Flashback 2001.
City Journal reports:
Today's liberal left discovers racism not just behind opposition to racial preferences but behind most conservative ideas and policy recommendations. When the Newt Gingrich-led Republicans wanted to cut taxes and pursue welfare reform in the mid-nineties, the New York Times excoriated Gingrich for his "race-based, anger-charged politics" and compared him to southern segregationist George Wallace. Harlem's Democratic congressman Charles Rangel attacked Republican tax cuts as pure race hatred. "It's not 'spic' or 'nigger' anymore," Rangel growled. "They say, 'Let's cut taxes.' " More recently, speaking on ABC's This Week, feminist and high-paid Gore consultant Naomi Wolf casually accused George W. Bush's advisors—by whom she meant City Journal’s editor—of being "racist." Wolf's evidence? The truthful observation that some members of the underclass, because of their dysfunctional worldview, ignore the economic opportunities blossoming all around them.
There's more:
A related charge that conservatives often hear from liberals is that, whatever they might say, they're really mean-spirited white people whose goal is to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, the black, and the helpless—especially kids. Such attacks reached a fever pitch after Republicans won the House of Representatives in 1994. "What [conservative Republicans] want to do," President Clinton said, "is make war on the kids of this country." On NBC's Today Show, to take another example, left-leaning host Bryant Gumbel asked liberal children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman a classic leading question: "In light of the new welfare-reform bill, do you think the children need more prayers than ever before?" Former Democratic New York governor Mario Cuomo evoked the image of "Republican storm-troopers." Another New York Democrat, Congressman Major Owens, went further: "These are the people," he thundered, "who are practicing genocide with a smile: they're worse than Hitler." The ideas that the Gingrich Republicans stood for—limited government, welfare reform, tax cuts, deregulation—don't seem to have all that much to do with Nazism and the Holocaust. But in the political rhetoric of today's liberals, fine distinctions often get lost.
Just reminder, being civil to America's left doesn't mean you'll get civility back for you rookies out there.
