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Jewish World Review Sept. 13, 2010/ 5 Tishrei, 5771 ‘Bigots’ in the Majority --- Again? By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
One of the more fascinating developments emerging from the "post partisan" election of Barack Obama is how the majority of Americans are now considered bigots by the American left. Depending on the issue, be it the Tea Party Movement, the Arizona lawsuit, or the Ground Zero mosque, such percentages range from a low of 51% to a high of 70%. In other words, as far as the left is concerned, a majority of Americans, sometimes substantial, are unrepentant, unenlightened stooges who ought to be ashamed of ourselves.
It is a little more than ironic that the American left should use shame as a means to their ends. With its almost cult-like worship of moral relativity, no other political ideology has done more to obliterate that concept in modern-day America. Almost nothing induces genuine shame or remorse anymore. The best we get these days is the same boilerplate apology that has become the catch-phrase for every miscreant attempting to square the un-squareable:
If I have offended anyone, I'm sorry.
Apology not accepted. This one American who believes the American left has been grossly offensive, and nothing epitomizes that offensiveness more than their knee-jerk reaction to the phenomenon known as the Tea Party movement. Without an ounce of evidence to back up their assertion--including the failure to collect the hundred grand columnist Andrew Breitbart promised to pay anyone who could produce proof of racism at one particular event on Capitol Hill--the American left has collectively decided every Tea Partier is a racist.
"Collective" is the key word here, and if the recently exposed JournoList scandal reveals anything, it reveals the bankruptcy of a political ideology whose adherents find it necessary to collaborate, lest they stray "off message." Sloganism becomes a substitute for the exchange of ideas, and woe to anyone who engages in heresy: one of the original targets of the JournoLists' wrath was former Clinton political advisor and current TV commentator, George Stephanopoulos. His "sin?" Asking then-candidate Barack Obama about his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 election campaign.
Why has the left directed so much time and effort into demonizing ordinary Americans? Because the Tea Party's three primary planks--limited government, fiscal responsibility and Constitutional fealty--represent the greatest threat to liberalism since its flowering in the 1960s. A smaller, fiscally responsible government dedicated to a Constitution expressly designed to limit the power of the state is the death knell for those dedicated to the idea their worldview must be imposed on Americans by an ever-expanding state. The left's worst nightmare is an America comprised of largely self-sufficient, clear-thinking individuals left to their own devices.
And so Tea Partiers have become "teabaggers." Again, it is amazing how obtuse liberals have become in that they can't see the irony of resorting to a crude sexual epithet to express their "superior" intelligence. The same bunch who rails against the bigotry and prejudice of their fellow Americans broad-brushes every single member of a political movement with a derisive term--and remains completely blind to the hypocrisy of doing so.
If that's not utter shamelessness, what is?
More to the point, it's not flying, any more than trying to shame Americans into accepting rampant lawlessness in Arizona, or a poke-in-the-eye mosque near Ground Zero. Less than two years ago, a majority of American voters elected our country's first non-white president. Since that time, the president's popularity has steadily decreased. If one accepts the American left's premise that those who currently oppose Barack Obama's agenda are bigots, such a premise begs a question:
How did so many Americans turn back into bigots so quickly?
How did the same American majority who elected Barack Obama in what the NY Times referred to as "a national catharsis--a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama's call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country" become supporters of "Arizona's tragic, noxious new immigration law" ("Showdown in Arizona," NY Times editorial board, July 28, 2010) or people promoting a "paranoid intolerance" towards the Ground Zero mosque ("Taking Bin Laden's Side, "NY Times Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, Aug. 21, 2010)?
The answer is simple: the theory of hope and change gave way to the practical application of it--and the majority of Americans were shocked by the difference. That shock has given way to anger and disgust. The American left can paint the majority's reaction to the above issues any way they want, but they can't dissipate it. It is real and it is profound. So much so that an American public with a legendary reputation for apathy has become engaged in civic discourse at a level unprecedented in modern history.
And so a price must be paid. As far as the left is concerned, Americans are "devolving" back to our previous levels of bigotry. We are rejecting our "national catharsis," the "change in direction and tone," and reverting back to a mindset the left finds "noxious" and "paranoid." No doubt if electoral predictions hold, we will not only be bigots, we will be bigots who had yet another "national temper tantrum" similar to the one the late Peter Jennings called the election of 1994.
If the unthinkable occurs, leftists will console themselves with a comfortably familiar assumption: most Americans are hopelessly stupid. How they will square that with the part of Barack Obama's 2008 victory speech in which he said his election demonstrated the "true genius" of his country is anyone's guess.
Maybe the "true genius" of America is the public's ability to see a mistake--and rectify it quickly as possible.
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© 2010, Arnold Ahlert |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||||
