Newsweek's Shameful Smearing of the Right

Newsweek has had its problems over the past couple of years, so I do not want to pile on and add insult to injury. They have some very talented writers and contributors, and I once attended a speech by the editor, Jon Meacham, and found him very intelligent and likeable. All that aside, the story in their issue last week on "hate on the right" is so bad it would be funny if it weren't offensive. And I can accept a good, thoughtful leftwing piece, or even a hit piece, but this was just awful. 

What follows are passages from the Newsweek story "A Surge of Hate," followed by some reaction.

"This is a season, or perhaps an era, when politics seem more intense than usual, and the domestic extremist threat seems more real. Partisan disputes are rarely pretty, but lately they have taken a particularly ugly, menacing turn. Last week the FBI arrested individuals for making death threats against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington for their votes on health-care reform. A series of expletive-strewn voice-mail messages left for Senator Murray were particularly creepy: "You're gonna have a target on your back for the rest of your life," the caller warned. "How long do you think you can hide?" Federal authorities have charged a man with multiple-personality disorder with threatening in a YouTube video to kill Rep. Eric Cantor; the suspect is not competent to stand trial."

So... people who threaten Democrats are dangerous, creepy, right-wing extremists. People who threaten Republicans are simply mentally incompetent. Got it.

"Economic distress and social change make for fear, and fear makes for anger, now and always... Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, later a U.S. senator who wanted to soak the rich, and Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest whose radio show reached 40 million people, seemed a political threat to FDR, until Long was assassinated and Coughlin became increasingly unhinged."

While true, there are two critical pieces of information left out of this piece. Huey Long was... get ready for it... a Democrat. Father Coughlin attacked FDR from the left.

""There was a lot of hatred in the 1930s," says Alan Brinkley, the Columbia University historian and expert on populist movements. But the currentsurge of fear and loathing toward Obama is "scary," he says. "There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings. I can't see this happening if McCain were president, or [any] white male." (Secret Service spokespeople reported spikes in threats against Obama after his election and inauguration, but they've also said the president generally receives about the same number of threats as did Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They've declined to comment on whether there's been a spike in threats related to health-care reform.)"

Why is the sentence about the current president receiving basically the same amount of threats as previous presidents in parenthesis? Is this not a fairly significant fact? Doesn't it sort of undermine the whole theme of the article?

"(McVeigh) He has, or had, some potential heirs apparent in a recently indicted group called the Hutaree, a Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio-based militia."

You mean the militia that hated Pres. Bush and whose only member affiliated with a political party is a Democrat? Got it.

"It is hard to know how much such grim fantasies are stirred by the steady stream of conspiracy theories pushed by talk-radio hosts. Rush Limbaugh talks about the Democrats planning to "kill you" with health-care reform and suggests (agreeing with black Muslim minister Louis Farrakhan, of all people) that it "seems perfectly within the realm of reality" that the H1N1 vaccine was "developed to kill people.""

I've listened to the clip they're alluding to here several times. This is misleading, Rush never said Democrats are planning to "kill you" with the vaccine, he was quoting Louis Farrakhan. Rush then put the quote in the context of rationing health coverage and a few other stories specific to the day about lack of respect for life. This was not Rush at his finest or most eloquent, but it seemed pretty clear to me that Rush was being hyperbolic to make a point.

This was the best evidence Newsweek had to offer on the alleged surge of hatred from the political right. Turns out, it was an exercise in the all too common practice of smearing and generalizing.