If you disagree with Obama, you're a liar or a shill -- same for Paul Krugman
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
08/11/10 1:04 PM EDT
I think Barack Obama has hastened the process by which America's political debate is becoming utterly poisoned -- and he has done it not accidentally, but willfully.
If there is a motto on the exit to the Democrats' locker-room under Coach Obama, it is this:
* The other guy is lying
* The other guy has bad motives
* And the other guy is the one playing nasty
I don't know if Obama believes this, but he certainly sees political gain to behaving this way.
If I had the time and was willing to make a huge post I bet I could lay out more than 100 examples of Obama assailing the motives of his critics. Instead, I'll just give you a few representative samples:
Last summer, in pitching his health-care plan, this is how he talked about his opponents:
<<< Despite all the hand-wringing pundits and the best efforts of those who are profiting from the status quo, we are closer ....
every time we come close to passing health insurance reform, the special interests fight back with everything they've got. They use their influence. They use their political allies to scare and mislead the American people. They start running ads. This is what they always do. >>>
This was false, of course, as the biggest special interests (AARP, drug lobby, AMA, American Hospital Association) had all lined up behind ObamaCare. But truth doesn't seem to matter so much in making these charges.
This month, we got a fundraising email from "Joe Biden" attacking the "corporate interests," and saying, "By spending an unprecedented amount of cash to support Republicans," Biden writes, "they're doing their best to buy their way back into power." More BS. Biden's closeness with lobbyists is jaw-dropping and the "special interests" are all favoring Dems with their money.
This should be no surprise -- it's how Obama behaved during the campaign, as I wrote about last year:
<<< "David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hatemongering,” Obama’s presidential campaign wrote about my friend and now Examiner colleague last September in an effort to get a radio host to drop him.
The campaign e-mail called Freddoso a “card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine” and said his anti-Obama book (for which I was the editor) contained “lies and smears about Barack Obama.” >>>
It's Obama's m.o., and increasingly it's the m.o. of the Left. Check out Paul Krugman's attack on Paul Ryan's "roadmap." Rather than go after the ideas, Krugman primarily attacked motives and the man in his column headlined "The Flimflam Man," which calls Ryan a charlatan and his plan a fraud. (Krugman's actual critiques of the roadmap, by the way, are unanchored by fact.)
I'm not saying Obama invented this style of politics. The Right had plenty of folks throwing the "Unpatriotic" label at those who opposed the "cakewalk" into Iraq. Today there are plenty of bloggers, pundits, and politicians on both sides who think that those on the other side are, de facto, immoral or dishonest.
But Obama is so relentless in his assertion that his opponents -- and only his opponents -- are special interests, liars, or dupes for lobbyists, that I wonder if he's not doing even more harm to the Republic through his rhetoric than either he or George W. Bush have done through their policies.
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