Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [19]
Does the Southern Poverty Law Center have a file on Sharpton? They can feel free to use my notes.
MSNBC’S Ed Schultz turned not only to Sharpton but also to former congressman Alan Grayson to discuss violent right-wing rhetoric after Tucson. Yes, the Alan Grayson who said on the House floor that Republicans’ health care plan was: “Die quickly.” The Alan Grayson who said he couldn’t listen to Vice President Dick Cheney “because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking.” And the Alan Grayson who went on radio and called a female official at the Federal Reserve a “K Street whore.”13
Soon, the media were cheerfully announcing a “center on civil debate” being established at the University of Arizona, despite the overwhelming evidence that the shooting had absolutely nothing to do with public discourse.
Further nailing down its irrelevance, one of the center’s honorary co-chairs was that balm of public debate former president Bill Clinton. Clinton had actually hired private detectives to dig up dirt on his “bimbos” and blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on conservative talk-radio hosts. Clinton unleashed adviser James Carville to vilify Independent Counsel Ken Starr as “an out-of-control sex-crazed person,” a “spineless, gutless weasel,”14 engaged in “a slimy and scuzzy investigation.” (Which was true, but only because Starr was investigating Clinton.) Carville said, “Ken Starr can go jump in a lake.”15
Clinton adviser Harold Ickes said the investigation “smacks of Gestapo,” and “outstrips McCarthyism,” asking, “What is this, a police state?”16
Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal—who looks exactly like that—called Starr “a zealot on a mission … waging an assault on American rights [engaging in] anti-constitutional destructiveness, [who acts out] his personal temper tantrums and harasses critics.” He called Starr an “inquisitor of unlimited, unchecked power” pursuing an investigation that was “unethical, illegal,” and added that he was a “Grand Inquisitor for life” presiding over a “reign of witches” out of “vindictiveness.”17
And that was in a single breath!
As students of history will recall, the courts found otherwise, holding Clinton in contempt, disbarring him, and accepting his $800,000 settlement with Paula Jones, and then the entire Supreme Court boycotted his next State of the Union address.
But it seems perfectly natural to Democrats that the man who sicced these curs on the public would be made co-chair of the Center for Civil Discourse.
How about making Michael Moore chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness? Or naming John Edwards chairman of a commission on tort reform? Why not make Helen Thomas a last-minute fill-in for Alan Dershowitz at a B’nai B’rith awards dinner, allow Senator Patty Murray to operate heavy machinery without adult supervision, or put Barney Frank on the House Banking Committee? (Wait—what? Since when?)
One begins to understand why liberals are constantly misquoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” by surgically removing the word “foolish.”
Just in the last half dozen years, this has included Ted Koppel;18 Charlie Rose (who also incorrectly attributed the line to Churchill);19 Keith Olbermann, who misquoted Emerson by saying “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, I believe was the original quote”;20 Mark Geragos;21 the New Republic’s Jeffrey Rosen;22 NPR’s Daniel Schorr—explaining—repeatedly23—that John Kerry’s answer to the flip-flop accusation should be “Consistency