Hernando Today
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Politics Of Hate
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Published: January 7, 2008
As a kid in Brooklyn, N.Y., I was an avid fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. I had buddies who were New York Giant fans. An argument during the pennant race between a Giant fan and a Dodger fan ended when one of them killed the other. It is difficult to imagine the enmity — the hatred — that existed between these two men, and over what? A game. Now, we kids didn't really hate anyone. Sure, we had heated debates over the relative merits of each team, but it never got down to gun-play.
Welcome to new millennium American politics. Debate is out. Hate is in. At least for now we have stopped short of killing each other like the Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
What brought this to mind was an item on "Air America," a liberal talk show, during the time George Bush was trying to sell Social Security reform. The announcer set up a skit by saying, "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he's going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp. (The listener then hears four gunshots.) Just try it, you little … !") The host of the show then laughingly said, "What is with all the killing?"
Its one thing to scare senior citizens about Social Security reform with hate speech, but to go so far as staging an assassination of the president over his idea for a Social Security fix, is kind of over the top.
In researching the politics of hate, I was surprised to get 1,690,000 hits on Google for "hate Bush." But I was astonished to get 1,140,000 for "kill Bush."
And this sentiment goes beyond the U.S. Just before the last election, the UK Guardian, fearful that George Bush would be reelected, wrote, "…the entire civilized world will be praying, praying Bush loses…John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?"
A 1976 winner of the Nobel Peace prize said before a group of school kids that she'd "love to kill George Bush…Bush will die slowly and painfully."
Democrats, prior to the last election tried to tone down the hate rhetoric. In fact one memo circulated to the party faithful noted that "Anyone caught violating the tenets of our newly found political compassion toward those we hate will be thrashed wickedly…"
The politics of hate is the mainstay of the politics of populism, which has morphed into the hate politics of the left wing of the Democratic Party, the point of which is to scare people. Seniors need to fear Republicans who will take away their Social Security. Illegal immigrants, women and blacks need to fear Republicans. Everyone should fear the rich, except rich Democrats — George Soros, John Edwards and his wealthy American Trial Lawyers Association, Hollywood elites and the like.
Extreme right wingers seem content to either ridicule Democrats or their ideas, e.g.: "The looney left;" or express frustration over their perceived lack of patriotism or support for our troops. Their attitude stops short of hate or death threats.
One can purchase the "I Hate Republicans Reader," or "888 Reasons To Hate Republicans, or better still, another publication, "2000 Reasons To Hate Republicans." An interesting title to a publication by a college professor is "Learning to Hate Republicans," — just in case you don't know how. For the "in your face" crowd, there is the "I Hate Republicans" T-Shirt that even comes in pink, presumably for the gals.
President hate mania as a national problem was probably first mentioned right after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy. (President bashing always has been an American sport, and parochial hatred was sometimes evident, but not across the entire political landscape as witnessed today.) I remember the edginess of the early reporting of the assassination by the media — liberals owned all the media in those days — detailing the political hate that was rampant in Texas and exemplified nationally by the Republican Right — a bit like the vast "right-wing conspiracy" mindset of Hillary Clinton before she discovered the truth about her husband. Even though Oswald was a communist sympathizer who defected to the Soviet Union, and married a Russian, the liberal urban myth arose that Kennedy was somehow the victim of a vast right-wing Republican hate conspiracy. After all, what else could have explained his assassination?
Ironically, the very political hatred that Democrats once erroneously identified as a Republican phenomenon has actually become a peculiar attribute of the political left.
Michael Moore personified this attitude when promoting his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" before an overflow left-wing crowd in Boston. Moore said that Republicans are not "patriots." They "exist in the politics of hate…They're hate-triots…Hate-tiotism is where they stand. The hate, they eat for breakfast…"They get up at 6 in the morning trying to figure out which minority group they're going to … today."
Anton Chekhov, Russian author and playwright observed, "Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something." Adolf Hitler, the Ku Klux Klan and Muslim extremists figured that one out a long time ago.
Just a word of caution for 2008 — as we go into the last lap of this never-ending presidential election campaign.
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