Liberals are... (lotsa jpgs)

Isn't this what psychologists refer to as "projection"?

Exactly. I work in a bookstore and have had to deal with that type of hate literature for the last couple of years.

Do you hide your contempt for the people who buy those books? Like at work, you know you a customer lacks tastebuds if he or she orders the "chicken and biscuits."

And, of course, completely insane:

I try to. I sent a whole bunch of copies of Santorum's book back to the publisher, for no reason other than the fact that Santorum is an intellectually dishonest moron. There I go, I am starting to think the way they do, which is what disturbs me most about this atmosphere of hate.

The depressing thing is that I doubt many of these authors actually believe much of their own rhetoric (well, Savage might), but have noticed that there is always money to be made with an "over-the-top" screed about how venal and subhuman liberals really are.

I get the feeling they all get together at cocktail parties and try to top each other with "ironic" inversion book proposals: "Liberals killed Kennedy and King! No, wait, liberals cause global warming! Oh, oh, I know, liberals started the Klan to discredit the South! And then introduced the AIDS virus into black communities! And they killed Rosa Parks because she was going to spill the beans!"

both extreme ends bait the other, in classic bullying tactics (and, obviously, they want people to "BUY MY BOOK!")... heck, if you poke someone enough, eventually they'll throw a punch, and then you can point and say "see? i told you they were insane!" however, i do think the conservatives have better marketing and publishers, so we see them a lot more. i guess it also depends on the market. in my area, entire QUADRANTS of bookstores are devoted to such "literature."

I just did a quick search for "republican" on amazon and I see many titles with equally outrageous claims. Sensationalism sells. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Goldberg's subtitle: "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Rodham Clinton"

Clearly a book of scholarly restraint.

Say, doesn't the right, here and at large, get all exercised by the absolutely insane and out of bounds and beyond the pale notion that liberal scum would sink so low as to compare Bush, the Bush administration, or Bush policies with HItler, Germany or fascism ?

I guess the odd blog getting carried away about one man is a horrifying lapse of decency, while a major book release slurring about half the country is just good old free speech.

Well, I did that search and I think you're wrong.

There are only a few "anti-Republican" books in the first three pages of hits, and they are either in the "I Hate Republicans Reader" vein, or about specific political issues: How the Religious Right (which is a more specific term than "liberal") is eroding the line between church and state, or how the Republican media machine is damaging democracy.

What's different about right wing attacks is the "eliminationist" tone: the premise that "liberals" are such an odious blight on the body politic that the best solution would be to eliminate them altogether.

"Conservatives have too much control of the media and an elaborately developed system for introducing spin into the national discourse" or "conservative ideology is wrong on all the issues you care about" are of a different order of rhetoric than "conservatives can't be reasoned with and should be dealt with with a baseball bat (pace Coulter) or "conservatives are guilty of treason and actively work to undermine the well being of the United States" or "conservatives are pathologically vicious and are best dealt with as rabid dogs that need shooting" or "conservatives are insane and must be removed from public discourse as we would isolate a disease vector".

Which titles are you referring to again? I did the same search. Organize the results (3000+) according to best-sellers, and you have the relatively tame "Why Dogs are Better than Republicans" coming in at #38. The fact is that these rabid, sensationalist books aren't nearly as popular or as prevalent on the left as on the right. It's kind of like how no popular leftist-limbaugh has emerged throughout all these years.

Being a conservative, I generally have a real hard time supporting these rags of "information." More times than not, they end up being about how the author is a genius and less about anything else. This is my number one complaint with Hannity, its all about him - one big ego-fest. Its quite a sad state of affairs.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

You got it. It's a "show".

I really get the feeling that we're all just part of some massive "Truman Show" where the "powers that bee" are dazing, confusing and distracting us.

This kind of crap is just noise I think. It is caricature and "entertainment".

You found the few books that expose the left. What about the rest of the media?

The media. Sheesh. I mean you don't need a book to tell you the media is anti-'merican. What with those unbecoming videos of the president speaking about anything, and the bizarre insistance at covering up stories that would make the American People Proud to be 'merican, like video or photos of our Soldiers lost in combat, or even worse like when the media asks people in power about mis-appropriation of truth, what does the media know about truth?

The president is truth. The president is for the people, elected by the people, and its a sad fact he can't make sure the media keeps those people happy.

It would be intersting to see a collection of books going the other way.

Al Franken and Michael Moore. Anyone else?

hahah. you guys are just getting silly. i guess if your party is in control of everything while the country gets measurably worse, you gotta blame someone!

Well, I think the point is that Al Franken and Michael Moore don't "go the other way".

They have certainly written books that take specific figures and polices of the right to task, but they haven't written any books, that I know of, whose general premise is "conservatives are the scum of the earth and don't deserve to share the sidewalk with you".

There is always an effort to claim "equal and opposite" in these kind of things, usually shorthanded by "we have Ann Coulter, you have Al Franken, as if the only possible distinguishing feature of a pundit was partisan affiliation.

By that logic, we shouldn't worry if "The Unibomber Manifesto" hits the best-seller charts, because "they have the Wall Street Journal".

"Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot" doesn't even inhabit the same universe as "the 9/11 bombers should have targeted the offices of the New York Times".

dp

What the...... triple post?!

We should also keep in mind that the nutjob wing of the Right (the Coulters and Savages and whatnot) are a crucial part of the RNC's machinerythey make shit up and they say crazy things, make bizarre inferences and basically say all kinds of wild shit that the politicians can't. But it is through them that the rumor and whisper campaigns really take on a national audience. Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity says something like "It sure seems like people associated with Bill Clinton are dying a lot! Makes you wonder whether he's ordering any of these assassinations.... I'M KIDDING! I'M KIDDING. But you still wonder." And then POOF. People all over the country are suggesting that the Clintons organized a series of hits on people. And if they say something REALLY crazy? It makes the news! Free coverage!

It really is brilliant. Evil, but brilliantly evil.

True.

What the right has done is create a self reinforcing ecology that is greater than the sum of its parts, by exploiting the "meta-news" phenomena of reporting "the controversy" around insane bullshit as a story in its own right.

The cable news pundits legitimize the scurrilous "Drudge Report/blogs" level, which has no standards of verification whatsoever, via the "Democrats hotly deny they jerk off to pictures of Iraqi war dead, let's go now to our in-studio expert on sexual perversion" type story, while the completely bat shit "Hillary has the anti-Christ totally whipped' crowd do their bit to make Hannity et al seem "moderate".

The entire apparatus has the effect of acting as a feed back loop which gradually escalates the intensity of the vitriol.

At some point every right wing pundit in America will be somewhere north of "Hillary can't be president because she hates America and yearns to see you and yours placed in concentration camps", at which point I think maybe the cycle will have run its course.

I have to disagree. I don't think it will run its course without a moment where someone can speak up like Joseph Welch did. Maybe Jon Stewart is the Welch of our age. Maybe not. But when Stewart stood up, he did so against the machinery itself, not the ideology or the people behind it.

What we need is someone, somewhere, with the power and the balls to stand up and say "America, haven't you noticed that everything is about being afraid? Haven't you noticed that everything is about division? Haven't you noticed that all of this rhetoric sounds familiar? Haven't you noticed that you're being treated like you're stupid?"

Just the logic, for instance, of the polarization is baffling. Take Frist's outburst after the Reid maneuver (it should be called that, shouldn't it?). He said, on the one hand, that the Democrats had no ideas. OK. Standard talking point of the right. And then he said that he really had hoped the Dems would be there to help them work on important issues. And yet the Dems have no ideas.... Take "John Kerry is the most liberal member of the Senate" plus "John Kerry is a flip flopper." How can you be consistent AND inconsistent?

I'm rambling. But we do need a Joseph Welch. Badly.

I know, "run its course" is probably wildly optimistic, but I fear it's either that or some kind of truly ugly upheaval.

Welch managed to appeal to an intrinsic decent streak in the American psyche, a voice that perhaps had been there all along but had bullied or frightened into silence.

What worries me are two trends that have taken hold since then: the ever coarsening appetite for raw slander and bloodletting, and the notion that "politics" doesn't really matter, that the circuses can be enjoyed at the same level as professional wrestling.

A John Stewart is certainly capable of giving a certain segment of the population pause, but it feels like there are as many or more people that would just want to see him brutalized, in a kind of "Mr. Smarty Pants gets a taste of his own medicine" scene.

Which is why it feels like to me (maybe it's just been a long day) that unless this appetite burns itself out, unless a lot of people just realize that they're hardily sick and tired of being fed a steady diet of deadening, polarizing bullshit, there isn't any figure that could emerge and gentle us back to our senses.

Of all the books have only read Al Franken and that book is garbage, despite his "team of scientific researchers"

I agree. I don't like Al Franken's political books either. I think his writing is taking on many of the worst qualities of the rabid right - invective combined with self-righteousness.

Well they don't call them conservatives. Instead they just call them "Stupid, White Men" as Moore did in his book.

Also you've obviously never heard of Clint Willis and his "I Hate" series which includes the "I Hate Republicans" followed up with more books like....

..The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Hideous Truth About America's Ugliest Conservatives

...The I Hate George W. Bush Reader: Why Dubya Is Wrong About Absolutely Everything

...The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice. . . Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal's War on America

etc... I think the point is made...


Well you seem to point out the key differences in your own examples. The right claims certain people are bad any might even threaten the country. The left meanwhile has folks sending mail bombs, torching SUV's on auto dealership lots, claiming private land for public interest, etc.

Or was that not the point you were trying to get across with the Unibomber example?

Nick

Edit: You pointed out the series and I hadn't gotten that far down yet. Good show.

By censoring what others may buy or read you have promoted the hate and intolerance you claim to stand against.

Nick

Actually having attended the liberal version of such cocktail parties I find it hilariously ironic that all the subjects you talk about have been made about conservatives and the black community. Liberals have claimed for years that AIDS was a engineered under Reagan to kill homosexuals, crack was engineered by the government to destroy the black community, etc.

Truth is stranger than the fiction you hypothesize about.

Nick

Whose point are you making? Citing a number of books from a relatively obscure and unpopular author isn't the effective counterweight you hoped. His books currently rank #365,072, #261,640, #236,518, #230,955, and the star of the group ranks at #62,573. So even if there was something analogous with the content of those books, their unpopularity simple doesn't compare to the popularity and prevalance of books of the slime industry on the right.


Well, we're talking about books here.

I can find these books easily. I don't believe you are using the correct search criteria.


You apparently suffer from the same problem...

I do a search, but not for conservative. I am fairly sure that a search for liberal would not have turned up most of the books BRussell mentioned.

However suppose I search for...fascists...

I get these...

Fascists in Christian Clothing: The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

along with...

Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party : Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics

If I want to go on to Mentally Disordered I can look up books like...


s America Nuts? : Uncle Sam Takes the Couch

Or even the ever popular...

What's the Matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

The real point, as others have made is that it is easy to find examples from all sides and additionally that controversy sells well.

Nick

So if I mention that Treason from Ann Coulter (which was first cited in the initial post) is ranked at # 54,393 while Lying Liars is ranked #1,773 and What's Wrong with Kansas is ranked #1,183 does that somehow disprove your point?

Nick

Ahem!

But you're right about those ragin' Repubs and their books....

Not much of an "ahem" listing. No one would deny that there are strongly partisan leftist ideology books to be had.

The difference, and it really jumps out if you look at the list you linked to and compare it to the books that are cited at the top of this thread, is pretty obvious.

Nick, if you really want to get in a pissing match about "left wing violence", we're going to have to put "torching SUVs" and "appropriating land" up against Timothy McVeigh, abortion clinic bombers, various white supremacist groups,including the Klan, protesters beaten senseless, various left associated organizations having their offices broken into and ransacked (when they're not being watched, infiltrated and harassed by the federal government), not to mention the Bush administrations habit of hustling anyone who hasn't signed a loyalty oath out of tax payer funded events because, you know, if you don't explicitly love Bush you might be all liberal and go crazy and kill everyone.

The idea that it's really those bad old leftists that are beating people up and threatening violence and generally talking about some kind of 'cleansing" to get the fags and hippies and commies and leftists and heathens and tree huggers and pussies and terrorist sympathizers gone, driven out, dealt with is classic Orwellian news-speak.

Kick a guy in the head and then tell everybody you had to because you feared for your life. So cowardly.

Again, I'll have to disagree. Their rhetoric has clearly attempted to create an "us" vs. "them" consideration where they have attempted to make the "them" white males and grab pretty much everyone else for their party.

The reason it doesn't work as well is because while they want women, some of those women happen to be married to those white males, or are sisters to those white males. Black and Hispanic people are friends with those white males and many of them do not react well to the religious attacks that are also levied against white men in the guise of overcoming a historical state/church enforced patriarchy.

This leads to this sort of mushy-mouthed double talking that is not an effective political attack or creates a sort of logical incongruence that cannot win over voters. They are so used to doing it in the sex/race realm that they cannot even understand how badly it sounds in other areas.

One of the best attacks has been how men are basically evil. They are potential rapists. They achieve their means only through violence and beat their wives on Super Bowl Sunday. They are sexual predators who want to harm adult women and children of both sexes as well.

Yet what is the number one historical way it is claimed that white men suppressed black men? Portraying them as sexual predators who would take white women. Black men were beings who were not in control of their sexual impulses, etc.

So then you end up with this argument that ALL men are this way, but well... not black men because that would be a sign that you are initiating a form of racism against them.

A great example of this outside of the 'isms is the attempt to gain credibility as both the anti and pro-war party at the same time. Kerry for example wanted to portray himself as both duped about the war intelligence yet also able to run a more efficient or better war campaign. This type of reasoning just doesn't fly well. Sure it can be explained, rationalized, etc. However at the end of the day, you can't claim to have been duped and also have the expertise to do a better job at the same time. Something inside people tells them that if you truly were better informed then you shouldn't have gotten duped in the first place. When you tell them that you still support the decision you made on top of this, it just becomes incomprehensible.

Nick

The bottom line is this:

Republicrat or Democan, ever growing numbers of their ranks are so stupid they believe their team is ultimately good for the country, despite flaws they are willing to admit exist, while the other team is ultimately bad for the country and nothing they do has any redeeming value or genuine merit.

Until the moderates of this country, left and right leaning alike, get pissed off enough at the whiney brats on both sides and give rise to a viable 3rd party, this supidity will only continue to increase.

Right now, both parties are detrimental to this country.

you're right, but i think there are moderates in both parties as it stands. it's hard to figure out which part of the republican party the democrats should appreciate though. before this bush, as a democrat i always admired the republicans commitments to fiscal responsibility. granted, reagan or bush 1 weren't the best at that, but it still seemed to be something the party had as a value. now, the democrats are the ones pushing fiscal responsibility.

i to some extent admire the republicans' constant talk about personal responsibility, but who doesn't believe in personal responsibility? plus, it's hard to take that seriously when you look at the irresponsibile things from the bush admin.

so, i thought i was going to write this and point out some of the good things about the republicans, but it is actually hard to think of redeeming qualities. i do know that the republicans that i know have plenty of valuable political viewpoints, but from the administration, i can't help but think they aren't even representing the GOP very well.

First and foremost pointing out that both sides can have some extremeists isn't news to me and I don't have to be convinced of this. It is you my friend who claimed this was a one way street. You still do because you declare that the abortion doctor murderer and say the Unibomber are not the same. You declare one worse and only condemn on of them.

You also have your history wrong. It is not the Republican party that has a former clansman in the Senate. It is not the Republican party that split the union to keep slaves or that filibustered the civil rights act.

Also if you think you can go to some Democratic party function or speech and not be hustled out of the building, or not even allowed entrance in the first place because you don't have the proper "credentials" then you are living in a fantasyland because I posted the very links showing such things in the last election and have witnessed and had such thing occur to me as far back as 1996 when I went to a Clinton rally in Orange County that required such things.

Stop drinking the kool-aid. The people in one party aren't above human nature.

Nick