New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman showed his impatience with democracy a few weeks ago by praising communist China’s superior ability to adopt what he regards as the correct environmental policies – none of that messy constitutionalism, consensus and rule of law. Now he packages what is essentially the same complaint in different garb: Opponents of President Obama’s policies object too long and loudly; they might even prevail. The implication is that they should just shut up.
The garb is the claim that “the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination”. Now, if Mr. Friedman had made that statement about the far left and George W. Bush, he could have clothed it substantially: Liberals routinely asserted that Mr. Bush was “selected, not elected” in 2000; leading MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann and others pushed the fantasy that his reelection in 2004 was the product of a 100,000-plus vote fraud in Ohio; a large proportion of Democrats (35% according to polls) believed that the White House was complicit in the 9/11 attacks; leading liberals talked of a “secret executive order” altering the Presidential succession to bypass Congress, among other nefarious plots; and we were constantly warned that the Bush Administration posed an immediate threat to civil liberties. There was “tipping over into delegitimation”, loud and clear. Thomas Friedman was unalarmed.
What comparable evidence can he cite for a parallel climate in the Obama Administration? Well, somebody posted a Facebook poll asking whether the President should be murdered. (The Secret Service is, of course, investigating.) Beyond that,
And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet “socialist” to calling him a “liar” in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives.
The birthers, who try to prove that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, are ridiculous, and – aside from the ideologically unclassifiable Lou Dobbs – no one with the least influence has taken up their cause. Note, too, that, while birtherism can aptly be termed an attempt to delegitimize the President, it is emotionally feeble. Being born outside the United States doesn’t involve moral turpitude, and, if any fraud had been committed, Barack Obama could not have been the culprit: He was a few days old when announcements of his birth appeared in the Honolulu newspapers. If there were actual evidence of their falsity, one might conclude that Americans elected an ineligible candidate in 2008, but there would be no cause to hate him for his parents’ or grandparents’ fib.
As for the rest of Friedman’s case, shouting during a Presidential speech is rude, but the now infamous Rep. Joe Wilson was correct on his substantive point, as the White House quietly conceded, and alleging that the President’s policies are “socialist”, whether right or wrong, is surely within the bounds of rational debate, not an incitement to assassination.
And that’s it. From those paltry facts, a New York Times pundit purports to fear that “people [are] crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable”. That makes sense only if what is truly “unthinkable and unforgivable” is the failure of the pundit’s favorite political causes. That wouldn’t be a problem in enlightened Beijing.
Further reading: Victor Davis Hanson and Jay Nordlinger recall, with quotes, the grand old days of Bush Derangement Syndrome, which Tom Friedman never saw as much of a threat to the Republic. Mr. Nordlinger adds the interesting point that the handful of examples of outrageous anti-Obama rhetoric are mostly cherry picked from unreflective rank-and-filers (or less – the Facebook poll that is so significant to Friedman was posted by a teenager, and the Secret Service has dismissed it as juvenile bad taste); the deranged anti-Bush screeds emanated from the elite of the Global Left. Turning to more recent times, Peter Wehner cites examples of Democratic civility in the debate on health care reform.