Jeff Jacoby gives his yearly synopsis of the slanderous and hate-filled rhetoric directed at the GOP by their opposition in the year 2004. And while Republicans certainly speak very badly at times about Democrats, the vitriol that comes from the Democrats is not even in the same ballpark.
As in years past, Republicans were almost routinely associated with Nazi Germany. Former Vice President Al Gore referred to GOP activists as “brown shirts.” Newsday columnist Hugh Pearson likened the Republican National Convention to the “Nazi rallies held in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler.” Linda Ronstadt said that the Republican victory on Election Day meant “we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.” Chuck Turner, a Boston city councilor, smeared National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as “a tool of white leaders,” like “a Jewish person working for Hitler.”
Such Nazi labeling is no less disgusting when it comes from Republicans, of course. According to Bob Woodward, Secretary of State Colin Powell described Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith as running a separate government out of his “Gestapo office.” Commentator Ralph Peters, writing in the New York Post, accused Democrat Howard Dean of using the tactics of Hitler and Goebbels to silence his competitors. Too many conservatives and libertarians refer to antismoking extremists as “tobacco Nazis,” or to the humorless critics of fast food as “food Nazis.” Whether it comes from the right or the left, language like that is vile.
Overwhelmingly, though, political hate speech today comes from the left. It has increasingly become a habit of leftist argumentation to simply dismiss conservative ideas as evil or noxious rather than rebut them with facts and evidence.
