IS POLITICS GETTING NASTIER? | 2004-11-05
Politics is getting nastier because whites are getting the dim realization that what is now at stake is more than their looking sweet.
Lefist politics were always nasty. But politics only "got nasty" when people started getting nasty back.
Leftists were allowed to pull every dirty trick in the book and to say anything they wanted to about anybody. On the other side, moderates kept the conservatives in line.
Leftists could declare that every child in America was starving, and moderates would tell them what idealists they were and suggest softly that maybe only half the country's children were starving.
But those sugar-sweet moderates were vicious when they fought conservatives. At every Republican convention conservatives were savaged and excluded.
In 1988, when Bush Senior took over, he had Reagan and one or two others speaking to the convention one night, and then his chief of staff said, "Thank God we got the conservatives out of the way!"
In 1989, one Bush operative bragged, "I was the first to clean all the Reaganites out of my department!"
As always, the conservatives mostly just grovelled at Bush's feet.
It was even worse before Reagan. Conservatives at conventions were treated like dogs. A friend of mine put it perfectly:
"Every four years conservative Republicans get kicked in the teeth and come up smiling."
Respectable conservatives now grovel at the fet of neoconservatives. But you have to give the neos this, they are not like moderates. When they fight on an issue they care about, like the fate of Israel, they go for the throat.
The media loved the moderates. The media hates the neos.
The media thought politics was very gentlemanly when only the Abbie Hoffmans and Ted Kennedys got to do the shouting and insulting and pull the dirty tricks.
The reason we hear that politics is getting nasty is because today the liberals are getting kicked, too.