http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010861
Our politics suffer when passions overcome reason and vitriol becomes virtue.
BY PETER BERKOWITZ
Wednesday, November 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
“In short, Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims–who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance–to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/eight_years_of_liberal_hatred.html
November 28, 2007
Eight Years of Liberal Hatred
By J.R. Dunn
“We often overlook the fact that liberalism is an ideology, and has been since the days of the New Deal. It is not a doctrine or a school of thought, and does not operate by the rational rules required in those cases. It’s an ideology in the sense of a synthetic, politically-based replacement for religious belief, and it operates by the rules of an ideology — irrational, compulsive, and totally divorced from anything outside of the ideological system itself.”
“Hatred, along with fear, hysteria, and conformity, is a basic element of ideological thinking. I know of no exceptions. For the Nazis, the hate-figures were, of course, the Jews. For the Soviet communists, they were a shifting cast of kulaks, socialists, capitalists, Trotskyites and “wreckers” (saboteurs out to destroy communist achievements on the orders of any of the above). For the New Dealers, it was businessmen (as it is today for some Greens).”
“While it was forgotten amid all the adulation following his funeral, Reagan was loathed nearly as much as Bush during his presidential terms. (A critical moment in my political education occurred when I stepped out of my office moments after Reagan was shot in 1981 and saw Americans dancing in the street over the news.) Reagan, of course, was the halfwit who needed to be led around by his “handlers” lest he stumble in front of a bus or hit the wrong button on the nuclear football.”
