June 14, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist The Obama Hatersâ Silent Enablers By FRANK RICH WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own networkâs surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, âamped upâ Americans who are âtaking the extra step and getting the gun out,â maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most. The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesdayâs mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally â notably during Hurricane Katrina â he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the networkâs âWe report, you decideâ mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly. What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had âbecome more and more frighteningâ in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he âcould read a hundredâ messages spewing âhate thatâs not based in fact,â much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunmanâs canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans âout there in a scary place,â Smith said. Then he brought up another recent gunman: âIf youâre one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone whoâs performing abortions?â An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tillerâs killer. He went on: âIf you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States ...â He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid. These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The networkâs highest-rated star, Bill OâReilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him âTiller the baby killerâ and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. OâReilly was unrepentant, stating that only âpro-abortion zealots and Fox News hatersâ would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming OâReilly, was breaching his networkâs brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters. What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies â indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if itâs not change you can believe in. We donât know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues â though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlovâs dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck â well before another âantigovernmentâ Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April â there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control. This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obamaâs name with âTreason!â and âTerrorist!â at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was âpalling around with terrorists.â But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponentâs honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democratsâ âArabâ candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership. That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When âthe tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,â she observed in Salon, âthere is reason for alarm.â She cited a âjokeâ repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how âany U.S. soldierâ who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden. This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into OâReillyâs Holocaust analogies to liken Obamaâs policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to âthe final solutionâ and the quest for âa master race.â After James von Brunnâs rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a âlone gunman nutjob.â Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that âthe pot in America is boiling,â as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on. But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. Whatâs startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the partyâs national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because âit no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.â Anuzis pushed âfascismâ instead, because âeverybody still thinks thatâs a bad thing.â He didnât seem to grasp that âfascismâ is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find âbadâ because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler. The Anuzis âfascismâ solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The presidentâs nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases sheâs adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of âa wise Latina woman.â She has been tarred as a member of âthe Latino KKKâ (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunnâs white supremacist screeds. Obamaâs Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of âTreason!â It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging âin the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.â He claimed that the president â a lifelong Christian â âmay still beâ a Muslim and is aligned with âthe dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.â Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic âcharitiesâ that âhave been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.â If this isnât a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned. The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is âif there is really a way to put a hold onâ those who might run amok. Weâre not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any âmainstream mediaâ debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality â I emphasize might â belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movementâs future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence. Itâs typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as âthe height of insult,â in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was âwarning us for a reason.â No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the partyâs big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voightâs devout wish was to âbring an end to this false prophet Obama.â This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they werenât warned.
The Secret Service has a point to prove. They lost JFK, a stain upon them to this day. Like the greater country exorcised it's racist demons with the election of Obama, the secret service will exorcise it's own demons when it keeps this President upright for two terms. Further, for every attempt they thwart, it will be one more nail in the right wing coffin. Well, actually one more shovel of dirt on the right wing grave. The coffin is already pretty much nailed.
This is a very good piece. The right wing is going way too far. You can disagree with Obama, as I do (on economic policy, which seems to be modeled on Bush's policies), but Fox news is feeding the hate that is bringing things to a boiling point. At what point does American recognize Fox and the other 'Cable News Networks' as not news at all, not reporting facts, but as ideological, spin and propaganda machines?
As a casual observer of-I was going to say, media and politics, but what seems to be happening in America is a very real, and very destructive variety of very deliberate social division. It's bizarre, but with so much hate disguised as news or editorials, and the abject failure to acknowledge reality, (the gulf of tonkin for example) the amount of "trust" people place in a simple flag is remarkable.
MSM is pure propaganda, all of them. Take a hard look at this imposter. you can blast Bush all you care, but this fraudster is going to do us in. and acronym is right. Respect is waning.
fucking cry babies this country is doom not becuase of the president but because of the people. bye bye american pie :eek:
Irrational hate is not a right wing only problem. Bush was hated in 2000 for simply being republican. American universities breed irrational knee jerk hatred of anything conservative, feminists hate anything male, blacks hate anything white, and muslims hate everything. To pretend that the left is the virtuous side is simply stupid, just what I'd expect from the OP.
If you read MY comments, you'll notice I said ALL cable 'news' networks, CNN and MSNBC included, in addition to Fox. They're all bad. They are almost 24/7 Op/Ed TV Stations, with radically baseless claims being casually tossed out on almost every subject. They're video muckrackers without the fact checking muckraking journalists used to practice - a dangerous development, IMO.
It sounds like someone is laying the groundwork to stamp out someones else's First Amendment rights. Thats exactly what this is about. We have seen this show before. Its no different then when they were trying to blame Ozzy Osbourne for teenage suicides. We notice that nobody is pointing any fingers in the Muslim shooters case are they.