As we have watched the ongoing fight in America over the direction of the country, the actions of the Obama administration and Democratic Congress, and the efforts of the tea party movement, the Townhall editorial team has noticed a disturbing pattern: the American Left is trashing everyone who dares to stand against them.
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The Townhall editorial staff compiled a massive list of those we believe have the largest bull’s-eyes painted on them by the Left and the Democrat-dominated government. From that list, through a process of voting, debating and prioritizing, we assembled the final 100.
Also in the July issue, we dig into the anti-Glenn Beck movement that is looking to silence one of America's most important conservative voices.
And we take a look at the Supreme Court that President Obama hopes to see shift even further Left with the confirmation of his extremely liberal nominee, Elena Kagan.
If you're sick of the Nanny Government telling you what to eat, we take an in-depth look at that, too.
Plus, Attorney General Eric Holder has been in the news a lot lately -- with his decision to lead the federal government's lawsuit against Arizona's law to crack down on illegal immigration, the DOJ's controversial treatment of the New Black Panther Party's efforts to intimidate white voters at the polls in 2008 and his frequent decisions that benefit jihadists more than his fellow Americans.
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The more effective the voices that oppose their agenda, the greater the venom the Left spews in their direction.
It’s this out-of-control behavior from our fellow citizens who are sold out to the ultraliberal progressive Obama agenda to “radically transform” the United States that led us to create this list of “The 100 Americans the Left Hates Most.”
Here's an excerpt from our Glenn Beck #1 entry:
Glenn Beck has been doing his thing for years. … It wasn’t until the last couple of years that the rabid hatred of Beck went mainstream. What happened?
On Jan. 19, 2009, just in time to counter the progressive agenda of the Obama administration that would be sworn in the next day, Beck launched his Fox News Channel show. Though he had been on CNN’s Headline News since May 2006, doing a very similar show, it took joining the Fox News family for Beck to really gain the ire of the Left—as long has he was on a low-rated cable channel that also happened to share the ultimate liberal agenda, they felt they could at least co-exist with the conservative talker.
But it wasn’t just Beck’s joining the Democrats’ most-hated network that has driven liberals to hysteria and resulted in some sort of mental condition that causes them to go into conniption fits at the mere mention of his name in even casual conversation. … No, it’s more than Beck becoming one of Roger Ailes’ minions—much more. …
Beck’s real sin is that he has successfully combined his concern for the direction of this country—a direction currently being dominated by progressives who hate what America has been—with a powerful defense of American exceptionalism and a passion for the Founding Fathers and the system of government and nation they created to produce a show that both educates and entertains. …
Americans—Democrats and Republicans, young and old, those who’ve been political for ages and those who are just beginning to get engaged—now truly sense the threat to the American way of life that the radical Left’s agenda poses. They hadn’t realized it before—both because they had never seen such an extremely progressive, uber-liberal, revolution-loving president and because they had either forgotten or never learned the real history of the United States.
Thanks to Beck, Americans are waking up to what our government is up to and are hungering for the real story of their nation—the one that the progressive movement, using the schools and universities, has tried to keep from them.
We are falling in love with our country again.
That is why the Left hates him.
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We should’ve seen it coming.
As his Fox News Channel television audience exploded in 2009, it was only a matter of time before the liberal Left organized itself into a full-court press against Glenn Beck.
Since the conservative radio phenom made the jump from CNN’s Headline News to FNC, Beck has set cable ratings records, adding more fans to his radio audience of millions. His five o’clock timeslot on Fox has grown to rival the primetime titans of cable news, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Though O’Reilly and Hannity are no strangers to hatred from liberals, Glenn Beck’s “fusion of entertainment and enlightenment” incites a particularly unique level of vitriol unmatched by any other television commentator today.
The concentrated disdain for Beck has also united the Left behind one common goal: getting him off the air. Various levels of the Left—from grassroots organizers to the Obama White House—are working in an all-hands-on-deck concert to discredit Beck with a barrage of attacks in a relentless smear campaign.
To Beck’s regular audience, his disregard for political correctness and adherence to no-nonsense common sense are refreshing. To his detractors, he is a fear-mongering extremist whose opinions represent reckless “vitriolic rhetoric.”
When third-year University of Wisconsin law student Angelo Carusone was annoyed by Beck’s “controversial” opinions, he launched StopBeck.com—an online effort aimed at pressuring advertisers to withdraw their commercial support from Beck’s broadcast on Fox and, in turn, force Beck off the air.
Working from an office in his two-bedroom apartment in Madison, Wis., Carusone sends sound bites of Beck’s show to corporate sponsors and questions whether their products and services should support Beck’s programming. In many cases, this slight nudge is enough to make the targeted advertisers pull their commercials.
If advertisers don’t pull their support, Carusone uses his website and social networking sites to organize other Beck opponents—including his nearly 8,000 followers on Twitter—to bombard the companies with messages in support of a Beck advertising boycott. And if the snowballing effect of thousands of outspoken anti-Beck activists doesn’t stir enough commotion for a company to relent, Carusone picks up the phone to personally confront them. In what he calls his “least flattering method of persuasion,” Carusone argues with corporate media executives until they give in.
StopBeck.com also claims that Beck “uses his media platform to disseminate vitriolic hateful rhetoric and stoke racial anxieties,” and the group works in conjunction with ColorofChange.org—a group founded by dismissed Obama green jobs czar Van Jones—in boycotting Beck’s commercial sponsors. Both organizations disparaged Beck for questioning President Obama’s personal motives in condemning the Cambridge, Mass., Police for arresting Harvard professor Henry Gates in 2009.
ColorofChange.org Executive Director James Rucker told Townhall that the group’s goal has been “to bring Beck’s pattern of race-baiting to advertisers’ attention, to let them know about our members’ concerns and to ask whether those companies feel comfortable enabling Beck’s rhetoric.” But when rapper Kanye West infamously stated that President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” following Hurricane Katrina, there was no boycott of West’s album sales. And when pressed by Townhall about uber-Leftist comedian Bill Maher’s recent comments about Barack Obama not being a “real black president” because he didn’t carry a loaded pistol in his waistband, Rucker and Color of Change did not respond. By Color of Change’s own standards, these comments seem “repulsive and dismissive,” yet Beck and Fox News remain the group’s only boycott targets.
Color of Change and StopBeck.com represent a small niche of the anti-Beck movement on the Left that uses advertising dollars as leverage to silence what they refer to as Glenn Beck’s “brand of hate”—a “brand” they’ve constructed by using selective interpretation of mere fragments of Beck’s contextual dialogue.
But the Left’s efforts in smearing and silencing Beck run well beyond the limits of these two online campaigns. The complex structure of the Left’s Glenn Beck smear campaign also includes some familiar big players in liberal politics.
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Ever since the Supreme Court wrongly delivered the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, the court has rapidly accelerated its hard-right activist tilt. At least that’s what People for the American Way claimed in a recent piece of left-wing propaganda that parrots several other liberal activist group talking points.
Is the court really hard-right? Did we miss something?
Actually, no, but liberal activists are trying valiantly to create some doubt about that.
The most interesting question is why they advance a claim with such laughably thin support.
With the nomination hearings for Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, now is the perfect time to examine what the high court's actual philosophy is.
Every year, the court gravely disappoints adherents of the rule of law.
The court certainly did get some important cases right during the last decade. Yet it is a serious error to just infer that any decision most conservatives agree with was ideologically driven.
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The new government-mandated food pyramid will be released this year. Are you ready for even more instruction from the feds on how to live your life?
The federal government is using its purse and prerogatives in unprecedented ways to try to achieve a long-elusive slimming of the American diet.
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The Obama Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Eric Holder, seems more interested in playing politics with the prosecution of terrorists and defending jihadists than in nailing down convictions to help protect Americans.
Exhibit A of this might be Holder’s initial decision to hold 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial in federal court. But after political blowback, that appears almost certain to change to either a military trial or a civilian trial outside Manhattan.
The about-face came after months of defending the policy by the White House and the attorney general. Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee last November, “Failure is not an option.” That guarantee is impossible to make and contradicts the basis of the original decision of civilian trials to maintain the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty.
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While there were indications that sending KSM back to a military court was part of a deal with Republicans to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, Holder has yet to make a fi nal call on the trial’s venue.
Even New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer became frustrated with the delay, saying in April, “We know the administration is not going to hold the trial in New York. They should just say it already.”
For those who issued the most dire warnings about Obama’s AG nomination, Holder has not disappointed. Aside from the KSM trial and commencing a probe of CIA interrogators, Holder defended his call to treat the Christmas Day bombing suspect as a “criminal.”
“Neither advising Abdulmutallab of his Miranda rights nor granting him access to counsel prevents us from obtaining intelligence from him,” Holder wrote in a Feb. 3 letter to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, Ky. “On the contrary, history shows that the federal justice system is an extremely effective tool for gathering intelligence.”
Most of this could have been foretold given Holder’s shaky history.
After serving as the No. 2 man in the Clinton Justice Department—where he played a defi ning role in the pardons of fugitive fi nancier Marc Rich and the FALN terrorists—Holder went on to be a senior partner in the powerful fi rm of Covington & Burling.
Covington & Burling’s website boasts of winning the “Beacon of Justice” award from the National Legal Aid & Defender Association for its work defending Gitmo detainees. The fi rm has devoted more than 3,000 pro bono hours of legal work to 18 terrorism suspects at Gitmo, seeking to grant the detainees rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and under the Geneva conventions.
“Most of the men have been detained for approximately seven years. None have been charged with any crimes, and none have been accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention,” the Covington & Burling site says.
“In Boumediene v. Bush, 128 S. Ct. 2229 (2008), where we were co-counsel for 11 of the detainees, the Supreme Court held that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus extends to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Following that decision, we have been preparing for habeas corpus hearings to be held in federal district court Washington, D.C., for 11 of our clients,” it continues.
Thus, there should have been little surprise that the Holder Justice Department would be staffed by at least nine lawyers who have defended or advocated for jihadists in American courts.
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