Why I am not a writer: Volume 2

This is a great article by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, expressing something that burns the crap out of me. There's no way I could write about it as eloquently, so I am pleased to bring his words to you. His subject is hate speech, and how most of it in this country is by the left against the right, and is mostly ignored. It's as good a year-end recap as I could wish for, and something to think about for the coming 4 years. We're so sensitized to it that we just ignore it. In one ear and out the other. Here are some examples of hate speech we ignored in 2004:

"...Cameron Diaz declared that rape might be legalized if women didn't turn out to vote for John Kerry. Or when Walter Cronkite told Larry King that the videotape of Osama bin Laden that surfaced just before the election was "probably set up" by Karl Rove. Or when Alfred A. Knopf published Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," a novel in which two Bush-haters talk about assassinating the president. "I'm going to kill that bastard," one character rages.

Bill Moyers warned a television audience on Election Day that if Kerry won narrowly, "I think there'd be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly. . . . The right wing is not going to accept it." Chevy Chase, hosting a People for the American Way awards ceremony at the Kennedy Center in Washington, slammed Bush as "an uneducated, real, lying schmuck."(and a f*ckhead--Ed.) A cartoon by the widely syndicated Ted Rall described Pat Tillman, who gave up his NFL career to enlist in the Army and was then killed in Afghanistan, as a "sap" and an "idiot."

But this is my FAVORITE one:

"A political flier in Tennessee, depicting Bush as a mentally disabled sprinter, bore the message: "Voting for Bush is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded.""

Check out the whole article here.

(cowboy) hat tip: McGehee