Understanding the Left

It’s a week in which leading Democrats have determined to demonstrate that in spite of the pressing nature of the Social Security crisis and the Medicare crisis the most important use of their time is to send letters to the head of Clear Communications to complain about Rush Limbaugh.  And for a United States Senator to threaten to censure someone who isn’t a member of the Senate.

Did he or didn’t he? Call honest Democrats “phoney soldiers?”  Did he or didn’t he call Brian McGough, the poster boy of VoteVets.org anti-Rush TV commercial, a “suicide bomber?”

You have to wonder, what does it take for Democrats and Media Matters to so wilfully take peoples’ comments out of context and use them as political bludgeons?

The answer comes from the review of a book by a British lefty who made the journey from the left to the right.  Matthew Parris writes about Andrew Anthony’s The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence.

In political journalism, as in warfare, relish is taken in a parade of defectors. Media neocons will therefore cheer the publication of the very personal tale of one Observer journalist’s journey from the dovecote to the hawks’ nest

But Parris notes that even though Anthony has traveled to the right he still belongs in the culture of the left.

I followed his progress across the ideological spectrum and saw him start doing, from the anti-Left, exactly what he used to do from the Left — labelling people, labelling groups, labelling ideas, ferreting out absolutist and blood-curdling claims made by individuals on the other side and brandishing quotes (the way the Israelis and the Palestinians do) with a triumphant ‘you-see-what-kind-of-bastards-we’re-dealing-with[.]’

I guess he is talking about the politics of personal destruction.

There is another way, Parris points out.  It is not a satisfying black-and-white Manichean certainty, but something more tangled and shaded.

And the lefties at Media Matters could learn a thing or two as well—even from Rush Limbaugh, who conducts his show with a jaunty optimism even on conservatism’s darkest days.

The power of Limbaugh’s voice is that he does not play the blood-curdling game of brandishing quotes.  He does not use the angry sneer.  He just brings out the quotes and laughs at the opposition.