Two Liberal Journalists

Two liberal journalists:

One with honor, one without. 

William Raspberry wrote a column in 1993 blasting Rush Limbaugh as a bigot. Eleven days later, he wrote a second  column retracting the first. “Rush, I’m sorry”, he began. To his great credit, he confessed that his earlier piece had been written in ignorance. “My opinions about [Limbaugh] had come largely from other people, mostly friends [in liberal-dominated newsrooms] who think Rush is a four-letter word. They are certain he is a bigot. Is he?” To find out, Raspberry did what responsible journalists are supposed to do — base opinions when possible on first-hand observation, rather than potentially-biased hearsay. After listening to several hours of Limbaugh’s radio show, Raspberry concluded that he is no more a bigot or hatemonger than Art Buchwald.

Paul Krugman is no William Raspberry, as evidenced by his scurrilous reaction to the Arizona massacre and his relentless, often unfounded, attacks on leading conservatives. Like other progressives who subscribe the win-at-all-costs tactics of Saul Alinsky, Krugman knows that people such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are not racists, bigots or purveyors of hate. Yet, he writes just the opposite. Why would a supposedly  respectable journalist do such a dishonorable thing? Unable to sell their dream of a socialist utopia to a nation made great by free-enterprise capitalism, Krugman and his fellow Alinskyites have made an art form of attempting to frighten listeners and viewers away from talk radio and Fox News by falsely portraying conservatives like Limbaugh and Beck as morally-bereft hatemongers whose programs should be shunned by decent people.  

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Krugman’s Toxic Rhetoric

January 10^th, 2011 by W.W. | Iowa City

HOW did a deadly shooting spree by a disturbed young man with the typically inscrutable politics of political killers turn into a crazy referendum on the state of American political discourse?

Mere minutes after the identity of the alleged Tucson gunman hit the wires, partisans began a reprehensible scramble to out Jared Loughner as ideological kin to their political opponents. Actually, well before that time, some left-leaning opinionators began suggesting that Sarah Palin's now-infamous crosshairs map probably had something to do with the shootings. At the very least, intemperately fiery right-wing rhetoric probably had something to do with creating a cultural "climate" unusually encouraging to would-be assassins. Before anybody really knew anything, some people seemed to have become convinced that if not for the heavy weather of partisan antagonism summoned by intemperate tea-party types, Gabrielle Giffords would not have got a bullet through the brain.

In a blog item on Saturday, before any significant details about Mr Loughner's motivations had come to light, Paul Krugman wrote:

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

This struck me as irresponsibly premature, and one might have thought that, given a little more time and information, Mr Krugman would change his tune, or at least turn down the volume. Nope. In today's column on America's alleged "climate of hate", Mr Krugman reports that he's been "expecting something like this atrocity to happen" since 2008, conjures in his fevered imagination a "rising tide of violence", and spots his hated political foes behind it all:

[I]t’s the saturation of our political discourse—and especially our airwaves—with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.

What's more, unless the ranting right reins in the kind of talk that leaves Mr Krugman "with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach", "Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning." Welcome to crazytown, my friends, where it does not seem crazy to disgorge toxic, entirely evidence-free rhetoric about the mortal threat of toxic rhetoric. Does the man honestly think he's helping?