http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/01/opinion/campaign-stops/crying-wolf-then-confronting-trump.html?_r=0
The Opinion Pages <http://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/campaign-stops> | Campaign Stops <http://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/campaign-stops> Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html> Frank Bruni <http://www.nytimes.com/column/frank-bruni> SEPT. 1, 2016 Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times Conservative commentators and die-hard Republicans often brush off denunciations of Donald Trump as an unprincipled hatemonger by saying: Yeah, yeah, that’s what Democrats wail about every Republican they’re trying to take down. Sing me a song I haven’t heard so many times before. Howard Wolfson would be outraged by that response if he didn’t recognize its aptness. “There’s enough truth to it to compel some self-reflection,” Wolfson, who was the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2008, told me this week. In fact, he finds himself thinking about it a whole lot: how extreme the put-downs of political adversaries have become; how automatically combatants adopt postures of unalloyed outrage; what this means when they come upon a crossroads — and a candidate — of much greater, graver danger. “I worked on the presidential campaign in 2004,” he said, referring to John Kerry’s contest against George W. Bush. He added that he was also “active in discussing” John McCain when he ran for the presidency in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. “And I’m quite confident I employed language that, in retrospect, was hyperbolic and inaccurate, language that cheapened my ability — our ability — to talk about this moment with accuracy and credibility.” Did Democrats cry wolf so many times before Trump that no one hears or heeds them now? That’s a question being asked with increasing frequency, though mostly in conservative circles and publications. An essay by Jonah Goldberg in National Review <http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438349/media-helps-trumps-image-because-they-cry-wolf-all-republicans> in late July had this headline: “How the Media’s History of Smearing Republicans Now Helps Trump.” In Commentary, Noah Rothman has repeatedly examined <https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/the-gall-of-dems-mitt-romney-nostalgia/> this subject. He wrote back in March <https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/left-disarmed-racism-charge/> that when “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst.” “Today,” he added, “they point and shout ‘racist’ into the void, but Democrats only have themselves to blame for the fact that so many on the right are no longer listening.” I think he’s being more than a bit disingenuous about the potential receptiveness of the right — or the left — to anything that the other side says in this polarized, partisan age. There hasn’t been all that much listening for some time. Also, the Democratic condemnations of McCain and Romney weren’t as widespread and operatic as the ones of Trump. And this is a two-way street. Republicans paint a broad spectrum of Democrats as socialist kooks, and Obama has been as strong a magnet for hyperbole as any politician in my lifetime. Let us not forget Dinesh D’Souza’s 2010 book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” or Newt Gingrich’s assertion <http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2010/09/12/what_was_newt_gingrich_talking_about.html> that “only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior” can you grasp Obama’s method of governing, or Trump’s insistence that Obama produce his American birth certificate. The sad truth is that we conduct the bulk of our political debate in a key of near-hysteria. And this renders complaints of discrepant urgency, about politicians of different recklessness, into one big, ignorable mush of partisan rancor. What stands out in this presidential campaign aren’t the alarms that Democrats are sounding about the Republican nominee but the ones that an unusual number of Republican defectors are. *That’s *what’s unfamiliar. And that’s what’s wounding Trump. Democrats were indeed dire about Romney, even though many of them, including President Obama, now speak of him fondly <https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/08/02/read-obama-calls-trump-unfit/yqjtDEDodrJNMxPRxycR0J/story.html>, as a Republican whose prescriptions might be flawed but whose heart is true. Four years ago, he was a bloodsucking capitalist vampire whose indictment of Obamacare was ipso facto proof of his racism. In The Daily Beast, he was called <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/12/michael-tomasky-on-mitt-romney-the-race-baiter-at-the-naacp.html> a “race-mongering pyromaniac.” On MSNBC, he was accused <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjAqt58pXbY>, by a black commentator, of the “niggerization” of Obama into “the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.” Romney was supposedly out of touch with reality — never mind that he had governed a blue state, Massachusetts, without cataclysmic incident — just as McCain was described <http://www.infowars.com/john-mccain-is-an-unstable-hot-headed-liar-unfit-to-be-president/>, in some quarters <http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/1/648861/->, as a combustible hothead who couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the nuclear codes. He was Trump before Trump, which makes Trump less Trump. And those are just the presidential candidates. Plenty of other Republicans have confronted charges of florid racism and incipient fascism that apply to some of them infinitely better than to others. Gradations disappear. Distinctions vanish. Important words are hollowed out, so that they lose their precision and their sting, and exist mainly to perpetuate a paralyzing climate of reciprocal hatred between political parties. After Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Wolfson went on to work for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat who became a Republican and then an independent. He’s still in the former mayor’s employ, as a senior adviser. That’s the vantage point from which he has watched Trump’s ascent, and from which he’s making some crucial observations. “It’s only when you find yourself describing someone who really is the definition of an extremist — who really is, essentially, in my opinion, a fascist — that you recognize that the language that you’ve used in the past to describe other people was hyperbolic and inappropriate and cheap,” Wolfson said. “It doesn’t mean that you somehow retrospectively agree with their positions on issues,” he added. “But when the system confronts an actual, honest-to-God menace, it should compel some rethinking on our part about how we describe people who are far short of that.” “We should take stock of this moment,” he said, “and recognize that our language really needs to be more accountable and more appropriate to the circumstances.” I hope we do. *------------------*I was ticked to read this only to find out it was from yesterday, and that comments were shut off after 166 of them (usually there's over a thousand). What I was wanting to say was this... It's fascinating to see dems grasp that most non-democrats have seen the vicious (and false) attacks of republican candidates every 4 years, and that these attacks are now officially meaningless. That they admit that even they knew they were being shameless, lying dirtbags when making those accusations (to a NYT reporter, no less) is stunning. As I read this article, I was reminded of many of the most vicious attacks we've seen heaped on moderate republicans in the recent past that went unmentioned. A classic example was the commercial and the public appearances that went on throughout the 2008 campaign blaming Mitt Romney for the fact that a man's wife died of cancer. It was part of the "vulture capitalist" attacks on Romney. The company he'd worked for (Bain Capital) had purchased a steel company, and then closed that facility down. One of the former workers was an angry, lying scumbag named Joe Soptic. Joe was given up to two years of insurance coverage after the plant closed. Joe's wife worked at a job that provided insurance, but she hurt her shoulder and left the job. As a result of her injury and leaving her job that provided insurance, she was uninsured when she was diagnosed with cancer FIVE YEARS after the plant closure. The disgusting democrats (using Priorities USA, a SuperPAC headed up by former Obama operative Bill Burton) put out an ad blaming her death on Mitt Romney. When democrats were called upon to denounce that disgusting attack on Mitt Romney (by the one or two media outlets who asked them to do so), none would. That was, in my opinion, the finest example of just how dishonest and deceitful democrats will stoop to win an election. And they couldn't care less the incredible harm they do to those left in their wake. It is because of that very kind of predictable behavior from the left in every election season that thinking people not only don't listen to democrats, but actively disbelieve whatever they say. I know, because I fall into that category. This entire article appears to me to be one of sheer desperation on behalf of democrats. They see that people are finally onto them. And in a not-so-transparent but desperate effort to paint Trump in the same dishonest light they've painted countless other republicans in the past, they create this incredible sob story that attempts to apologize for all of the horrific things they did to McCain and Romney, and why? Because according to these same admitted liars, Trump really is a fascist and would lead to the end of the world. And somehow, the stupid American voters they've laughed at for years are supposed to believe them just this one last time. **If you need a reminder of this pathetic lie the democrats used against Romney, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b1g07uq4y8 (Mitt Romney killed my wife) If you want to see a hilarious and better version of that same video, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPMTVm3GEyo (Barack Obama killed my wife) -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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