One of These Things is Not Like the Other

Kim Strassel managed to get under my skin Sunday morning. Somehow she landed on the This Week roundtable and tossed a smoke grenade on the topic of violent, anti-government rhetoric on the Right.

(http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/roundtable-financial-regulation-10406844 about 1 minute, 30 seconds in.)

The question was raised following former President Clinton’s remarks about how all of this reminded him eerily of the anti-government rhetoric of the ‘90s (which of course led to the Mura Federal Building bombing). Strassel’s ‘argument’ was that liberals seemed to think it was fine when Code Pink interrupted congressional meetings and back then it was just “public discourse” and “considered good.”

Just a small pet peeve. If one of the central arguments you dust off whenever someone argues a principled point with you is, ‘well the other side was bad once too,’ then you represent a not so serious political perspective. And if your points of comparison are substantially dissimilar, then don’t expect anyone to consider your perspective serious at all.

Look, I’m not arguing liberals are inherently morally superior when it comes to overheated rhetoric versus people on the Right. America has seen violent, anti-government rhetoric from the Left in the past, but now, as in the ‘90s, it’s primarily from the Right and the troubling thing is that conservative politicians are embracing these folks rather than distancing themselves. When Congressman Steve King sympathizes with the nut who flew his plane into the IRS building or suggests the Tea Party come to DC and take over the place and prevent the elected government from functioning, he should be ostracized by others on the Right. They should be coming forward to say this is unacceptable. Instead we hear crickets.

PS-I have yet to find a liberal that has a positive thing to say about the antics of Code Pink. No congressperson I know of thought their interruptions of hearings were a good thing. And as annoying as Code Pink was/is, I don’t recall them ever calling for a violent revolution.