It’s almost hard to recall how the left howled about “civility” in the wake of the Tucson shooting horror. But that was then, and the standard the left sets for the right is one it hardly adheres to. We had Vice President Joe Biden’s now-denied comments casting Republicans in the role of “terrorists.” And then the hometown newspaper for liberal elites got into the act.
There’s no denying the depths — and hypocrisy — to which the New York Times opinion section has sunk. Remember that Paul Krugman carried on his own war of vilification, claiming Republicans were responsible for mass murder. As my colleague Charles Lane and the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto noted, another New York Times columnist decided to unleash his own noxious assault on the right. Yesterday Joe Nocera coughed up this bile on the Times’ op-ed page.
Charles Lane: Liberals Are In Deep Denial About Their Own Incivility Issues:
If liberals believe anything, it is that the right is either solely, or mostly, responsible for the degradation of political discourse in America. And they are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009.
But liberals are in deep, deep denial about their own incivility issues. Consider the “terrorism” analogy now being aimed at the Tea Party by Democratic members of Congress — in the acquiescent presence of the vice president, no less — and by some journalists who sympathize with the Democrats. To pick just one example of the genre, today’s New York Times carries Joe Nocera’s column, “Tea Party’s War Against America.”
According to Nocera, President Obama’s debt-ceiling deal with the Republicans violated a basic rule: “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He adds: “Much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” These “intransigent” spending cutters were indifferent to “blowing up the country” in pursuit of their goals. They are indifferent to “inflicting more pain on their countrymen” via “the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class” and the extra unemployment it will bring.
I’m puzzled. The Times editorial board only recently condemned “many on the right” for “exploit[ing] the arguments of division,” and “demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.” Right-wingers, The Times notes, “seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.”
So how can it be okay for Times columnists to demonize the Tea Party and try to persuade Americans that they are not just misguided, but the enemies of the people?
It’s all about the narrative. One needn’t be consistent, so long as one is consistent with the narrative.
UPDATE: More here. And readers point out that the Obama-is-Hitler stuff was mostly from Larouchies, who are hardly right wing.