John Hawkins writes The Right Needs to Play as Dirty as the Left. Beyond being wrong on most issues and being incompetent in office, their dirty politics is a major reason why most Americans are rejecting politicians of the right. Public attention to Sarah Palin’s family, which was more a national phenomenon than something coming from the left, hardly compares with the dirty tactics of Dick Tuck, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Swift Boat Liars.
It gets even more ridiculous. Hawkins’ recommendations include:
Instead of continuing to complain, here’s a better idea. Why don’t conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber? Have they ever been arrested? Whom do they own property with? Have they ever been paid to do a speech for someone and then run a favorable news story about him? Certainly Keith Olbermann’s personal life is just as newsworthy as Joe the Plumber’s, and the details of Maureen Dowd’s life are just as noteworthy as those of Bristol Palin — are they not?
Sure, start writing about Keith Olbermann and Maureen Dowd’s sex lives. Anyone think that will get anyone who has abandoned the Republicans to give them another chance?
The public hates Republicans’ views, and they have no solutions. So they resort to character attacks, distortions, and the like. It won’t work.
Perhaps the best post ever by a Conservative. Thank you John Hawkins.
This is PRECISELY! why we Libertarians have been so damned skeptical over the years, of our Conservative cousins. They’ve been too damned wimpy.
It’s not so much that the Conservatives are Pro-Life or many against Drug Legalization, that we Libertarians balk at. It’s more their wimpiness in face of the overwhelming Fascism of the Democrat Party.
If the ‘C’s are finally getting some cajones, I say GREAT! Maybe now we Libertarians can come back into the fold and align with them against the evil Left.
Attributing to your enemy your own moral failings. Richard Hofstadter called it the paranoid style. Psychiatrists call it projection. The rest of us call it modern Republicanism.
Attacking others for their own failings certainly is an extremely common Republican tactic. I’m undecided whether it is unconscious projection or a planned strategy to try to distract people from seeing their failings.
Eric,
First of all, out of respect for my libertarian friends, please stop saying things like “we Libertarians” when you consistently express far right wing views which are contrary to libertarianism.
Secondly, you help demonstrate that conservatives hardly need to get dirtier. If they have already have conned people like you into considering the “Democrat” Party to be fascist and the left to be evil they hardly need to get dirtier.
Umm, Eric D. Rittberg?
I that word “cajones”? That means “boxes” in Spanish (or “drawers”), and is sometimes used as a euphemism to refer to a lady’s naughty bits, not a gentleman’s.
The word you probably wanted to use is “cojones”.
Please stick to English so as to avoid further embarrassment or unintended ironies.
Not to be nitpicky, but Dick Tuck was not a right-wing dirty trickster. He was a Democrat who dedicated his life to making Richard Nixon miserable. In often-hilarious ways. His stunts were “dirty tricks,” to a certain degree, but they were mostly mild. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tuck
Does Dick Tuck really belong on the list?
I for one would be happy to learn all about Olberman’s and Dowd’s steamy sex secrets. I would even watch a video of that.
Ok, throw in Lee Atwater instead of Dick Tuck, although that’s not who I originally had in mind. Maybe I was thinking of someone else and got the names wrong.
HP Stevens,
Considering how poor the ratings are at MSNBC, perhaps they will put on such a show if they think there would be a large enough audience. However this still wouldn’t get any voters to return to the GOP.
True, Ron, but I think for MSNBC, attracting a large audience is probably enough incentive all on its own.
The word you probably wanted to use is “cojones”.
Here’s a handy mnemonic: In his book Eight Million Ways to Die, Lawrence Block writes of a character who registers at a hotel as “Charles Owen Jones”. It’s a play on words: he’s a ballsy guy, so he signs himself “C. O. Jones”, i.e., “cojones”.
So the right wing has decided it’s time to bring the war home and recruit the returning soldiers as their brownshirts, eh?
“Ok, throw in Lee Atwater instead of Dick Tuck, although that’s not who I originally had in mind. Maybe I was thinking of someone else and got the names wrong.”
Murray Chotiner.
Indeed, the journalists who write about Bristol Palin should be exposed!
People Magazine and Greta Van Sustern must be shaking in their boots.
What is it with calling the left fascists? Does no one bother to look up the definition of the word?
Hawkins: “…we don’t have to become liars …”
Correct. Because you already ARE liars.
I hit enter by accident before I was finished. Turn on AM radio and listen for a few minutes and the lies will pile so high you won’t be able to keep up with them. I once heard – and I’m not making this up – Rush Limbaugh telling his audience that carrots are deadlier than second hand smoke and/or trans fats.
senevada,
As bizarre as it sounds for Eric to be calling the left fascists, you probably don’t know how bizarre it gets (unless you have read Eric’s other writings). Eric, while labeling himself a libertarian, has supported what amounts to a military dictatorship which would deny civil liberties to anyone who opposes the war on “Islamo-fascism.”
The ‘fascist’ label started really being trundled out by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter in the 1990s, which is sort of a pot-kettle thing at best. The convoluted reasoning behind it is that liberals supposedly want to force everyone else to think like we do and speak and play nice with others whether they like it or not. Forcing states to recognize the civil rights of women or homosexuals or minorities, or preventing individuals from practicing discrimination and harassment and advocating equal pay for equal work is all horribly repressive and violates the rights of those who deserve to be free to discriminate, harass, etc. Depriving of that hard earned freedom is clearly fascist.
Past conservatives (notably Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater) have speculated about whether or not it is appropriate for the government to enforce integration in violation of the personal freedoms of its opponents, but it is important to note they did not oppose firm government enforcement of equal voting rights and protection of individual civil liberties and that their consideration of the issue was an ongoing process. Goldwater, for instance, finally came to the conclusion that individual civil rights for every citizen justified government action against citizens choosing to deny those rights to others. The conservative positions on these issues was far more nuanced and thoughtful (far more similar to many liberal positions on abortion than to today’s conservative positions on, say, gay rights) than those advanced by the right to day. Barry Goldwater had the same problem of nuanced thought and constant evaluation of his own positions that caused modern conservatives to condemn Al Gore and John Kerry as ‘flip-floppers’, for instance. Though they held or considered positions on which the contemporary claim of liberal fascism is based, such past conservatives believed they were serving a place in the greater political dialogue while today’s conservatives seek to own the dialogue.
So while the idea that government protection of the natural rights of citizens violates the natural rights of the citizens from which they need to be protected is not new, they idea that it somehow a Nazi-esque threat to freedom for all is very new and not consistent with similar conservative positions of the past. It’s a sign of just how far the self-appointed heirs of Taft and Goldwater really are from their genuine roots.