By Warren Henry
Tuesday, September 06, 2016
New York Times
columnist Frank Bruni, considering the charges of racism and hate-mongering
lodged against GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, asks: “Did Democrats cry
wolf so many times before Trump that no one hears or heeds them now?” He quotes
Democratic communications maven Howard Wolfson, who worked on the campaigns of
John F. Kerry and Hillary Clinton, as concluding there is some truth to the
charge.
There has been pushback against this heresy in the world
of Acela journalism, mostly on Twitter, but most notably from Chris Cillizza in
the Washington Post. Cillizza
asserted:
First, while the rhetoric about
George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney was overheated at times — and there
are certainly anecdotes to be mined in each case — they never faced anything
close to the consistent drumbeat of accusations about racism, sexism,
demagoguery or fascism, as Trump has.
Bush was painted as not particularly
bright, as deceiving the country into going to war, and later on as being
uncaring in the face of Hurricane Katrina. Kanye West intoned during a Katrina
benefit show that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but the idea
that Bush was a racist, demagogue, or fascist was never widely circulated.
Were You Around
for the Bush Years?
I am not sure where Cillizza was during the Bush
administration. During the controversy over Bush’s Electoral College win, Jesse
Jackson claimed the Bush campaign had used “Nazi tactics” and his brother Jeb
had targeted Holocaust victims (part of a history of Jackson’s Nazi analogies).
Antiwar demonstrations routinely featured “Bush as
Hitler” imagery. Iconic
columnist Jimmy Breslin directly compared Bush’s speech at the outset of the
Iraq War to one Hitler gave when launching World War II. Former United Nations
weapons inspector Scott Ritter compared the invasion of Iraq to Hitler’s
invasion of Poland. Ralph Nader quoted Michael Kinsley as claiming “in terms of
the power he now claims, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time
to dictator of the world.”
Cindy Sheehan, who was afforded “absolute moral
authority” and passels of pixels to attack the Bush administration after she
lost her son Casey in Iraq, compared Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to
Hitler and Stalin. Sen. John Glenn, acting as a surrogate for Kerry’s 2004
campaign, compared alleged GOP misstatements to the propaganda of Nazi Germany.
Progressive mega-financier George Soros made similar claims regarding GOP
propaganda.
Sen. Robert Byrd, ironically a former Klansman, launched
such attacks more than once. Al Gore accused the Bush administration of working
with “digital brownshirts” to suppress dissent from the media. Rep. Keith
Ellison compared the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 to the Reichstag
fire that assisted Hitler’s rise to power. Television producer Ed Gernon was
fired from the CBS miniseries, “Hitler: The Rise of Evil,” after telling the
media that Bush’s post-9/11 policies and the popular support for them were
reminiscent of—you guessed it—Nazi Germany.
Newsweek later
proclaimed that, with respect to the NSA eavesdropping program, “We’re seeing
clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or
in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.” Slate’s
Jacob Weisberg asked whether Bush was turning America into an elected
dictatorship. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, in full self-righteous dudgeon, called
Bush a fascist during one of Olbermann’s famous “Special Comments.”
Chris Matthews chatted with far-left propagandist Michael
Moore about the idea of trying the administration Nuremberg-style for waging
the Iraq War. Former Gore adviser Naomi Wolf wrote that Bush was taking all the
steps necessary to create a fascist America. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s “The Great Unraveling”
featured a jacket with Dick Cheney sporting a Hitler-esque mustache made of
oil.
In “Liberal Fascism,” Jonah Goldberg notes that Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. compared the Bush years to the rise of Mussolini, while Norman
Mailer called America a “pre-fascist society,” and renowned political scientist
Theodore Lowi called the Republicans “friendly fascists.” Andrew Sullivan, who
bows to no man regarding hysterical hyperbole, saw nascent dictatorship even in
the Bush administration’s response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Did You Watch a
Movie or Listen to Music Then?
Cillizza did manage to recall Kanye’s televised attack on
Bush. But West was far from alone among those in pop culture and the arts
attacking Bush and other GOP nominees. That list includes, but is not limited
to Linda Ronstadt, Tony Bennett, Black Sabbath, and Madonna (who likened McCain
to Hitler, among other dictators).
When the antiwar group World Can’t Wait ran a full-page
ad in USA Today comparing Bush to
Hitler and claimed “[t]he Bush regime is setting out to radically remake
society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come,” it was
signed by Ed Asner, Ed Begley Jr., Harry Belafonte, Gabriel Byrne, Rep. John
Conyers Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Steve Earle, Daniel Ellsberg, Eve Ensler,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jane Fonda, Paul Haggis, Kathleen Hanna, Rev. Jesse L.
Jackson, Rickie Lee Jones, Casey Kasem, Ron Kovic, Jonathan Kozol, Jessica
Lange, Lewis Lapham, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Tom Morello, Rep. Major Owens,
Harvey Pekar, Sean Penn, Harold Pinter, Mark Ruffalo, Rep. Bobby Rush, Susan
Sarandon, Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Sheen, Gloria Steinem, Studs Terkel, Gore
Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Rep. Maxine Waters, Cornel West, and Howard
Zinn—to name a few.
In 2005, Rep. Charlie Rangel claimed “George Bush is our
Bull Connor,” referring to the Birmingham, Alabama police commissioner who in
1963 turned fire hoses and attack dogs on blacks and other civil rights
protesters, including Martin Luther King Jr. (Note: Connor was a Democrat.)
This absurd charge received thunderous applause at a Congressional Black Caucus
town hall meeting attended by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and some of
Rangel’s colleagues in the House. If the establishment press ever asked Obama
or Clinton about Rangel’s inflammatory speech—as any Republican would be about
a similarly offensive slander—I could find no record of it.
Or Maybe You
Weren’t Reading Newspapers
Cillizza may be partially correct to claim there was less
of a drumbeat of such claims against McCain and Romney. Of course, that
assertion overlooks that neither of those men became president, and both
campaigns were likely quite aware they could be attacked as racists while
running against Obama. But even a few moments with a search engine would have
revealed Rep. John Lewis comparing McCain rallies to those held by George
Wallace.
And Ezra Klein asserting a McCain campaign video looked
like “an over-the-top parody of fascist campaign propaganda from a movie, and
sounds like Triumph of the Will.” And
Josh Marshall claiming that McCain’s ad painting Obama as a celebrity candidate
was intended to link Obama to “oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women.”
And the media debate over the seminal question of whether McCain referring to
Obama as “that one” was racist. And the Obama campaign’s claim that McCain was
playing racial politics for daring to suggest that Obama was preemptively
accusing him and the GOP generally of racism.
Again, this list is hardly comprehensive. Perhaps
Cillizza and people like him do not remember the sort of horse manure
progressives spread about Republican nominees in every election cycle precisely
because it is so ridiculous and embarrassing to the Left. Or perhaps these
comments do not strike the establishment media as scandalous simply because
Democrats made them.
Or perhaps Cillizza and others have failed to hear this
drumbeat because the drum sounded so softly on the pages of Acela journalism.
To be sure, some of the Democratic attacks mentioned above were reported by
CBS, CNN, and even the Washington Post,
but none received the national media firestorm that comments from Republicans like
senatorial candidate Todd Akin would. To the contrary, the Washington Post’s mention of Glenn’s Nazi analogy was tossed off in
the final paragraph of a story as a comment of trivial consequence.
Maybe Your Sources
Are Biased
Beltway journalists largely live in the world where polls
about GOP birthers are hyped immediately (despite birtherism originating with Clinton
supporters) but the majority of Democrats who thought Bush was complicit in
the 9/11 attacks does not get blurbed until 2011.
The media rightly excoriated Trump for not immediately
disavowing the Klan in a television interview. In contrast, The New York Times, Chris Matthews, and
many others gushed when Obama delivered a prepared speech in which he generally
criticized the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but largely avoided explaining his
longstanding membership in a church preaching black identity politics, and
asserted he could no more disown Wright than he could the black community or
his white grandmother.
Of course, Wright then went on a media tour so typically
odious that Obama dumped him for good a month later. The Acela press also
cheered that move and generally avoided mentioning the flip-flop, except
perhaps as evidence of Obama’s keen political instincts.
Republicans, on the other hand, live in the world where
all of those irresponsible attacks by Democrats are ignored or downplayed by
the national media. They live in the world where the double-standards of the
Democrat apparat and the establishment media (Do I repeat myself?) are glaring.
They note that the establishment media routinely goes easy on remarks by
Democrats that would be multi-day sagas and possible career-enders if uttered
by a Republican.
They live in the world in which it was a minor story when
Vice President Joe Biden told a crowd including many African-Americans that
Romney would “put y’all back in chains” by unshackling Wall Street. They know
Biden said that after skating on his remark that “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven
or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.”
They recognize that when Hillary Clinton cannot tell you
about a meaningful conversation with her black friends, but can say they have
tried to expand her musical tastes, it does not seem to generate the same sort
of press it would coming out of a GOP nominee’s mouth. In this world, it is not
remotely surprising that many Republicans have stopped taking the Democrat-Big
Media axis as seriously during its pious sermons on fascism or racism.
Frank Bruni has noticed the world Republicans have seen
for decades. Democratic consultant Wolfson sees it. Cillizza and much of the
establishment media, however, are yet to get woke.
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