Christian Hartsock
October 12, 2008
Desperate Democrats call for "desperate Republican" press coverage
By Christian Hartsock

Democrats love to claim that you can tell the Republicans are "desperate" when their campaigns begin turning negative. However, I will just as lief say that you can tell the Democrats are desperate when the mainstream media begins turning negative.

The Smear-Free Left has been incessantly screeching about John McCain's new "smear" campaign, clumsily tossing desperate and meaningless charges of "racism" around as they are historically wont to do when they have run out of creative ideas. When it comes to the art of verbal combat, liberals never did graduate from the third grade playground. Rule #1: When at a loss for ideas, call your opponents "racist!" (It works even better than "Your mom!")

In response to conservative acknowledgments of Obama's financial ties with convicted felon Tony Rezko, the Sunday Times gasped that McCain has become "desperate." The New York Times chastised Sarah Palin's public acknowledgement of B. Hussein Obama's indisputable ties with anti-American terrorist Bill Ayers (as reported by The New York Times), whining that "[Republicans] have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent's record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia." (How dare you notice that story on our front page and actually read it! Racist! Xenophobe!)

Liberals have a tendency to do this every election. In 2004 they ran a candidate, John Kerry, whose history of maligning the character of the U.S. ranged from accusing Marines of having "razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan" before congress in 1971, to accusing them of "going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children" before CBS's Face the Nation in 2005. This time they are running a candidate, B. Hussein Obama, whose idea of saluting our Marines in combat consists of crediting them for "air-raiding villages and killing civilians." Charming.

Just as liberals accused the Bush campaign of being "desperate" for daring to notice Kerry's questionable attitude towards the United States in 2004, they are now accusing the McCain campaign of being "desperate" for daring to notice Obama's unquestionably questionable attitude towards the United States. In essence, the ingenuity of liberal defense mechanisms can be summed up in the following statement: "How dare you notice that our motives are unmistakably anti-American!"

Gee, liberals — have you stopped to wonder if maybe it's not us, but you? Perhaps if you stopped running candidates who show contempt for America every election, we might stop noticing your candidates' contempt for America every election! Republicans questioning Democrats' patriotism is not a manifestation of "desperation" — it is a manifestation of basic observational skills.

In the heat of desperation, liberal inferiority complex tendencies incline them to resort to three instinctive impulses: a) Self-conscious of their own desperation, deriding their opponents for being "desperate"; b) Using their mass-media monopoly advantage to sic the press on their opponents and emphasize the "desperation" thereof; and c) the classic genius tactic liberals apparently never get bored of: calling their opponents "racist."

Within 24 hours of Palin's rally speech in Carson, California, CNN "experts" made an "official" invalidation of the Obama-Ayers relationship on the basis that Obama was never technically in association with Ayers — he just served on a committee board with him, held a fundraiser at his home and accepted a $200 campaign donation from him, that's all!

In addition to CNN's heroic attempt to save the day for Obama, Obama himself laughed off the claim by reminding voters that he was only eight years old when Ayers was busy bombing the capitol. Fine. The two of them have a 17-year age difference. He's got us there!

While Republicans have to depend on bloggers to invalidate liberal lies about them (i.e. the 2004 CBS "Rathergate" scandal), Democrats have major media outlets like CNN at their disposal ready at the whim to pounce on any charges made against them within a heartbeat. The Smear-Free Democrats need not bother getting their own hands dirty and can rely on the mainstream media to malign their opponents — i.e. Keith Olbermann at MSNBC carping about John McCain's "continuing association with radicals from the 1970s" on the basis of a "public conversation" McCain had with G. Gordon Liddy in November 2007 — thereby resting his case that McCain "hates the constitution."

Meanwhile, Republican candidates like Sarah Palin don't have a mass-media propaganda machine to depend on, thus they are left to their own devices to illuminate questionable associations their opponents have had with, well, questionable individuals. And the moment they do — they are instantaneously gang-raped for it and subsequently laughed off as "desperate." If only the Nuremberg defendants had the American media behind them to call their prosecutors "desperate" they may have just walked.

If McCain having a "public conversation" with Gordon Liddy constitutes "hatred of the Constitution" (and Olbermann is somehow immune to any degree of media backlash such as that of CNN's against Palin) — then I say Obama working with, partying with, and collecting campaign capital from Bill Ayers constitutes "hatred of America." Do we have a problem?

Following Palin's public acknowledgment of Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, an "analysis" by the Associated Press (which, for purposes of brevity, I will refer to as simply, the "Ass. Press") sneered that "her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret."

Life must be unimaginably convenient for Democrats. When Palin says, "Our opponent who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country," one can simply count on the press to scream in effect: Hey! Did you catch that? Palin just called Obama a "nigger"!

Um, no. In saying, "our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country," Palin most likely meant something to the effect of "our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country." The exuberant imagination liberals must have to derive their penumbraic "between-the-lines" allegations of "racially-tinged" rhetoric out of a statement that carries absolutely zero invocations of race from any plausible approach is a modern phenomenon.

Racial division is a perennially healing itch in American history that liberals never cease to scratch into a blister. Being that their party was on the wrong side of the race issue from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats apparently harbor the compulsion to overcompensate by resurrecting the race issue into the American political arena, and via the mainstream media, clothe themselves in shining armor for wanton political purposes. Every time Obama's ethnicity has been brought up in this presidential race, it has always been at the left's behest. They need racial division — we don't.

When Bill Clinton called Obama's Iraq plan a "fairy tale" in January, Congressman Tom Clyburn immediately deemed the comment "insulting" to the African-American community. Now that Sarah Palin has highlighted the ties between Obama and a white American terrorist, liberals have resorted to the same "Oh, Because He's Black, Huh?" retort. Liberals have erected a protective, impenetrable wall of infallibility around their candidate, conveniently filing any criticism of him as evidence that "America simply may not be ready for a black president." But many liberals obviously weren't ready for the first black Secretary of State, instead dismissing Colin Powell as a "token" and an "Uncle Tom"; nor were they ready for the first black female Secretary of State, Condi Rice, as they mocked her as a "house nigger" and an "Aunt Jemima." But now that they have their first black presidential nominee, Republicans better watch what they say when they question Obama's record! (Never mind that Obama's opponent in 2004 Senate race, Alan Keyes, had been a black Republican presidential candidate twelve years before Obama's "historic run for the White House.")

Democratic desperation is effectively invisible to the public, as it only need manifest itself in the form of media coverage on alleged "Republican desperation," inasmuch as Republicans don't enjoy the hegemonic media resources Democrats do. Thus, the secret to determining when Democrats are really desperate is by simply take note when we begin "learning" about how "desperate" those race-baiting Republicans are.

© Christian Hartsock

 

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Christian Hartsock

Christian Hartsock, 24, is a director, screenwriter, producer and political columnist and activist... (more)

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