I'll never forget how Al Gore's Democrats tried to steal the 2000 presidential election and then spent the next eight years complaining about Republicans stealing their "democracy." Liberals: Projection is your name.
We've watched their behavior since, from the Democrats' suppression of military voters to Al Franken's larcenous Senate victory to the flagrant voter intimidation of the New Black Panther Party members in Philadelphia to untold stories of voter fraud already emerging in these congressional elections. We just saw a Delaware TV station "forgetting" to broadcast Christine O'Donnell's 30-minute campaign ad.
Sadly, Democrats are often what they accuse their "enemies" of being. They typically engage in that behavior which they decry and exempt themselves from standards they proclaim.
Item: Snarky comedian Jon Stewart issued calls for civility at his mock political rally this past weekend. "But we live now in hard times, not end times," said Stewart. "And we can have animus and not be enemies." Similarly, on his show, he has exhorted people to "stop shouting, throwing and drawing Hitler mustaches on people other than Hitler."
Yet in 2008, Stewart noted that Sarah Palin had said she really likes going to small towns "because that's the pro-America part of the country. You know, I just want to say to her, very quickly, f--- you."
Somehow I doubt that Stewart was similarly miffed at Barack Obama for denigrating small-town Midwesterners by saying, "It's not surprising, then, that they get bitter and they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." I also don't remember Stewart and his ilk condemning the Bush/Hitler left for its eight years of malicious slander. We will probably get old waiting for "progressives" to denounce their fellow leftist Tony Serra, a defense attorney in San Francisco, for displaying a huge banner in front of his building that reads, "F--- Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina."
But we mustn't let this hypocritical incident pass without also challenging Stewart's bogus premise, shamelessly popularized by the liberal media, that Obama's opponents, particularly tea party protesters, are uncivil, vulgar, bigoted, hyper-partisan rubes forever flirting with violence.
This is wrong in every respect. The protesters are extraordinarily civil, racially colorblind, peaceful and committed to making public officials of both parties more accountable and responsive to the people and more faithful to America's founding principles.
The truth is that Stewart and his fellow leftists can't stand criticism of their policies and their politicians. It's not the tea partyers' mythical rudeness that bothers leftists. It's that they are daring to stand up to the left's agenda. So don't blindly or silently accept these false caricatures. Remember who's making them -- and why.
Item: Speaking of Obama's bitter-clinger formulation, I've always believed his bizarre suggestion that the small-towners cling to "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" said more about Obama than it did about small-towners, about whom Obama obviously knows next to nothing.
We've seen repeated proof that it is Obama who harbors animus toward people who aren't like him, from his "typical white" grandmother to Republicans he is relegating to the back seat because they "created the mess." Most recently, we saw his antipathy exposed in his now famous "enemies" statement.
At a rally in Cincinnati, Obama said, "If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're going to punish our enemies, and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us' ... then I think it's going to be harder."
There's no two ways of interpreting this. Obama unambiguously is calling those who oppose his agenda "enemies." He's the one with the antipathy. But it's worse than that. He's also, once again, using the race card, deliberately trying to paint Republicans as enemies of an entire race of people, the same tactic he used in opposing the Arizona immigration law. So it is Obama, not his opponents, who are culpable on the matter of "enemies" and alleged racial animus.
Item: I filled a couple of chapters in my book about Obama's deceitful self-description as a post-partisan and his fraudulent labeling of Republicans for their alleged partisanship. Well, he struck again in his recent Cleveland campaign rally, where he said the Republicans' political strategy has been to count on voters having "amnesia" about the GOP's having caused this terrible economy. He said they were obstructionists -- just as he disingenuously accused Republicans of having no ideas on health care right before he bragged about having adopted some of their ideas.
On the bright side, people are onto Obama's and the left's projection and hypocrisy, which is yet another explanation for the Democrats' imminent trouncing.