As the left has become increasingly frustrated with a large majority of the country over the Ground Zero mosque, its leaders have, as Charles Krauthammer describes, reached for their defense of last resort: “Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.” He explains:
This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.
It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms).
The election, Ground Zero mosque notwithstanding, was not going to be pretty for the Democrats. But at least it could be, the chattering class reasoned (not convincingly, but in the dead of night, thinking of what they could say on CNN or MSNBC when the right was in full gloat), chalked up to the economy. Not Obama’s policies about the economy, mind you. But the economy. Bush screwed things up worse than they ever imagined. Or something like that.
Now, however, the election is about more than the liberal agenda; it is about liberals themselves. It turns out the left — shocking, I know — predominates in the media and White House but not in the country. They are outnumbered, vastly so. And they forgot to be ingratiating and polite to the rubes with the ballots. The result, Kauthammer predicts, will be “a comeuppance [that] is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.”
The voters, I suspect, have had it with the sneers and, yes, the race-card playing. They’ve had it with being told things they know aren’t so. They’ve had it with being called un-American. They have had it with insane accusations that they are paid opponents of ObamaCare or the Ground Zero mosque.
The public has reason to dislike not merely the policies but also the ethos of the liberal governing class. They have every right to be mad and to throw them out. So naturally, that makes them racists.
