The Long History of Dem Smear Tactics
Find it here
In a long a exhaustive article, the author gives examples of the Dem/media smear collaboration that has existed since the Fifties in this country, and how it is getting more desperate and vicious at this time. Some excerpts:
The choice of “designed” is deliberate. Sarah Palin was the victim of the most vicious, global, and organized campaign ever carried out against a modern politician. It might have begun spontaneously, as the standard mud-flinging attendant to any political campaign. (Yeah, I know - liberals don’t actually do that, they sit around on chaise longues wearing togas discussing policy in Socratic dialogue. I’m just being a throwback.) But it soon expanded well beyond the customary level of heated campaign rhetoric to fill every last niche of the media sphere, a process that could not have occurred without manipulation at every last turn.
The anti-Palin campaign was intended to implant myths so complex, so convoluted, and so widespread that they could never be completely countered. The American left has developed the art of slander to a degree never previously achieved. It’s one thing they’re good at. Not even the most acid-tongued gossips of the Bourbon court at Versailles were quite the match of contemporary left-wing political operatives.
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Vicious innuendo has been part of the left’s toolkit for generations. Long before Saul Alinsky formalized the practice, mud-throwing was a central element of left-wing strategy. Reading some of the attacks written by Marx and Lenin would make your hair stand on end. (Curiously, most of this stuff was aimed, not at the capitalist oppressor, but at lefty comrades, including Marx’s brethren in the Socialist International and Lenin’s direct competitors, the Mensheviks.)
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The 1964 election marked the culmination of this fever. The GOP candidate was Barry Goldwater, a no-nonsense western conservative, viewed as stalwart, straightforward, and a little dull. Then Goldwater declared his candidacy and was immediately transformed into a fire-breathing right-wing lunatic. JFK had been murdered only months earlier, and no Republican had much of a chance, but the left pulled out all stops anyway. Ralph Ginzburg, a glossy porn merchant (and no relation to poet Allen, though I thought that myself for years), published a claim by “500 psychiatrists” that Goldwater was a paranoid schizophrenic. The charge was a complete fabrication—Ginzburg may as well have said 5,000 or 5 million—but it was repeated across the country all the same. After traveling to Germany to meet members of the center-right Christian Democrats, Goldwater, whose father was Jewish, was accused of meeting with Nazis. (A friend of mine, a stolid old-school suburban Republican, was painted as a Nazi by The New York Times for campaigning for Goldwater. An apology? Are you kidding?) About the only thing Goldwater wasn’t accused of was hunting wolves from the air.
The effort climaxed with a slander orchestrated by that moral paragon, Bill Moyers, who oversaw the creation of possibly the most infamous campaign commercial of all time, the “little girl” or “daisy” ad (the ad can be found here and is certainly worth checking out). A cute little girl is seen pulling the petals off a flower and chanting to herself. A gruff voice suddenly overrides hers, counting down from 10. As the voice reaches “1”, the scene—child, flowers and all—is obliterated by a nuclear blast. On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of Democratic candidate Lyndon B. Johnson misreciting a line of poetry from W.H. Auden: “We must love one another, or die.” (Actually, coming from LBJ, it sounded more like, “We mus’ luv one unadda, er dah.”)
Moyers’ ad was vicious, inaccurate, and very effective. As the culminating ad in a series (there were three or four others, each just as meretricious, none quite as powerful), it had the impact of a knockout punch. For days afterward, few politically-aware Americans spoke of anything else.
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Liberal hate campaigns are a product of the ideologization of American politics. As liberalism has shifted more to the left, the concept of “the opposition” has altered. Classic American liberalism of the mature period of American politics in the late 19th to mid 20th century held a pragmatic view of competition. By the very nature of things, the opposition was someone you had to live with amid the give and take of the political game. While at one point you might be up, the next week it might be the guy across the aisle, so you treated him civilly as a matter of simple good sense. FDR selecting Wendell Willkie as ambassador without portfolio for Latin America after defeating him in the 1940 election is but one example.
Contemporary leftists, on the other hand, view their opponents as people you send off to the Gulag, unworthy of any respect, deserving of any kind of low blow, no matter how foul. So you accuse Goldwater of insanity, slander Justice Thomas as a sexual monster, casually publish plays, books, and films calling for the assassination of President Bush, and assault the first serious Republican female candidate at her weakest point—her family. And of course, you scream to high heaven if any form of turnabout occurs in your direction, as in the case of the Obama family, which was declared “off limits” early in the presidential campaign, at the same time that Palin’s family was being stretched on the media rack. (Someday, somebody has to do a study of liberalism and hypocrisy. It’ll be an awful lengthy volume.)
This style of political loathing has become effectively innate. It has been systemized to such a degree as to become integral. Modern liberalism cannot do without it. An entire structure has been erected on the basis of political hatred, and from that structure a whole new strategy has arisen.
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Read the whole thing. This is the real enemy of freedom, a concentrated and focused propaganda attack on real American values, in order to install a totalitarian regime of govt controlling every detail of our lives.
