Frank Rich

The agonizingly close relations between the GOP establishment and the loonier elements in the right wing media who have been on an increasingly mainstream basis feeding the hatred of the far right extremists who have been committing violence has been receiving increased attention. This has been discussed recently by Judith Warner, Paul Krugman, and Frank Rich. Krugman recently wrote, “Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.” Frank Rich discussed this topic at length in his latest column:

Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

Violence committed by right wing (or left wing) extremists is the more serious problem. But a similar, even if less violent, mindset can be seen in the recent outrage against David Letterman: despite agreement from Letterman that he should not have told a joke which was clearly about Bristol Palin, and despite the fact that Bristol Palin has been the target of jokes from multiple comedians largely because of the manner in which Sarah Palin has intentionally placed her children in the public spotlight for political gain, many of them continue to attack with outright lies as to what Letterman actually said.

There was no point in attacks on David Letterman once he conceded that he should not have told the joke, with many of these conservatives proceeding to over play their hand and ultimately discrediting themselves. The controversy is about the desire of the authoritarian base of the Republican Party, which has hijacked the right, to prevent any criticism of their extremist agenda and has little to do with any real concern about sexist jokes. They tend to wage their war with little regard for fact, with such distortions being common place. This has included a similar distortion of a joke told by John Kerry in 2006, the fabrications of the Swift Boat Liars, all the lies about Obama which were spread during the presidential campaign, and the recent lies about Sotomayor such as that sixty percent of her decisions have been overturned (& not surprisingly though, even a Next Right editor repeated it.) While less extreme and violent than those who have been committing violence, the conservative movement has increasingly become dominated by those who show hostility towards reason, freedom of expression, and the contemporary culture.

One would have to be disengaged not to notice that the Democratic Party, and the party's scribes in the press, are really quite angry about the ascension of Sarah Palin. But it is not Sarah Palin that has them upset; it is not John McCain or George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or Rudy Guiliani that has the left in high dudgeon. It is not any one person or defined group that has given them fits. What has them so agitated is that the very visible Republican National Convention showed Republicans doing the worst of all possible things: It showed Republicans laughing at the Democratic Party and its candidate. And there really can be no greater sin.

Please take a few minutes to read the inane (and mostly insulting) comments of New York Times columnists Paul Krugman, Judith Warner, and (inane to a lesser degree) Bob Herbert. You should also read today's piece by the Times' Frank Rich, "Palin And McCain's Shotgun Marriage." I urge you to read these pieces because they prove two things: they prove that Mr. Krugman is wrong that Democrats, at least many Democrats, do not consider themselves elite, and they prove that Republican laughter is justified.

If we simply take as a starting point Mr. Krugman's apparent incredulity at the assertion that Democrats who propose to lead this country come across as elitists, and juxtapose this with the essays mentioned above drafted by his own colleagues, we end up not merely with a glaring contradiction. What we end up with is a rousing good joke. We end up with something to laugh at (even if we are not Republican). And we end up with something to pity.

The very title of Frank Rich's piece is condescension of the highest order. It is the sort of condescension one would expect to hear in the Hamptons, or perhaps over cocktails on a Montauk veranda. McCain and Palin -- a shotgun marriage? How funny! How cute, Mr. Rich! How clever and deft! How deliciously and naughtily adroit in an ironic and pleasing "get-the-dinner-guests-laughing" sort of way! (Of course, you prove that Paul Krugman must be in another room.) And that first line, Mr Rich. How daring and devilish! Who would have thought to describe John McCain as old? Brilliant. I love to hear you speak truth to power!

Ms. Warner's statements hardly help Mr. Krugman's defense of the indefensible. Nor do Mr. Herbert's. When Ms. Warner (she found Gov. Palin's nomination "nauseating") suggests in an essay about Ms. Palin that women "are perhaps reaching historic lows in their comfort levels with themselves and their choices," you know you are not just hearing a malicious woman, you are hearing an elitist woman. But if you can't hear Ms. Warner's elitism, perhaps this quote will shout elitism loud and clear, and in a most vicious tone:

"Why does this woman [Sarah Palin] – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so 'real?'"[emphasis added]

And this statement by Mr. Herbert is surely not issued from the muted bowels of intellectual lowliness, but from the voluble summit of smugness:

"If there were any good ideas at this convention of mostly rich and mostly right-wing delegates about how to haul the country out of this mess that the G.O.P. has gotten it into, they were kept well hidden. Perhaps they were tucked away behind the more prominently displayed creationism and “just-say-no to global warming” documents."

That "creationism" pokes its head up here is as funny, as twistedly funny, as Mr. Krugman's swipe about alleged Republican anger at the convention being in part fueled by "fundamentalists" ticked off about evolution and abortion (forget those pro-life Catholics, for they suggest so much more than "fundamentalists"). Surely the truly sophisticated among us know what these columnists are doing: they are reacting from their very high places, throwing out insults and code words all designed to make the smug even more smug (and playing on elitists' fears). And Republicans do, and should, find all this rather funny.

Sarah Palin laughed at Barack Obama on Wednesday night. She poked fun at him. She mocked his ridiculously lofty rhetoric. She pointed out his condescension: she held him to account for his own words about gun-clinging, Bible-hugging, embittered townies allegedly uncomfortable with differences in skin color. On Thursday night, John McCain did the same thing. And they both did so in language that indicates something rather plainly: Republicans made Democrats look like a joke. (And I think this is the root of Bush/Cheney hatred, as both men have been known NOT to take their critics seriously, and have had the temerity to laugh at Democratic Party ideas and tactics.)

Paul Krugman is wrong about the politics of resentment, but only in part. There has never been a columnist, in my opinion, as resentful as Paul Krugman. Resentment is what he sells. But resentment is what his party sells, too. It is the very marrow of class and social warfare; resentment politics are what this election is about. But what Mr. Krugman does not realize is that Republican resentment is bred by men like Mr. Krugman. He -- and countless other pundits and wannbe pundits -- continually portray Republicans as a joke. All the Republicans are doing is demonstrating that they are sick of the gross misrepresentations about them manifested in print, in broadcast journalism, and in film. Republicans are tired of being the media's favorite caricatures, and they fought back in Minneapolis by enjoying a good laugh or two at the big corporation built around the Barack Obama brand.

What Mr. Krugman and his colleagues don't understand is that the reaction to Gov. Palin coursing through the media like a pandemic proves that the Democrats are ultimately a humorless, petulant bunch. They can dish it out, but they can never take it. That's always funny.

And what we are discovering in this political process is that what really galls the humorless Democrats is that Republican resentment manifests itself not as a grimace, but as a very toothy grin.

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