A friend writes to voice his displeasure (see Feedback) over Viewpoint's tendency to highlight left-wing depravity and to associate it on occasion with the Kerry campaign. His concern was with our post titled How Low Can You Go. Our reply follows:
You say you don't understand my logic. That makes us even. You say I'm focussing on extremists on the fringe that nobody listens to, and you think it's unfair to associate them with Kerry. I don't know why. First of all, I'm not sure they are on the fringe. The original column implicitly encouraging the assassination of George Bush was in The Guardian which is a mainstream leftist paper in England, and the website which carried those awful "endorsements" of The Guardian's sentiments gets a heck of a lot more traffic than mine does. It's a fairly mainstream site on the left.
You ask why I don't write about the KKK or the skinheads, etc. and connect them with George Bush. I'll tell you what. You give me a site where the wing nuts on the right talk about assassinating Kerry and use the sort of hateful language against him that these people used, and I'll be more than happy to run it. Show me a site where there are haters on the right urging people to vote for Bush, and I'll certainly write about it.
I'm as sickened by the behavior of the KKK and skinheads as you are, but to compare these people to the ones I quoted in the Viewpoint post is to compare apples and oranges. The skinheads are absolutely irrelevant to this election. The sickos on the right really are out on the fringe and are politically isolated. In fact they are scarcely political at all. To the extent that any of them are involved politically they are a negligible voice.
The thugs on the left are not. They are politically active and they are not at all irrelevant. They are trying hard to dehumanize the President, but you can't dehumanize a man without it resulting in some lunatic feeling justified in actually trying to carry out an assassination. Their coarseness is creating a climate in which people feel it's okay to joke about killing someone. It's a short step from that mindset to actually trying it.
I'm surprised you don't join me in pointing out the outrage of this instead of criticizing me for identifying these people with Kerry. Nor do I think that that identification is at all unfair, anymore than it would be unfair to wonder what it is about Bush that attracts neo-nazis to his side, if, in fact, such were the case. If David Duke and the Klan were out endorsing and campaigning for Bush, I'd be appalled. Kerry has attracted endorsements from some of the worst tyrants and killers (Arafat, Kim Jong Il, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, et al) around. It's completely fair to wonder why. It's also completely fair to point out that many of the people he attracts on the domestic side are in some ways just as despicable. I'm sorry you have such a problem with that.