The Opinion Side of the New York Times

Complaints about the "opinion side" of Fox News Channel usually mention Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly. Beck, of course, is a professional crank. He's good at, and there's obviously a market for it. O'Reilly is in fact pretty reasonable as opinion journalism goes. For all sorts of historical and functional reasons, newspapers limit editorials and commentary to a small part of their total print. But if the New York Times ran a Fox style cable news network, one can imagine that Frank Rich would be on it.

Well, here is something Rich had to say about the election in New York's District 23:

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats' prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we're seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era's equivalent to today's tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society's "ruthless prosecution" of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

Now there is a paragraph that makes Glen Beck look like a moderate. Let's consider what is happening at "this moment." When Republican leaders tapped Dede Scozzafava to run in District 23, a lot of conservatives decided that they couldn't support her. So they coalesced around Doug Hoffman, a Republican running on the Conservative Party ticket. With Hoffman running ahead of Scozzafava, her support collapsed and she has now withdrawn. Hoffman looks poised to win.

Somehow all of this seems strangely familiar. Let's see…a major member of Congress, I seem to recall he was a candidate for Vice President, is deemed insufficiently liberal by his party and they engineer his defeat in the Democratic Senate Primary. Oh, I know! It was Joe Liebermann. Of course, Joe went on to run as an independent and win.

You might think is the prerogative of voters to ignore the decisions of party leaders and go with someone they think might better represent them. But when conservatives do it, it's pathological, radical-right hysteria. I am sure that Rich loves government by the people. He just can't stand most of the people. But his next lines are priceless.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.

Matt Welch, writing at the libertarian journal Reason, shows what an utter fool Rich is.

How do you even get to a place like that? For those of you keeping metaphorical score at home: Stalin's Great Purge (just to name his most famous one) included roughly 1,000 executions a day, over two years. The alleged Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin purge, meanwhile, has resulted...brace yourself...in a moderate Republican suspending her campaign for Congress to make way for a conservative independent. Yeah, totally the same.

What is it about the Left today that it cannot allow for the possibility of an honest opposition?

Comments

[IU ERIK]

Honest Conservative opposition wins elections and changes the fabric of this country.... Be true to who you are... Not who they say you should be! Vote for who you are and what you beleive...

[A.I.]

Honest opposition is a two-way street. Why can Republican conservatives not abide moderates within the party? At this point, there is no liberal wing and people like Newt Gingrich are considered moderate. All I can say--as someone who would have voted for Nelson Rockefeller had he won the 1968 nomination--is wow, how ideologically pure and wholly unacceptable the party has become to a lot of voters.

There is one big difference between the Liebermann and Scozzafave situations. Liebermann lost in a primary while Scozzafava was pushed out of the general. Both were "victims" of their party's respective bases, true. But, the traditional way for the base to advance their candidate is through the primary process or as part of the party hierarchy, as would have been the case in NY 23. Instead, NY conservatives mounted a challenge from without to instill the base's ideological purity on the rest of their party. I know Lincoln expressed concern about "a house divided", but he wasn't talking about creating an ideological monolith in the party he helped to found.

As for taking Frank Rich to task for comparing the Republican purge to that of Stalin, consider he was commenting in the context of Obama's opposition likening him to Hitler and his ilk. So isn't criticism of Rich a case of calling the pot black while giving a bye to the kettle?

[KB]

Republicans have no trouble abiding moderates. Perhaps you have heard of Olympia Snowe of Maine? Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas? And then there was the fellow, what was name, oh yeah, John McCain, the most recent Republican nominee. It might be that the GOP is a bit more monolithic, as you put it, right now. That's largely because the Democrats won a lot of seats in conservative districts in recent years. But do I not remember Michael Moore and others threatening to target any Democrat who didn't support the Obama agenda? Speaking of pot and kettle syndrome.

You are right that the Democrats took out Lieberman in the primaries. They did so because he disagreed with the activist core of the party on one important issue. On that issue, national Democratic activists insisted on a "monolithic" party. In New York 23, there was no primary. Scozzafava was chosen by party leaders, but she failed to generate any support. She was in fact to the left of her Democratic rival and was perceived to be a the sort of "Republican" who would side with Nancy Pelosi on pretty much everything. It is not unreasonable for Republican voters to insist that their candidate be distinguishable from a Democrat! Republican support quickly coalesced around Hoffman because that was the only choice available to the party rank and file.

If someone compares Obama to Hitler (as was done to Bush by Moveon.Org), that is stupid and reprehensible. For Rich to say what he said is equally stupid and reprehensible. Two wrongs don't make a right.