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Liberal
Hate Speech
By Jeff Jacoby
Jewish World
Review,
12/29/00
YOU'RE WATCHING "The O'Reilly Factor," Fox News Channel's popular
nightly interview show. The host is commenting acidly on the presidential
campaign. To illustrate a point, he airs some video of Al Gore addressing
the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. And as you watch, amazed, the
words "Snipers Wanted" appear on the screen as Gore speaks.
It never happened, of course. But can you imagine the reaction if it
had?
If Bill O'Reilly ever pulled such a stunt, he would be pilloried from
coast to coast. Editorials would sear him for joking about murder. Democrats
would blast the "sick right-wing mentality" that thinks killing
the vice president is humorous. Talk shows would seethe. The Federal
Communications Commission would investigate. And Fox News, flooded with
petitions demanding O'Reilly's head, would be forced to take him off
the air.
That's the script, more or less, when well-known conservatives aim vicious
insults and hateful slurs at liberals. But when the venom moves in the
other direction -- when it's a conservative being smeared -- the indignation
meter barely flutters.
Which is why there was no explosion over "Snipers Wanted."
The truth is, it did happen -- only not on Fox News and not with an image
of Al Gore. It was Craig Kilborn, host of CBS's "Late Late Show," who
issued the call for snipers while showing footage of George W. Bush at
the GOP convention in Philadelphia. Eventually CBS issued a brief apology,
mumbled something about the joke being "inappropriate and regrettable" --
and that was the end of it. No seething, no petitions, nobody taken off
the air. Par for the course -- for liberal hate speech.
As each year draws to a close, I take a look at this persistent double
standard. Each year, sad to say, there is no shortage of illustrations.
Y2K was no exception.
Bush didn't realize the microphone was live when he described New York
Times reporter Adam Clymer as a "major league a-hole," and
got pummelled for his crudity. Dan Rather, to cite just one example,
scolded him for "meanness," "nastiness," and using "gutter
language." But when Jesse Jackson accused Bush of using "Nazi
tactics" to win the election, neither Rather nor any of his colleagues
lifted an eyebrow.
I grant that it's not nice to use the A-word -- not even when talking
about a New York Times reporter. But it's not nearly as vile as comparing
your political opponents to acolytes of Adolf Hitler. Yet liberals routinely
liken Republicans and conservatives to mass-murdering totalitarians,
and no one objects.
The platform of the Texas Republican Party, Bill Clinton sneered in June, "was
so bad that you could get rid of every fascist tract in your library
if you just had a copy" of it. Joe Gellar, the Democratic Party
chairman in Miami-Dade County, fumed that out-of-town Republicans protesting
the ballot recounts were engaging in "brownshirt tactics." US
Rep. Patrick Kennedy told Democrats in Pennsylvania, "All you need
to do is look at Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay ...
There's always been a fascist kind of crowd in every society." And
for those too dense to grasp the point -- conservatives are the moral
equals of goose-stepping SS men -- filmmaker Michael Moore spelled it
out.
"
There are tens of thousands of people who lived through [the Holocaust],
escaped the ovens, and are now living out their final years in South
Florida," he wrote on his web site in demanding a new vote in Palm
Beach County. "Sixty-two years ago tonight, the ... German government
sent goon squads throughout the country to trash and burn the homes,
stores, and temples of its Jewish citizens. Seven years and 6 million
slaughtered lives later, the Jewish people of Europe were virtually extinct.
A few survived. I will not allow those who survived to ... be abused
again." Anticonservative hate speech was plentiful in 2000. None
of it provoked an outcry from the national media. Some of the lowlights:
Gay activist Dan Savage boasted on Salon.com of his efforts to infect
Gary Bauer with flu. When readers appalled by this germ warfare complained,
Salon's editor groused that "America has become really humourless
about these things."
In his New York Press column, Alexander Cockburn suggested "dropping
a tactical nuclear weapon on the Cuban section of Miami." Alas,
he lamented, that "would require the sort of political courage sadly
lacking in Washington these days."
A sickening TV spot sponsored by the NAACP showed a pickup truck dragging
a chain and accused Bush of having "killed" James Byrd "all
over again" when he opposed a change in the Texas hate crimes law.
But for pure vitriol, nothing matched the eruption by former Clinton
aide Paul Begala, who wrote on MSNBC.com about the map with color-coded
election returns that showed a sea of red for Bush with small blotches
of blue for Gore:
" But if you look closely at that map you see a more complex picture. You
see the state where James Byrd was lynched-dragged behind a pickup truch
until his body came apart -- it's red. You see the state where Matthew
Shepard was crucified ... for the crime of being gay -- it's red. You
see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building
and murdered scores of federal employees: red. The state where an Army
private thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat,
and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African Americans
because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University
spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they're all red, too."
Ugly, repugnant stuff. A conservative who talked this way about liberals
would be crucified. When will liberals stop talking this way about conservatives?
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