The disdain of a dead, pompous establishmentarian for living, American people

Howard Sutherland writes:

Washington Post fixture David Broder (last heard from lauding the elevation of the “Wise Latina” to the Supreme Court and hoping for the rapid conversion of America to a complete gynaecocracy) opines on the protests against B. Hussein Obama and the Democratic Party’s lethal “health care reform” schemes. Broder cites an obscure 1960 confrontation between GOP Rep. Bruce Alger and Lyndon Johnson (with Lady Bird in tow) in the lobby of Dallas’s Adolphus Hotel. Broder wants us to believe the presumed incivility of Alger et al. may have turned the 1960 election in Kennedy and Johnson’s favor. He then mentions the more recent occasion of egregious and superannuated Democratic Rep.-for-Life John Dingell’s getting his just deserts from a lively crowd in Romulus, Michigan as he touted Obamacare. Broder hopes that protesters will defeat their purpose and excite sympathy for Obama and the Democrats’ disastrous socialist medicine bills. That’s a stretch. It’s also pretty conventional thinking from one of the most eminent inside-the-Beltway liberals.

Broder, naturally, makes much of Dingell’s claim not to have suffered such indignities since he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nice Beltway sleight-of-hand to equate opposition to Obamacare with opposition to “civil rights”: always be sure to play the race card where The One is involved! (And never mind that the CRA is bad law to begin with.)

More interesting is the window Broder inadvertently opens onto another aspect of the conventional thinking of our leftist Establishment. Throughout his column runs a tone of astonishment and indignation. How dare these little people question, much less heckle, such panjandrums of our (effectively) one-party state as Lyndon Johnson and John Dingell? To say nothing of other colossi of the Congress such as Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill! (As an aside, Broder also—pretending to quote her approvingly—gives evidence of why Sarah Palin is not the girl the GOP needs at the top of its ticket. While Palin’s Facebook comment makes tactical sense, it can also be read as acknowledging that the protesters have gone too far. What credible evidence is there that that is true? In any event, her comment is ammunition for liberals, and Broder—true to form—picked up her present and shot it right back at her.)

Note also Broder’s sly dig at the Republican leadership, set up for him by Florida Dem Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is outraged, outraged, that House GOP leaders have not “publicly repudiated” comments Rush Limbaugh made comparing Obamacare to medical policies under the Third Reich. In the first place, what duty do GOP leaders have to police Limbaugh, who is a private citizen and not a Congressman? And if Limbaugh’s comparison is accurate, he—to say nothing of the GOP—has nothing to apologize for. Even if it isn’t entirely accurate, I doubt Limbaugh has any reason to apologize. Has anything he said actually damaged Rep. Wasserman Schulz or any of her constituents? It seems any pretext will suffice to trot out the old Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 13, 2009 01:59 PM | Send