"I ask you to judge me by the standard that you would want applied to your father, your husband, your brother or your son." -- Brett Kavanaugh
“Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.” – John Adams
“A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.” — Samuel Adams
Politics ain’t pattycake and expecting someone to love and adore people on the other side of the aisle who disagree with him on fundamental issues is probably a bridge too far.
Still, every American has a right to expect equal treatment under the law and from government agencies. There’s also a fundamental American belief in fair play. That means whatever rules we come up with get applied to everyone equally. It means that right is right even if you don’t agree with the person who benefits from that. It means that it is immoral to lie about someone even if you disagree with him. It means that at the end of the day, we put the good of the country ahead of our own petty political disagreements.
Those are the sorts of foundational customs and mores that allow people with wildly divergent viewpoints to live together in a functional society. The very fact that the Left has rapidly moved away from those principles is why our society has become increasingly dysfunctional. This is a tendency liberals have not just here, but everywhere. As Margaret Thatcher said,
Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.
Conservatives have long since tired of being smeared in the very schools where they send their kids to be educated, in mainstream media outlets that have become little more than open propaganda outlets for the Democratic Party, and by vacuous celebrities and professional athletes who know about as much about constitutional governance as they do about quantum physics. We have noted with dismay that it has become mainstream on the Left to vilify conservatives merely for our being white, male, or Christian. It became even more dismaying to see Obama’s IRS targeting Tea Party groups and Obama’s FBI showing political partisanship in 2016 because if those two DANGEROUS government agencies can’t be trusted to be evenhanded, then it is a long-term threat to the stability of our republic.
But, what we’ve seen in the Kavanaugh hearings and with the Covington Catholic High School debacle is even more disturbing.
How do you live with people who are happily willing to brand a man as a sexual predator with no evidence against him merely because it benefits them politically? When you reach a point where a large percentage of liberals are willing to ruin a man’s life work and brand him as a rapist, not because of their honest appraisal of his guilt or innocence, but because he’s in the wrong political party, how do you live with them?
As disgusting as the Kavanaugh hearings were, what has been done to Nick Sandmann is even worse. Keep in mind, we’re talking about a teenager here and not someone like David Hogg who became a public figure by being on cable news every night. Nick Sandmann was minding his own business with his schoolmates and doing some school cheers in response to vicious homophobic slurs being hurled at his group by nutjob Black Hebrew Israelites. Despite the provocation, there was no brawl and there were no slurs hurled back at the kooky racists insulting Sandmann and his classmates.
Then, publicity-seeking liberal activist Nathan Phillips walked a long way to get in Sandmann’s face while chanting and beating on drums. Meanwhile, one of the people with him insulted the kids. This could fairly be seen as a provocative act, yet Sandmann didn’t insult him or push him away; he stood there smiling.
Then after it was all over, Phillips blatantly lied about what happened. He claimed the Covington high school kids surrounded him and that Sandmann was intimidating him. Had that happened, Sandmann would have deserved condemnation, but no evidence was ever provided that this happened and the initial video showed nothing more than Phillips chanting and beating a drum in Sandmann’s face. Still, the condemnation of Nick Sandmann, who literally did nothing wrong whatsoever, was overwhelming.
Later, as more videos came out, Phillips’ story crumbled. Within 12 hours, he had changed his story completely and soon thereafter, it was revealed that he lied about being a Vietnam veteran. Numerous conservatives who jumped to conclusions about Sandmann at least had the decency to apologize. On the other hand, while SOME liberals did at least admit that they got the story wrong, most of them doubled down and continued portraying an innocent 17-year-old kid as a racist and a Nazi. When the pushback on that came, the basic response came down to, “He’s a smiling white kid wearing a MAGA hat, therefore he deserves everything he gets.”
It would be nice to make it into a joke by calling it what it really is, a “hat crime,” but it’s not funny. If you’re willing to falsely brand a kid as a racist, a Nazi, and a horrible person because he stood there and smiled while some weirdo beat a drum in his face, where do we go from there? Do we declare every person who wore an “I’m With Her” shirt to be a pedophile? If Joe Biden wins the Democratic nomination in 2020, is it acceptable to try to destroy the lives of random liberal teenagers for wearing “I’m With Joe” shirts?
This is the world liberals are dragging us into with their myopic vision, unquenchable hatred for people who disagree with them, and their raging intolerance. Is this good for the country? No way. Will it produce a better America? No. Is it entirely possible that this sort of thinking could lead to increasing amounts of political violence? Absolutely, because you can’t live in harmony with people who think there’s no punishment too great for people who wear hats designed to support their political opponents. We keep hoping against hope that saner heads will eventually prevail on the Left, but so far voices of sanity are few and far between.
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