Ranting Screeds takes me to task for laying the roots of hostile political discourse at the feet of Newt Gingrich. They go far deeper, says he, and liberals were among the founders.
I’ll have to hit the books and think about this…
Ranting Screeds takes me to task for laying the roots of hostile political discourse at the feet of Newt Gingrich. They go far deeper, says he, and liberals were among the founders.
I’ll have to hit the books and think about this…
Date: 09/25/2002 00:00:00 AM
The Ranting Screed is comparing a bunch of teenagers demonstrating out in the streets with the Speaker of the House. Yes, those demonstrators said *mean things*. But it wasn’t Tip O’Neill talking like Newt Gingrich. Abbie Hoffman clowned around a lot, but he didn’t have his own show – he didn’t even get to go on talk shows to promote his books. And the “Daisy” commercial wasn’t a patch on the Willie Horton ad. Get real.
Date: 09/23/2002 00:00:00 AM
Will: Your side does that all the time. Indeed, you did it in your own post.
Date: 09/23/2002 00:00:00 AM
Love the comments, folks, you’re helping prove my point; and Armed Liberals, to the extent to which none of the people critical of Republican rhetoric saw fit to chim in on his concerns and comment and condemn overheated political rhetoric in the “WTF – WWF Style Blogging” post.In any event, I blogged the rest of my thoughts on your comments here.
Date: 09/23/2002 00:00:00 AM
I, for one, wish that there were still Democrats willing to be as politically brutal as Lyndon Johnson. This isn’t a boxing match or a foot race, this is real life and it affects real people. You owe it to the people whose lives are going to be deeply affected by political decisions to do whatever you can legally do to win.A parable:Al Gore wanted to win the White House cleanly. He had tons of negative information to use on Bush (Harken, cocaine use, et al). He chose not to because he didn’t want to win that way. Millions of people are having their lives negatively affected by his decision (and if we don’t do anything about Global Warming, it’ll be billions).Bush and the Republicans had no such compunctions. The RNC ran a brutally effective campaign to convince people that Gore was a congenital liar (despite his previous reputation as a goody-goody Boy Scout). It worked well enough to leave the election up to a handful of judges.
Date: 09/23/2002 00:00:00 AM
Hey A.L., Don’t waste too much time thinking about it. It’s not that complicated.Sure, there is ample historical evidence that politics is a dirty, nasty game; no argument there. But historians will see that Newt’s was a brand new chapter in that story; furthermore, Newt’s rise paralleled the similar rise of talk-radio and the Internet. Newt was smart enough to exploit that. Newt’s biggest boost in the late 80’s and early 90’s came from the similarly rising star of Rush Limbaugh Don’t you remember?In the aftermath of the 1994 elections, several members of Newt’s following called Rush “the majority maker.” And the feeling was mutual. Rush revered Gingrich, calling him “Mr. Newt” mimicking the nickname of the long-ago powerful House Speaker “Mr. Sam” Rayburn.So Newt had found a mouthpiece, a megaphone, for his message. What was the message? It was simple:”Whatever is bad is liberal; whatever is liberal is bad.”Not subtle, not new, but he WAS in the right place at the right time with the right message for the right audience. Unfortunately for Newt, he sucked as a tactician. Once he gained power, it was the beginning of his end. He was always much better as a bomb-throwing back-bencher. Ara Rubyan[ More where this came from at E Pluribus Unum ]Oh come on you guys. Stop showing off.
Date: 09/23/2002 00:00:00 AM
Hmm… If you’re going to do some reading, I would suggest the 4th book of Dumas Malone’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty.” Congressional investigations, nasty political backbiting, and “partisan” strategizing certainly occured in the turf wars between Jefferson and Hamilton. Yup, hostile political discourse has been with us since the Washington administration — before Democrats and Republicans even existed.
Date: 09/23/2002 00:00:00 AM
Of course, the Republicans were perhaps much more in line with what we think of as liberal politics than were the Democrats immediately after the Civil War. =P
Date: 09/22/2002 00:00:00 AM
I must disagree with Ranting screeds. The Republican Party was notorious for ‘waving the bloody shirt’ after the Civil War. More recently, they attacked FDR so viciously, he commented, that not only did they attack him, they even attacked his dog. Newt was one of the nastiest Democrat bashers in the era before FoxNews and the lastest bunch of liars for Bush such as Hannity, Coulter, Horowitz, Sullivan, etal. Slime and slander have been the weapons of choice for Republicans for over 100 years.