At Gateway Pundit, Jim links footage of former President George W. Bush addressing a critic in a town hall meeting which should be required viewing for all critics (and haters) of that good man, but flawed politician.  The respect the Republican showed for his adversary is at odds with the imagery the left used to portray the man they so regularly demonized.

Note how W tries to silence those who would drown out his critic–how he lets him speak his piece, reacts with humor not defensiveness. And addressed his criticism without badmouthing him.

In short, George W. Bush offers an example for his successor who takes criticism far more personally and judges his adversaries far more harshly.

FROM THE COMMENTS:   ILoveCapitalism writes:

Bush, whatever his faults, never told his leftist moonbat critics (and yes, they were downright kooky – like the guy in the video clip) to sit down, stop talking, etc. as Obama has done. He would not try to suggest they were Nazis, as Pelosi has done. When he disagreed with them, he told them he thought they were wrong, and gave his reasons, which is what a leader of any party should do. He did not question their right to speak – as the Democrats are always doing.

While there clearly is some popular support for the President’s health care overhaul, the better part of the organized activism (“astroturfing” if you will) is on the left.  It is they who are looking to hire organizers to round up activists, is is their paid professional organizations recruiting supporters to “drown out” opposition, it is their side that is tapping into the wealth of a fiercely partisan billionaire and industry lobbying groups to fund their campaign.

Although the opposition to the President’s plan is clearly being out-organized by the left, as Michael Barone puts it, “the spontaneous enthusiasm” is on the side of those out-organized opponents, “with the Democratic astroturf efforts producing pathetic turnouts and largely spontaneous opposition to the Democratic health care plans producing large turnouts“:

The Democrats’ health care bills have stirred widespread and deeply felt opposition. While some of the protests are organized, the turnout and strong feeling expressed indicate that we are watching something that is largely spontaneous. Try organizing such a protest when almost no one cares much about your issue: no one will show up. It’s the supporters of the Democrats’ health care bills, not their opponents, who are astroturfing—and spending plenty of moolah on television ads and the like.

Emphasis added.  Echoes what Athena said.  Seems likes there’s unity among the Olympians

Perhaps, it will be the backlash against the tactics of the President and his allies, smearing those protesting his policies, with unions using a sexually suggestive term to deride them and a Congressman equating them with Klan protests against Civil Rights legislation.  Or perhaps it will be that most Americans don’t agree with Democrats that our health care system is as broken as described.

Imperfect it may be, in need of mending it certainly is, but an overhaul is not necessary.  And since that is how the president is billing is plan, that’s why it’s not gaining traction with the American people.

The President’s traveling dog and pony show may help him hold onto his base, but he likely won’t succeed in winning converts to his cause.  Most people are pretty happy with their health insurance and fear a radical overhaul like the Preident proposes.

To note, in every major poll, support for the various health care plans has diminished since the President turned his attention to the issue, “dropping like  a stone,” in Michael Barone’s words.  Importantly, those most passionate about the issue are overwhelmingly opposed:

Currently 26% strongly favor the legislation and 44% are strongly opposed. This reflects the fact that young voters who favor Democrats’ bills tend not to have strong feelings and older voters who oppose them tend to have strong feelings.

That’s why leftist contentions that our “side will be smaller” notwithstanding, more opponents of the President’s plan continue show up at rallies and townhalls than do proponents.   Even when interest groups allied with the Democrats bus in their supporters.

In his Welcome to Obamaland: I Have Seen Your Future and It Doesn’t Work, James Delingpole anticipated how Obama’s Democrats would respond to Administration critics:

When leftists wish to destroy a conservative’s arguments, they invariably circumvent the troublesome process of actually engaging with them by caricaturing them as “right-wing rant.”  If right-wingers do more than their share of ranting though, there’s probably one very good reason for it.  It’s because they’re in a perpetual state of hair-tearing despair that a counter-ideology of such manifest illogicality and conter-productivity can yet have been able to exert so powerful a grip on society.

For some reason for the better part of the day yesterday, Monday, August 10, I didn’t feel much like blogging or really dealing with anything political.  My mind was about as far from politics and the blogosphere as it could get.

I wonder if it is because sometime in the late morning, early afternoon — I’m no longer sure excatly what time — I simply had enough with those on the left, our commenters, pundits, Democratic legislators and even members of the Obama Administration who rather than engage the criticisms of their political, ideological and philosophical adversaries seek to ignore their criticisms and denigrate the critics.

We’ve seen these so many time before.  Why, simply put, do they refuse to accept the legitimacy of our concerns?   Why do they need to badmouth their adversaries?

But, I’ve said this before.

I knew my hiatus from politics was only temporary.  And when, as I cleared my head and prepared for bed, words came to my head, words from the man I sometimes dub the first neo-conservative, a figure beloved on the left for the better part of his life, yet reviled by them at its end.  As Albert Camus increasingly spoke out against the rising tide of Communism, applying to that totalitarian ideology the same standards he applied to Nazism, he lost friends among (and suffered opprobrium and ostracism from) the French left.

It was his words that came to mind, words I used in my first blog post (now long since disappeared into the ether), but which I used to celebrate my six-month blogiversary.  Shortly, after World War II, Camus wrote:

Something in us has been destroyed by the spectacle of the years just past. And this something is the eternal confidence of man, which has always made him believe that one could draw human reactions from another man by speaking to him in the language of humanity. We have seen lying, debasing, killing, deportations, torture, and each time it was not possible to persuade those who were doing it not to do it, because they were so sure of themselves and because one cannot persuade an abstraction, that is to say, the representative of an ideology.

The long conversation of mankind has just ended. And, of course, a man whom one cannot persuade is a man who frightens us….

We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible, because man has been delivered entirely to history and because he can no longer turn to that part of himself, as true as the historical part, which he discovers in front of the beauty of the world and of human faces…

Emphasis added.

All too many Democrats, including the Speaker of the House and her fellow San Franciscan, my junior Senator, refuse even to be persuaded that those protesting their policies have legitimate concerns.  And that is truly frightening in a society like ours.

So, while perhaps temporily discouraged, I will not be silenced, just as tens of millions of my fellow Americans who have serious concerns about the President’s policies, will continue to speak out, including many who voted for him, hoping that he would change his predecessor’s spendthrift domestic policies.

“There is no substitute for victory”

Ronald Reagan, quoting Douglas MacArthur

And to the Gipper’s successor, at least in terms of U.S. efforts to defeat our adversaries, “There is no such thing as victory.”

(Not My) Speaker & Crazy Harry had their say in today’s USA Today.

‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate
By Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer

Here’s my response folks:  how about you buy this bumper sticker and slap it right on your car?

UPDATE: James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal adds this perspective about the Pelosi-Reid smear column today:

All we can say is, America is very lucky that George W. Bush was president.  Had he not been, we might never have found out that dissent is patriotic.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

This isn’t the only Leah to whom left-wing bloggers, liberal pundits, Democratic Senators, the Speaker of the House and the President of the United Statesshould be listening.

Maybe it’s her name that causes her to say this so well, so succinctly and so passionately?

(H/t Instapundit)

The prejudice that all too many on the left (including some of their most educated and supposedly most literate pundits) harbor towards conservatives, the condescension they express toward any who dare to express their opposition publicly to President Obama’s policies has become increasingly manifest in the past week.

But, we were already seeing signs of such animosity during the presidential campaign when some, including at least one prominent liberal columnist, suggested racism was the only reason people might oppose Barack Obama, as if his far-left voting record had nothing to do with our concerns about the way the Democrat might govern.

They have resorted to use a term with sexual references to describe our rallies.  They see their task not to describe or debate but to denigrate, not to consider, but to condemn.  If they applied the same standard they use to trash the Tea Parties (and associated protests) to one-time community organizer Barack Obama’s first professional activists as well as his presidential campaign as well as the myriad protests against George W. Bush and his polices in the previous eight years, they too would be calling such efforts Astroturf.   And these efforts had far more professional organizing and far fewer spontaneous demonstrations than do the current spate of protests.

Taking issue with former California Democratic Party Chairman BIll Press’s smear of those protesting the President’s policies as “crazy . . . partisan zeealots,” Sally Zelikovsky details how left-wing groups have been organizing people to speak out in favor of the President’s health care overhaul, doing exactly the sorts of things Press finds repugnant in his description of the efforts to oppose said overhaul.

So, if left-wing groups organize to oppose George W. Bush and his policies and support his successor and his, it’s grassroots, but if conservative, Republican and independent groups (and individuals) organize in the same manner, but for the opposite effect, it’s astroturf. (more…)

Reporting dissent is the highest form of patriotism!

Wow…. Just, wow. (h/t – GP reader Peter Hughes & Newsbusters.)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Our reader Leah will be hosting a barbecue for blog readers next Saturday, August 15 at her home in the Valley.  Rumor has it that frequent commenter ILoveCapitalism will be coming down from San Francisco just for this occasion.

If you’d like to join us, e-mail me for the details.

In a previous post, I linked Mickey Kaus’s observation, “If an ‘astroturfing’ campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn’t it … community organizing?“  Now that conservatives are organizing communities of concerned citizens in much the same manner Barack Obama did when once a recent transplant to the Windy City, well, the Democrats (and their allies in the MSM) just can’t fathom the notion of their ideological adversaries expressing their grievances in much as they have done for the better part of the last eight years.

“The activist Left,” as Michlle Malkin puts it, “can’t stand competition.“  It’s as if one may only legitimately agitate against Republicans, “corporate interests,” the military, Western nations and the allies and defenders of said groups.  And the object of their protest must be the end to a robust US defense policy and an increase in the size and scope of government at all levels, with appropriate tax increases on productive individuals coupled with a concomitant redistribution of wealth to favored classes and ideologies.

When the President “summons his army” to fight for his proposed health care reform, this is a legitimate, “grassroots” expression of popular will, but when citizens (some working with conservative groups) send out e-mails to their fellows urging them to rally in public against that health care reform, that is astroturf, ginned up by corporate special interests.

The man, who tells us he’s trying to “break pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame,” constantly blaming his predecessor (and that predecessor’s political party) for the wrongs he must clean up.  (Indeed, in the same speech that he contends, “All we do is just then bicker and point fingers,” he points fingers.)  The man who claims he seeks a bipartisan approach to policy-making, listening to all sides, tells the other side to shut up.

But, that’s contradictory statements show Obama only warming up his Orwellian approach. It’s when he tries to say his policies have prevented an even higher deficit that he uses words to mean their exact opposite, attempting to change reality with his rhetoric: (more…)

As French fades in importance as an international language, my knowledge of that Romanic language serves me less well than it might have when I first started studying it. To be sure, I can still read French literature in the original. And haven’t had to rely on translations of some of the scholarship relevant to my dissertation. But, last night, it came in handy when I watched Nora Ephron‘s Julie & Julia, her new flick starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams–and not  to understand any of the dialogue or read any of the signs.

Knowing the language, however, I could better appreciate how wonderfully atrocious was Julia Child’s (Streep) French.  Every time she tried to speech the one-time langauge of literature, art and love, I laughed perhaps louder than anyone else in the auditorium.  Streep was clearly having a ball showing that despite Child’s mastery of French cuisine, she could never really master the French language.

Streep’s performance was the best thing about a largely haphazard movie.  The blending between the two stories, that of Child learning to cook and becoming the celebrated chef and of Julie Powell’s (Adams) gaining her fame in blogging about her experiences cooking 524 of Child’s recipes in 365 days did not really flow.  Indeed, the movie (like most contemporary comedies) seemed a series of vignettes grouped around a common theme.

Amy Adams made the best of a a clunkily written part with scenes set in 2002-03 New York that don’t seem to represent exchanges that could occur between actual human beings, saved those living in the imaginary realm of feminist writers.  None of the men had lives or personalities outside of their relationship to the leading women.  We didn’t even know that Powell’s husband Eric (Chris Messina) had a job until he walked out on her (for reasons that just didn’t seem believable.)   In short, the tension between Julie and Eric seemed contrived.  And their reconciliation fake.

Stanley Tucci‘s Paul Child seems similarly devoid of personal life or human passions.  And since it was his being posted to American embassy in Paris (he was some kind of diplomat) that led Child to discover the art of French cooking, you’d think they might have explored that a little more. (more…)

And one of the things that I’m trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.

President Barack Obama
The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (March 2009)

I don’t want the folks who created the mess do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.

McLean, Virginia August 6, 2009

Some unifier, huh?

“What would the reaction be if a Republican President said this?”

Despite Democratic descriptions of those protesting the President’s health care as a “mob,” protesters on the whole have conducted themselves in a civil manner.  And despite conservative criticism of Democratic Representatives (and Senators) of painting their critics with a broad brush (as some have done), a good number of Democrats, like the late Jim Hunter, have shown great respect for their political adversaries.

And I’m pleased to report that one such Democrat, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy is a graduate of America’s finest liberal arts’ college.  Although “mobbed” by angry constituents at a supermarket in his district, this good man was unfazed and stood up for citizens’ rights to speak out:

Murphy said it didn’t matter to him whether those attending were part of a coordinated effort or just on their own.

“Any time I’m talking to my constituents in an unfiltered way I consider it productive,” he said in a phone interview afterward.

Murphy acknowledged that a few angry voices dominated the gathering, at least initially. But he said that didn’t bother him. “Was that out of a Norman Rockwell town meeting painting? No. But there are big issues being discussed in Washington … and people have a right to be concerned, even angry about it.”

It’s too bad my representatives in Washington haven’t shown such understanding for their critics’ concerns.  (Heck, they don’t even seem to be open to meeting with us.)  Still, we should act as if all our representatives were as open to our concerns as Murphy has been.

When we protest, we must make our concerns known, but not drown out elected officials (and their representatives) when they are trying to speak.  Allahpundit offers this advice:

If all they’re going to do is scream, they belong outside. Disrupting the event itself when people are trying to listen is a jackass thing to do, and totally counterproductive in terms of handing the left material with which to tar the GOP. (more…)

If there was a theme which unites two of the biggest issues bloggers have been reporting, discussing and debating this week, it would be the projections all too many liberals cast on their conservative counterparts.  First, they accused us of backing the “birthers.”  Then, they used various slurs to attack our opposition to the President’s proposed health care overhaul.

They accused us of being tools of corporate interests, not being sincere in our opinions and of instigating violence (when there’s far more evidence linking activists supporting the President’s plan to thuggish tactics at townhall meetings) in publicly expressing our opposition to said overhaul.  One columnist for a major national daily accused us of “poisoning the political well, [becoming] political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems” without once quoting (save to reference a clever line of criticism) any Republicans opposed to the various Democratic plans.

And then, there’s Paul Krugman, calling us a “mob,” the New York Times columnist suggests that we’re racists with a “substantial fraction” being birthers.  You’d think a columnist for such an esteemed newspaper with a Nobel Prize in Economics no less would have the least bit of understanding of laissez-faire economic and its many advocates in the United States.  But, you’d be wrong.  According to Krugman, “the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the ‘birther’ movement“.

My friend David Boaz, a strong critic of the Bush Administration, will have none of this narrow-minded left-winger’s nonsense.  In a must-read post, he takes down Krugman:

Paul Krugman can’t understand why people would oppose government control of health care — or skyrocketing deficits, or a federal takeover of education, energy, and finance along with health care — unless they’re driven by racism.

Like those who dismiss the protesters as astroturf, the Times‘ economist must needs reduce the motivation of his intellectual adversaries to racism.  And his ideological allies accuse us of having a narrow view of the world. (more…)

More biased coverage from the AP:

Palin resigned as Alaska governor on July 26 with nearly 18 months left in her term. She cited not only the numerous ethics complaints that had been filed against her also her wish not to be a lame duck after the first-term governor decided not to seek re-election next year.

I’m sure astute GayPatriot readers can tell us what “reporter” Mark Thiessen left out from the second sentence in the paragraph quoted above.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Eartha nailed it with two words, “All dismissed.”  You’d think that would be a tiny bit relevant if you’re going to mention “numerous ethics complaints” filed against the subject of your article, that the reporter would note that they had all been dismissed.

Since I criticize the statist, Democratic-friendly agenda of the gay groups on a regular basis on this blog, it behooves me to credit them when they get something right.

You see, a private organization, AAA South (the affiliate of the American Automobile Association serving Florida, Georgia, Middle & West Tennessee and Puerto Rico), recognized “couples in same-sex relationships for an array of benefits and services.“  (Apparently, this only applied to same-sex couples whose marriages have been recognized by a state.)  In conversations with the group, Equality Florida had persuaded its management to offer such benefits.

They didn’t go to the government and demand that the state mandate such coverage.  Instead, they lobbied the organization on their own.  Exactly the right way to do things.

Well, once AAA South decided to do the right thing for gay and lesbian members, anti-gay groups raised a stink.  So, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) sent out an “Action Alert” to those (including yours truly) on its mailing list:

Please let AAA South you appreciate their fair and principled policy. Send a thank you note now; and while you are at it, personalize your letter and ask AAA South to consider extending this service to all registered domestic partners.

This is exactly the way to handle this, one private organization lobbying another, without getting the state involved.

Kudos to Kate Kendell and the folks at NCLR (and those at Equality Florida) for promoting social change through private institutions.

Both House Speaker Nancy Pelose and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have called those protesting Democratic health care plans as astroturf or fake grassroots, with the increasingly unpopular Nevadan even waving some actual astroturf to make his point.

Now, we’ve learned that moveon.org has “hired skilled grassroots organizers” to fight back as citizens spontaneously gather at townhalls across the country to express their opinion.  Why would MoveOn need to pay them if they’re real grassroots organizers?   (When you “hire” someone, you do tend to pay them.)

So, if it’s Astroturf when conservative groups encourage their members and supporters to speak out against the President’s policies, why is it when left-wing groups do speak out on in favor of those policies, hiring “grassroots” organizers to help them out?

RELATED:  “Flashback: When the Left Protested Bush, the Media Saw Only “everyone from grandmothers and students to veterans and mothers pushing strollers”

ALSO RELATED:  MICKEY KAUS: “If an ‘astroturfing’ campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn’t it … community organizing?”