wouldn’t they, given the green light for such twisted hatred that was long provided by many esteemed Americans? As Peter Wehner observed recently on Commentary Magazine’s blog, even a Democratic presidential candidate — Howard Dean in 2003 — described the notion that Bush might have been “warned ahead of time (about 9/11) by the Saudis” as “most interesting.”
Meanwhile, the roll call of prominent pols and commentators who accused Bush of being a despicable liar (Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry and a legion of others), who claimed he’d “betrayed” his country (Gore, Harry Reid, etc.), or who equated Republicans with “brownshirts” or Nazis (Gore, John Glenn, Garrison Keillor and many more) is almost mind-boggling.
No wonder Michael Moore’s pulp propaganda attack on Bush, “Fahrenheit 911,” became such a hit and was praised so lavishly (one of Carter’s favorite movies, he said). Or that it was once fashionable not only to volunteer that you hated Bush but that you’d like to see him dead. In a recent issue of National Review, Jay Nordlinger recounts a host of these ugly eruptions, including Kerry joking with Bill Maher in 2006 that he “could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” Funny, no?
Friedman believes that “a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.” Maybe so, but it wasn’t just fringe idiots who debased anti-Bush rhetoric with the crudest name-calling and vilest accusations. It was genuine opinion leaders and members of Congress such as Rep. Pete Stark, who just two years ago said troops were being sent to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”
Fortunately, the rhetorical excesses of the Obama haters are different so far in at least three respects.
First, they’re usually not as vituperative.
Second, they’re not nearly as common.
And third, they’re being subjected, finally, to the withering criticism of establishment figures like Friedman.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
