Abstract

SUBJECT to DEBATE

The article looks at the negative campaigning of right- and left-wingers in the United States prior to the 2004 presidential election. For well over a decade now, right-wingers and Republicans have heaped insult, lies and slander on liberals and Democrats. It took ages, not to mention a suspect election and a suspect war, but suddenly everywhere you look Democrats and liberals are fighting back. Hatred of President George W. Bush was not supposed to happen. Liberals were supposed to be lofty and wistful and clueless, even as their enemies slimed them into irrelevance. In The New York Times Book Review, Leon Wieseltier uses his review of Nicholson Baker's thin, sensationalistic novella "Checkpoint," about a man holed up in a hotel with fantasies of assassinating the President, to deliver a long, sanctimonious lecture to the anti-Bush crowd. Bush seems to have plenty of political cunning and skill, and that's a kind of intelligence, albeit not the kind that has much relation to making good policy decisions in a complex and dangerous world. One group protesting at the Republican convention is planning to hand out 3,000 fortune cookies with messages like "Do not change horses midstream unless horse lies to you and stream is on fire," and lists of ways Bush has mispronounced "Abu Ghraib." You can be sure the Republicans will portray these mild jabs as demonic howls of rage and fury.