Bob Novak and the Knoxville Church Shooting—Hatred, Left and Right

I remember the day it was announced that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer’s disease. I was in downtown Iowa City when I read the headline. At that moment, a leftist colleague strode up beside me, read the headline, and laughed. She was beside herself with joy.

The press reported today that conservative columnist Robert Novak is being treated for brain cancer, and literally within minutes, leftists posting at DemocraticUnderground.com were already having their fun. A sample of their hateful posts:

Karmas (sic) a bitch, ain’t it?

Brain tumor? Isn’t this kinda like a woman getting testicular cancer?

Maybe there IS a god after all.

(Brain cancer’s) Not horrible enough for Novak.

Are we supposed to make nice about this motherfucker, too? Payback time, asshole.

The Hollywood liberal news and gossip site HuffingtonPost.com, as is its usual practice when conservatives die or suffer tragedies, is not allowing posts on the Novak story. I’ve seen the same kind of vitriol at HuffPost on numerous occasions, along with calls for the torture and assassination of the president and vice president.

It was also reported today that the man who killed two at a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee did so out of hatred for liberals.

The hatred for liberals so rampant on the right, especially in conservative talk radio, is worn as a badge of honor by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity. Limbaugh accuses liberals of celebrating at the deaths of American soldiers; Savage considers liberalism (but not autism!) to be “a mental disorder“; Coulter accuses liberals of treason and godlessness; and Hannity was caught by an open mic referring to liberals with the oxymoronic phrase, ”God I hate these people.”

Then there’s Neal Boortz, who on March 14 of this year encouraged military personnel present at an anti-war rally in Pittsburgh to “Shoot those leftist bastards dead.” (Boortz should watch out for the ricochet.)

Most Americans, left and right, are decent people whose points of view may vary, but who harbor no ill will towards those on the other side of the ideological aisle. Such moderation and simple human decency are largely missing from the left wing blogosphere and the right wing airwaves.

Moderation and decency don’t attract large lucrative audiences, however. Hatred and extremism, it seems, do.

Newsprism

Citizens, States and a Ballooning Federal Government

Two recent Internet posts compelled me to take a brief hiatus from summer vacation today to blog about our ballooning federal government.

The first is a July 16 column by Walter Williams entitled “Oklahoma Rebellion.” Williams, an uncompromising libertarian conservative, outlines a bill passed overwhelmingly by the Oklahoma House of Reperesentatives–Joint House Resolution 1089 (text)–which demands a return to the Consitutional principle established by the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment plainly and unambiguously limits the scope of federal authority to precisely those powers enumerated in the Consitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That the federal government long ago usurped, and continues to usurp, powers clearly reserved to the states and the people is undeniable. Resolution 1089, introduced to the legislature by Representative Charles Key, simply demands a return to the rule of law:

therefore, be it resolved … that the State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States. That this serve as Notice and Demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.

Dr. Williams ends his column this way:

Both parties and all branches of the federal government have made a mockery of the checks and balances, separation of powers and the republican form of government envisioned by the founders. One of the more disgusting sights for me to is to watch a president, congressman or federal judge take an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, when in reality they either hold constitutional principles in contempt or they are ignorant of those principles. State efforts, such as Oklahoma’s, create a glimmer of hope that one day Americans and their elected representatives will realize that the federal government is the creation of the states. A bit of rebellion by officials in other states will speed that process along.

Now for the irony: adjacent to the column in which Dr. Williams discusses this “Oklahoma Rebellion” is a news story entitled, “Oklahoma Asks Feds for Drought Aid.” The problem, as Dr. Williams well knows, is that the states suck on the federal teats just as greedily as do so many of our fellow citizens and are no more likely to be weaned from them than the most irresponsible welfare recipients.

Speaking of whom, an article on National Public Radio’s web site today proclaims, “For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out of Reach.” The article describes an Ohio family that, despite government aid in the form of food stamps, subsidized housing, and Social Security, struggles to buy groceries. The story ends,

The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it’s more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don’t buy extras like ice cream anymore.

Apparently, at least according to NPR’s grocery bag index, inflation in Ohio is running at something like 35%.

Here’s the rub: these hungry victims of the vagaries of our capitalist economy don’t appear to be missing any meals:

I pity this mother and daughter, but starving Ethiopians they ain’t. The daughter, 19, along with “most of her siblings and their spouses,” is “unemployed and relies on government assistance and food stamps.” Predictably, the mother, 40, has never worked.

What is the Constitutional rationale for subsidizing so many aspects of citizens’ lives? That’s a power reserved to the state, or to the people, who are free to subsidize the poor through the church and civic organizations.

And what is the rationale for the federal government running a radio network, especially one with so transparent an agenda as NPR? The mass media, above all American institutions, is the one in which government should be most reluctant to operate.

One last irony: the link directly beneath the photo above reads, “Enlarge.”

Newsprism