First Clinton-Bashing Book Due out Soon

Rabid Republican hatemongering
Ah! Yet more of that Republican double-standard morality. Somebody explain to me in a rational and logically sound fashion just why it is that Clinton-haters feel so free to hate Clinton but don’t allow anybody to hate Bush?

White (House) Lies
By David Corn, AlterNet.
Posted June 22, 2004.

Bush’s advocates have done a good job of countering the general accusation that the president is a liar. I know, because I have been on the receiving end of their spin and obfuscation. In September 2003, a spate of books critical of Bush were published and landed on the best-seller list. Three had the word “lies” in the title, including my own, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. At the time, left-of-center advocacy groups — most notably MoveOn.org — initiated
public campaigns questioning Bush’s truthfulness. Bush’s defenders fought back, dismissing these books as irrational expressions of a phenomenon they belittled as Bush hatred. On CNN’s Crossfire, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson described the anti-Bush books as written to cater “to the paranoid and craziness of the far left” and “selling because the Democratic Party has gone completely insane with Bush hatred.” Conservative columnist David Brooks opined, “The core threat to democracy is not
in the White House, it’s the haters themselves.”

Even non-ideological writers bemoaned the anti-Bush books as the latest indication that the nation’s embittered and deteriorating political culture was degenerating further. Time magazine pointed to my book as more evidence of “the rise of the anger industry.” New York Times Magazine’s James Traub observed, “Hatred is delicious. But the sudden rash of jeremiads and their stunning popularity raises a question: Why are so many liberals, including sane and sober ones, granting themselves
permission to hate the president?…. Buying a book that has ‘Bush’ and ‘lie’ in the title…is a deeply cathartic, ideology-affirming experience. It’s satisfying; but I don’t see how it can be a good thing, either for public debate or ultimately for the electoral prospects of the Democrats, to have liberals descend to the level of rabid conservatives.” Another New York Times Magazine writer, Matt Bai, took the same line: “A new strand of vitriol has consumed the Bush-hating left…. The new
leftist screeds seem to solidify a rising political culture of incivility and overstatement…. The various expressions of liberal fury are a direct imitation of what the right has been doing for more than a decade…. Hate isn’t much of a message.”

Why, during the Clinton years did so many Conservatives grant themselves permission to hate the president? Clinton’s memoir has barely had time to cool off from the printing and there is a stunning rash of three jeremiads. Am I too believe that these responses are likely to exhibit any degree of critical thinking? What is it, exactly, that the neo-con contingent has to fear? Why is that they cannot possibly see or understand that Clinton is no longer the president? Why — oh why?! — must they continue to savage him as if he is?

Yeah, I can see why Traub would allude to “the anger industry”. Let’s just keep in mind that it cuts both ways. Traub and Bai can be let off the hook, since the above reviews predate the current rabid showering of conservative shit and derision, but make no mistake:
the republican kettles are not more or less black than the democrat pots.

As for me, my position is: They’re all liein’, cheatin’, thievin’ scum.