Political Hate Speech

Journal Concern's Journal: Political Hate Speech 1

Journal by Concern on Wednesday March 24, 2010 @02:32PM

Remember this gem?

The kind of rhetoric you hear from [Democratic presidential candidates] ... on either side of the aisle, Ronald Reagan never said Jimmy Carter couldn't find countries in his own hemisphere. Walter Mondale never said that President Reagan was a miserable failure. When Bill Clinton ran against President Bush, he didn't compare him to Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. And when Bob Dole ran against President Clinton, he didn't say that he was an absolute phony or a liar. The kind of words we're hearing now from the Democratic candidates go beyond political debate. This is political hate speech. -Ed Gillespie, Republican National Committee chair

A "miserable failure"? Seriously? phony? liar?? That's hate speech? You didn't even use the n-word. Or compare anyone to Lenin. Or Stalin. Or Hitler. Or call a black man a racist.

Oh Ed, why have you hung up your political hate speech sword? The GOP was already comparing liberals to Al Qaeda.

For that matter, why has the New York Times let this go? They just published a whole article about hateful GOP speech without, apparently, recognizing the irony that for about 5 minutes in 2003, the GOP had the audacity to coin the phrase "Political Hate Speech." You know, when they were criticized in whatever way. Like being called a "phony." Or, you know, passing off their Iraq war agenda as a response to 9/11.

Then about a year later, they stopped using the trick, because they were busy ramping up the biggest political hate speech machine ever created in modern America. Doing both at once might, you know, be awkward. Today, Republican hate speech is now an industry. Republican party experts, in think tanks and PR agencies, create huge volumes of hate speech daily and distribute it via a vast network of radio and television shows, including an entire cable channel devoted to Republican propaganda that calls itself a 24/7 news network. At their darkest and most juvenile, the democratic critics of GWB couldn't even fantasize something so ambitious. They're still playing politics as they were played in 1980, which is part of why they are sucking so badly.

What's especially funny and ironic is that the GOP hate speech has risen to the level where it can actually be objectively compared to fascism.

http://cursor.org/stories/fascismxiv.php
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009083205/fascist-america-are-we-there-yet
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/spring/rage-on-the-right
http://whiterevolution.com/?p=1661

You see, if your accusations of fascism are part of an organized and deliberate campaign to stir up violence and silence dissent, so you can subvert the democratic process and foster a corporatist theocracy, you might actually be a fascist. And then if someone called you that... well, it might just be the truth. As opposed to, you know, hate speech. :)

Since Republicans are the party of Hypocrisy, this shouldn't be too big a leap to make. Fox News is Fair and Balanced. Budget Reconciliation is a violent coup that we refer to as the Nuclear Option. The GOP is outraged about budget deficits. And so forth. Calling their opponents fascists and accusing them of hate speech fits the pattern pretty well.

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