Political Winds

Enough already.  First they renamed National Airport “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.”  The guy wasn’t even dead yet. Then they christened a ship the “USS Ronald Reagan.”  Last week California decided to remove one of the two statues it’s allowed in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall and replace it with a Reagan statue.  And now we have
Time’s silly cover with Reagan’s face and a tear on his cheek.  The Time article is about conservatives pining for the good old days of Reagan conservatism.  Except they weren’t good old days, as Paul Krugman correctly points out in today’s Times.  Many of today’s disasters are an extension of the Reagan legacy:  laissez-faire economics, regulatory oversight conducted by lobbyists and cronies, anti-environmentalism, attacks on civil liberties, you name it.  I will give Reagan this:  he wasn’t as bad as Bush.  Admittedly this isn’t saying much, but Reagan sometimes responded to changing circumstances.  He saw the opportunities presented by Gorbachev’s Soviet Union.  But Reagan didn’t end the cold war as the myth-makers would have you believe.

We’ve been through the drill many times. Ann Coulter says something outrageous and hateful. There are calls for conservative organizations to stop giving Coulter a platform. The vast majority of those pleas do not come from conservatives. Then a few weeks or months go by and Ann is back at it, sanctioned again by the conservative establishment.

This time it was Coulter using the word “faggot” referring to John Edwards in her speech on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Then today it was revealed that Coulter’s Web site said Edwards campaign manager David Bonior “is fronting for Arab terrorists.”

People like Coulter give voice to the worst and often unexpressed sentiments of Republican politicians and their allied conservative organizations. What’s especially galling is that Republicans not only don’t hold Coulter accountable but they often suggest that the Democrats have their own extremists whom they use in the same way. Well, yes, there are extreme voices on the left. The difference, however, is that mainstream Democratic organizations and politicians don’t embrace those voices. Remember when Rush Limbaugh did his gruesome imitation of Michael J. Fox? Just days later, the president of the United States cozied up to Rush on his demagogic radio program. Ah, the Republicans say, you have Michael Moore. Sorry guys, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, Michael Moore is no Ann Coulter. Nor is he Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and all the others. Moore has a strong point of view and sometimes resorts to journalistic techniques that are arguably unfair. But he’s not a hate-mongerer. When it comes to lying and distortion, Moore isn’t in the league of the conservative propagandist/shock jock A-team.