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How low can you go?
Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:
| | I'm not saying that opposition to Bush and the war policy is illegitimate. Of course not. Much of it is important and helpful. But the coarseness of some of it is truly awful. In some conversations I've had with people who strongly oppose war, I keep hearing this personal demonization of Bush... |
Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of "coarseness" and "personal demonization" when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably "coarse" and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of "personal demonization" to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.
Two wrongs don't make a right, and I'm sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters -- outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults -- who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for "personal demonization," and I won't defend it, but at least there's some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about.
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How green was my astroturf?
The blogoverse is abuzz with people exposing the Republican approach to "astroturfing" letters to the editor that praise the president. The funny thing is, We've been receiving these for months at Salon, and it's a piece of cake to identify them, at least in e-mail. (Snail mail is no doubt a different story.) When you get dozens of e-mails from different people that all start off with "President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership," you get the idea pretty quickly. And in e-mail, the tip-off is that the letter comes in formal letter form, with the "to" address neatly at the top. Who writes e-mail like that? They go straight to the Trash.
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