GOP Joins Thought Police

Thursday, January 14, 2010

At FrontPage Magazine, Jacob Laskin correctly cries foul on the Republican response to Nevada Senator Harry Reid's recently-publicized "racist" comments about Barack Obama. Laskin notes that the GOP is acting on an ill-conceived premise of expediency by adopting the childish tactics of the multiculturalist left. Doing so, while bemoaning the obvious double-standard applied to those who make such remarks, he argues is foolish because it wrongly legitimizes these tactics:

[GOP National Chairman Michael] Steele is of course right about this double standard. But the chairman does nothing to restore integrity to the political debate by validating the political left's pernicious smear that any and all comments about race, however innocuous, must be treated as an act of racism, with their author forced to prostrate himself before various racial lobbies or risk banishment from polite society.
As I have noted in the past with other, similar, cries of "Hypocrisy!" from the right, it is fine to call someone a hypocrite, but not enough when that person's precepts are wrong to begin with and it would thus be immoral to actually follow them anyway.

The right, unfortunately, does this all the time, even going so far as to dare the Democrats to be more consistent collectivists from time to time. But in this case, it's worse: The right is doing the job for the left rather than taking this golden opportunity to stand up for freedom of speech and against the attempted thought control that is multiculturalism.

Until the right definitively repudiates collectivism and its undergirding morality of altruism, such moral cowardice will be the order of the day. For the guilty secret of many conservatives is that they aren't individualists, either. This is why we see them, time and time again, toss tomatoes at the Democrats, only to "show them how it's done" in exactly the wrong way.

This is not the first time the GOP has aped the left right after noting one of its shortcomings, but it is one of the more obvious examples in recent memory.

-- CAV

4 comments:

madmax said...

I have had mixed reactions to the Reid affair. While I am no fan of Reid, I don't understand the context of his statements. If he was saying that only a light-skinned black man who spoke without an ethnic tone - ie without ebonics - could get elected then he was just stating the truth. I don't see why he should be criticized for stating the realities of current politics. If he was stating that light-skinned was better than dark-skinned or that a black man didn't have the ability to be articulate than that would be racist.

But more importantly, I find it distressing that the conservatives are making such a big issue of this. Taking any statement concerning race and denouncing it as racism is the Left's game. The Republicans shouldn't be playing it. There are a thousand things to lambaste Reid for. This is the least of them. It seems to me to be the same pattern of when they went after Bill Clinton. Instead of the many things they could have focused on (selling nuclear technology secrets to hostile enemies for campaign funds for example), the Republicans focused on sex. They really are the party of stupid.

Gus Van Horn said...

Madmax,

I am inclined to think -- although I do not know for a fact -- that Reid was simply stating the truth.

Your mention of the Republican attempt to impeach Bill Clinton is an excellent example of the same pattern of behavior in the past. Thanks for mentioning it.

Gus

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, you write: "the Republican attempt to impeach Bill Clinton..." Just to be persnickety about it, the Republicans did impeach Clinton; they didn't convict him, however.

Gus Van Horn said...

Ah. True. I stand corrected, sir!