Quote:For many months we've been warned by tut-tutting commentators about the evils of irrational "Bush hatred." Pundits eagerly scanned the Democratic convention for the disease; some invented examples when they failed to find it. Then they waited eagerly for outrageous behavior by demonstrators in New York, only to be disappointed again.
There was plenty of hatred in Manhattan, but it was inside, not outside, Madison Square Garden...
Why are the Republicans so angry? One reason is that they have nothing positive to run on (during the first three days, Mr. Bush was mentioned far less often than John Kerry).
The promised economic boom hasn't materialized, Iraq is a bloody quagmire, and Osama bin Laden has gone from "dead or alive" to he-who-must-not-be-named.
Another reason, I'm sure, is a guilty conscience. At some level the people at that convention know that their designated hero is a man who never in his life took a risk or made a sacrifice for his country, and that they are impugning the patriotism of men who have...
But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at that convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation's freedom, diversity and complexity.
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Welcome to the future of American political discourse.
Of course, there has always been people like these two that deb refers to...quick to hate, deeply uncomfortable with complexity, and ready at the drop of a pin to follow any leader who understands them, because he is like them, into war, into division, and into their neighbor's house to root out the evil that is surely there.
In another discussion, finn, often a smart fellow, derided Krugman's sentence (the one in bold) as 'unadulterated crap'. But he's wrong, and that he and so many others cannot perceive the truth in Krugman's observation is the scariest part.
The republican convention, the last three years of this administration, the eight years of concerted efforts to remove Clinton from office, and much that has gone before leading to the re-alignment of the conservative movement in the US has been a story of the purposeful promotion of hatred, the purposeful promotion of division, and the purposeful use of deceit, falsehoods, and simplifications to the end of achieving monolithic power.
One out of six Americans now hold that the UN is the enemy. One out of four believe that France is the enemy. And at the convention, how many cheered to hear it said that the enemy are those who disagree with, or who speak out against the ideas of, the President? How many here say "yes!" to all of the above?
