Guilty (42 page)

Soon, Vedder was backpedaling faster than a Dixie Chick. He later said, “Just to clarify … we support the troops.” To prove it, he cited his short haircut: “How could we not be for the military? I mean, look at this [expletive] haircut.” Vedder also said his remarks had been “misconstrued.” The band issued a statement saying Vedder had just been talking about “freedom of speech.”

Like the Dixie Chicks, Vedder folded like a house of cards at the first note of dissent. Even with the entire mainstream media ready to hail airhead entertainers for their fearless Bush-bashing, the airheads can't take a few boos from the audience. A few years later, Barbra Streisand responded to a lone heckler responding to her anti-Bush sketch by exploding in rage. “Shut the f—k up, would you?” she wittily retorted. “Shut the f—k up if you can't take a joke.”
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These touchy celebrities demand to be simultaneously showered with praise their every waking
moment—and also have trumpets blare for their courage. There is only one way to pull that off in America, and that is to be a liberal.

Having been taught by liberal celebrities to seek attention without risking anything, in 2006 a student speaker at the New School's commencement proceedings bravely insulted the official commencement speaker, Senator John McCain. The world gasped in awe at the raw heroism of Jean Rohe for being rude to an invited guest who also happened to be a Republican, a U.S. senator, and a decorated war hero. Not least of those hailing her bravery was Rohe herself—and really, who was in a better position to judge?

Describing her decision to attack the invited guest, Rohe said that as she talked to people on campus the day before her speech, she discovered how overwhelmingly popular it would be to attack McCain. Everywhere Rohe went that day she ran into students and faculty fashioning armbands and preparing to protest McCain. Her mother wept when Rohe read her illiterate speech over the phone. Literally every person Rohe talked to the day before the ceremony opposed the Iraq War and hated McCain with blind fury. At two graduation ceremonies a day earlier, attacks on McCain had brought wild cheers from the audience.

Rohe's resolve to tell the audience what it wanted to hear was only hardened when she was told there would be media at the event. “The situation seemed pretty serious,” she said. “It was something I didn't want to do, but knew I had to out of an obligation to my own values”— such as the value of being popular, getting a standing ovation, and being praised for her courage.
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Liberals' idea of questioning authority is to check with the authorities to see if a “Question Authority” bumper sticker would be popular. See, where I come from, sucking up to the audience is not called “courageous.”

Sensing that grandiosity and fake heroism were within her grasp, Rohe lectured McCain, bravely telling him, “We have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet.”
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Except Osama bin Laden, apparently: Rohe was furious with Bush for not catching him. So I guess she thought we had something to fear from him. Still, she was brave. I know that because she got a standing ovation.

Rohe then fulfilled her final obligation as a brave liberal by bitterly
complaining that those who criticized her behavior were trying “to hurt my feelings.”
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But to be a true ace at the game, Rohe will have to learn to be an utterly opportunistic grandstander
and make a living at it.
For that, we turn to John Kerry, who has managed to secure a Senate career by passing off his antiwar activism as raw courage, rather than the naked self-promotion that it was.

After spending three months in Vietnam, and then returning to discover that that military service would not boost a political career, Kerry did an about-face and became America's most famous antiwar protester. His 1971 Senate testimony against the war catapulted him to media stardom with a virulently antiwar press. He was awarded a long segment on CBS's
60 Minutes
a few weeks later—in which he was asked if he wanted to run for president.

His fellow antiwar activists “viewed Kerry as a power-grabbing elitist.”
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Kerry's undisguised ambition in the antiwar movement turned him into a regular character in Garry Trudeau's “Doonesbury” comic strip. In a 1971 cartoon published in the
Yale Daily News,
a character walks up to two men talking about John Kerry and says, “If you care about this country at all you better go listen to that John Kerry fellow.” Next box: “He speaks with a rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!” Last box: “Who was that?” one man asks. “John Kerry,” the other says.

And yet, in 2004, liberal columnist Tom Oliphant converted Kerry's grasping antiwar activism into an act of staggering courage. Oliphant wrote, “What Kerry did in the spring of 1971 still amazes me. The power and eloquence of his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee [blah, blah, blah] … At the time, Kerry told me that he assumed his actions had precluded a political career, a sentiment experience had taught me to share.”
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It was such a brazen inversion of the truth, one almost admired Oliphant for allowing those lines to be published under his name. It certainly showed more audacity than anything Kerry had ever done.

As the
Boston Globe
said, Kerry's Senate testimony “made possible his political career.”
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For Kerry and his acolytes in the press to claim
that he was spitting into the wind with his antiwar testimony would be like Britney Spears claiming that appearing on stage wearing only a bra would hurt her performing career, but dammit, she had to do it!

It would be one thing if liberal suck-ups said,
Okay, gimme a break. I have to make a living here.
But they demand that their most whoring behavior be described as “brave.”
Wearing just a bra on stage is just something I have to do to be true to myself!
These are goody two-shoes apple-polishers—the kids who volunteer for extra work after school and turn in their classmates who talk when the teacher leaves the room. Okay, fine. There have always been wienies groveling toward authority figures, and in modern America the most powerful authority figure is the liberal establishment. But this may be the first time in history that we ever had to suffer the effrontery of the bootlickers telling us, “I'm bad—I clean erasers for teachers after class because I'm
baaad.”

I don't care what liberals believe, but don't tell me they're courageous when they are saying exactly what every powerful institution in America wants to hear. These people would have collaborated with Hitler. This is not an exact science, but if you've just been on the cover of a magazine or received a standing ovation, you're not being courageous. There's a different word for it— What's the word I'm searching for? Oh yes, it's “ass-kissing.”

MOST HILARIOUS ARE LIBERALS WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT “DEATH threats.” In the Dixie Chicks' 2005 song “Not Ready to Make Nice,” Maines sang:

My life will be over? I gather Maines is not talking about the grave risk that she will be on the cover of yet another dozen magazines with
feature articles about how she's been silenced. In an editorial—yes, an editorial—the
New York Times
described how the group had suffered: “Their music was boycotted and banned by country music stations, their CDs were burned and smashed, and
group members' lives were threatened.
”
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Someone has got to make liberals stop telling us their “lives were threatened.” Every public figure's life has been threatened. If more than fifty people know your name, you have been proposed to, propositioned, and insulted and have had threats on your life.

Any public figure who complains about hate mail is a scaredy-cat sissy. My proof:

Krugman probably writes his own hate mail.

The preeminent security specialist Gavin de Becker says attacks on public figures are almost never preceded by a warning,
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so you're really pathetic if you're whining about “death threats.” John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Gianni Versace did not receive any warning before they were shot. The “death threats” liberals constantly wail about are less than nothing. On the other hand, publicizing a public figure's address is intentionally putting that person's life in danger. Noticeably, liberals go out of their way to publicize the addresses of conservative public figures.

According to the mainstream media, this nation is a cauldron of right-wing violence. But oddly, it's always liberals caught doing the political violence. At the 2008 Republican National Convention, for example, liberal protesters were arrested for smashing police cars, slashing tires, breaking store windows, and possessing Molotov cocktails, napalm bombs, and assorted firearms.
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No conservatives protested the Democratic National Convention. Sarah Palin and Con-doleezza Rice have been rushed by crazed liberal women in public forums. Conservative speakers on college campuses have been repeatedly physically attacked by liberals. Bill O'reilly, Matt Drudge, and Sean Hannity, among others, have been harassed at their homes by liberals. Meanwhile liberal luminaries go about their private lives unmolested. But we're supposed to believe Paul Krugman has to ride in cars with windows blacked out for fear that right-wing proponents of Social Security privatization might get violent.

On December 26, 2006, not long before Barack Obama publicly announced that he was running for president, the
Chicago Sun-Times
reprinted an Internet column by Erin Kotecki Vest. The column was a completely insane “open letter” to Michelle Obama.

“I look at my husband and my two beautiful children,” Vest wrote, “and I wonder how on earth you and your family will make this decision [to run for president]. It would be a sacrifice, no question.
Possibly the biggest sacrifice a family could make. We all know it wouldn't just be the usual pressures of the job or public life, it could very well mean the word no one wants to say but everyone is thinking: ‘assassination.'
” Claiming she had the courage to say what no one else would, Vest identified the “ugly truth” that “some in America may not be ready to see a black family in the White House”—that “the decision to run for president could mean the death of your husband or family member or yourself.” Even though she felt that Barack Obama could “change the world,” Vest told Mrs. Obama, “I can't ask you to do it for me. I can't ask you to do it for the children or for the future or for the good of mankind. You are a mother, like I am a mother, and I know I can't ask that of you.”

After Obama officially announced that he was running for president, liberals were nearly paralyzed by the fear that he would be assassinated.

On CBS's
Early Show,
host Harry Smith slowly spoke these words to Senator Ted Kennedy: “When you see that enthusiasm [for Obama], though, and when you see the generational change that seems to be taking place before our eyes, does it make you at all fearful?”

Kennedy may be a drunken slob, but unlike CBS news anchors, he is not certifiably insane. He ignored Smith's portentous question and chirpily responded that people were saying “they want a new day and a new generation in this country at this time,” and so on.

But Smith somberly returned to his nutty assassination scenario, speaking even more distinctly this time: “I just, I think what I was trying to say is, sometimes agents of change end up being targets, as you well know, and that was why I was asking if you were at all fearful of that.”

Again, Kennedy blew him off, saying, “Yeah, yeah. No, I think there's—Barack Obama is the kind of candidate for change and I think the people all over the country have been impressed by the breadth and the width …”
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About the same time, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, wrote to the Secret Service to request extra protection for Obama, saying, “As an African-American who was witness to some of this nation's most shameful days during the civil rights movement, I know personally that the hatred of some of our fellow citizens can lead to heinous acts of violence.”
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Then, in February 2008, Nobel Prize–winning author Doris Lessing predicted that Obama would be assassinated because he is black, saying an Obama presidency “would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him.”
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The
New York Times
ran a front-page article about the “hushed worry” of Obama's supporters that he will be assassinated.
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By this point, the “worry” that Obama would be knocked off by imaginary right-wing assassins was about as “hushed” as the news of Britney Spears's latest breakdown.

Chris Matthews joined the macabre brigade, saying, “I don't want
to get into all the details, but every American knows what happens in these very charismatic moments, when somebody is really the toast of the town, and people are really excited about a campaign. Sometimes, it brings out the loonies.”
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