Vivid examples of insanity on today’s Democratic left
Believing that literally everything conservatives and Republicans say is said for dishonest and ulterior motives, liberals make themselves, literally, insane. A reader writes:
In your recently reposted October 20, 2004 post called “Why liberals always deny that conservatives rationally believe what they say,” you wrote:
“We might say the same thing about the way the leftist media greeted the Swift Boat Veterans. The Swifties weren’t people who had something to say and were saying it, who might be right or wrong, honest or driven by anger into distortion. They were creatures of the GOP. But no one ever asked, how did this ‘creation’ occur? Did the GOP go looking for people to take over and brainwash, sort of the way the North Koreans did to the Lawrence Harvey character in The Manchurian Candidate?”
I think the liberal answer to your last question is “yes.” There is no limit to what people believe about the Dark Powers of the Bush administration—and specifically Karl Rove, who plays Darth Vader to Bush’s Emperer.
During the SWIFT boat fuss, my liberal friends devoted huge efforts to uncovering the linkage between Rove and the SWIFT boat vets. It culminated in a contorted article by the NY Times showing (gasp) that some SWIFT boat vets were “conservatives” (or at least Republicans) and that these conservatives had links to each other. I know, “Go figure,” but that was enough to prove the conspiracy for most of them. This was another Karl Rove smear campaign, nothing else.
The “Rathergate” forged Texas Air National Guard memo case was particularly interesting. Many people denied that they were forgeries. After they were conclusively shown to be fake, most chose to believe one of two things:
1. That they were “fake but accurate,” as if a benevolent forger created them to expose Bush’s record. (Although they did use the phrase “fake but accurate,” they never explicitly discussed the “benevolent forger” or used that phrase because that would show how stupid their position is.)
2. That they were created by Karl Rove, who sent them indirectly to Rather in order to discredit the mainstream media. That, they reasoned, would anchor the conservative base by making sure that they didn’t believe any real attacks against Bush that might come up right before the election.
The funniest/saddest part of the whole affair for me was watching my friends flip from saying that (a) there was no conclusive evidence that the documents were forged, to saying that (b) the forgeries were so bad that Karl Rove must have created them specifically to be exposed, in order to discredit similar attacks against the President.
We went from the belief that any suggestion that they were forgeries was a plot by the Republicans, to the belief that they were forgies that proved there was a plot by the Republicans. The possibility that a Democratic operative tried to cheat, and wasn’t very good at it, was never even a possibility.
Paranoia runs deep among Democrats right now. It ran deep among the Clinton-haters, too, but what I’ve seen among my liberal friends—and you can’t help having a lot of them in the New York City area—is absolutely, clinically insane.
I had written, and the reader had agreed with me, that according to the Democratic conspiracy theory the Swift boat veterans
were creatures of the GOP. But no one ever asked, how did this “creation” occur? Did the GOP go looking for people to take over and brainwash, sort of the way the North Koreans did to the Lawrence Harvey character in The Manchurian Candidate?
Michael Jose writes:
My thought was that the main liberal narrative as to how the creation occurred was that the Swift boat veterans were shamed war criminals who lashed out at Kerry becasue he revealed their crimes and that Rove recruited them by offering them an opportunity to get revenge against the righteous Kerry.
But I think that this such a theory would still be unsustainable. If these guys were guilty war criminals who wanted to bring down Kerry because he had exposed the truth about them, then they weren’t the creation of Rove, they already had a big animus against Kerry and sufficient motive for doing what they did.
So, the two possible Democratic theories are that the Swift boat veterans were ciphers who were recruited/brainwashed by Rove into becoming Kerry’s enemies, a theory that would not stand one nanosecond of scrutiny; or that the Swift boat veterans were long-standing enemies of Kerry who wanted to harm him, in which case they were not creatures of Rove. The most that Rove might have done would be, say, to help them get their book published or something of that nature. But the Swifties’s case against Kerry’s was their own.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 11, 2006 02:01 AM | Send