E.J. Dionne notes that the media is far too willing to repeat nonsense attacks from the right without demanding that those who make the attacks can back them up:
Upon Barack Obama’s election, even my most conservative friends who supported John McCain said Obama could do a world of good for poor children in the country by stressing the importance of education, hard work, staying in school and taking responsibility. Yes, those are often thought of as conservative values.
But when Obama proposed to do just that on the first day of school, the far right — without asking any questions or seeking any information — decided to pounce, on the theory that everything Obama did should be attacked relentlessly as part of some secret and dangerous ideological agenda.
Out popped Jim Greer, the Florida Republican chairman, who accused the president of trying to “indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.”
In a normal world, the media would have asked Greer for proof of such a wild charge and, since he didn’t have any, his press release would have gone into the circular file.
But, no, the media is so petrified of being criticized for being “liberal” that it chose to take a lunatic charge seriously and helped gin up this phony controversy.
Of course there is noting socialist in either Obama’s views or in his speech to school children. Comparing Obama’s speech to those given by other presidents, Dionne concludes:
If that’s “socialist,” then Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and just about every parent in America are “socialists.”
Modern conservatives might have spent a little more time in school learning what “socialism” means.
Dionne also responds to the false right wing meme that their treatment of Obama is justified by the way in which Democrats treated Bush after his election:
Defenders of the right-wing argue that the left said terrible things about George W. Bush. That’s true. What the apologists miss is that the deep anger at Bush did not set in until he had been president for several years. Despite the rage over Florida and the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, Bush did not face until much later in his administration anything like the hostility that Obama already confronts. Liberals, staunch liberals, were even willing to work with Bush on some issues — remember, for example, Ted Kennedy’s work on the “No Child Left Behind” Act.
And the entire country, including almost all of the left, united behind Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (Here, to provide a personal example, is my own column of Oct. 12, 2001. Yes, what I wrote looks naive now, but I’m still glad I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt at that moment.) The far, far left that trashed Bush immediately after 9/11 was isolated and treated as cranky and even subversive by the mainstream media. Note how quickly Van Jones was driven from his administration job for singing that wacky post-9/11 petition. The far left faces much tougher public and media discipline than the far right.
The right-wing decided almost from Day One that a president elected with 53 percent of the vote (and 365 electoral votes) was illegitimate. They are trashing a moderate liberal as a socialist propagandist. They are getting a lot of press coverage for doing so. Where is the accountability?
Am I continuing to be naive in believing that, one of these days, a phalanx of responsible conservatives will stand up to the extremists? Boy, do I miss William F. Buckley Jr.
