PrintMay 23, 2010
The Enemies Within
It is not entirely clear what possessed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to disclose his peculiar suspicions that a yet-to-be-apprehended terrorist could very well turn out to be a right-wing enthusiast driven to violence because of his strong disagreement with President Obama's health care plan. What the consequences would have been had his suspicions proved accurate we cannot now predict, since said miscreant has already confessed. It turns out that he is, after all, merely another SUV-driving, stand-by Islamic jihadist commissioned to bring the war on terror to our shores.
Yet amidst the ensuing fray of speculations about whether or not our country is safer now than it was two years ago, our most luminous intuition tells us that this unfettered armchair deduction from such a high-profile elected official suggests that there are quite possibly a whole lot of other less prominent and less sensible people out there who believe that the apparent re-emergence of violence as a socially acceptable form of dissent can be attributed only to the prevailing virulence in partisan rhetoric from right-wing ideologues.
In short, the mayor's impolitic statement exposes the currently accepted form of profiling that has effortlessly gained traction among many of today's most prominent media pundits, Hollywood elite, and left-wing politicians, which casts all conservatives as highly imbalanced bigots and malcontents known for instinctively resorting to violence any time they don't get their way. In other words, these are people who cling to their guns and religion.
At its most benign stage, the popular entertaining of this notion typically means another round of listening to the progressive-minded laity as they masterfully regurgitate the tiresome litany of evils that George W. Bush allegedly inflicted on this country before Obama the redeemer came onto the scene. The blighted souls who typically end up fielding these ludicrous allegations do well in recognizing that sometimes it is safer to maintain a cautious rapport with their assailants -- if for no other reason than to maintain a semblance of civility -- and to indulge their fancy that perhaps their addlebrained logic does bear some traces of legitimacy.
But when people who hold positions of power and influence are swayed by these outlandish misconceptions, arguably, it should be a matter of great concern, as one can often find a direct link between the theoretical absurdities they have accepted as gospel truth and the far-reaching social and economic ordinances that spring forth from such delusions, which they then try to impose upon the unsuspecting masses.
On a more pernicious level, the power to effect significant change that is temporarily bequeathed to the new leadership can easily devolve into a collective assent to freely engage in the furtive demonizing and brazen infringement of the rights of those in the minority; but not before there is a tacit agreement that the latter has been justly maligned.
Many continue to dispute that conservatives regularly sustain these kinds of ideologically driven assaults from the media, high-ranking Democrat congressmen, a few prominent members of the Obama administration, and at times, even the president himself. But the deliberately ignored, hence largely unreported, facts yield an entirely different picture.
It was not long ago that Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano unveiled a national safety report singling out peaceful pro-life protesters as potential terrorists. Yet hereto, the only person officially charged and subsequently arrested for threatening to kill a public official in connection with the Obama health care debate happens to be a loyal DNC donor.
You may also recall that on the heels of ramming ObamaCare through Congress, several Democrats projected that right-wing extremists would likely retaliate with violence. Yet virtually every credible reported incident of politically motivated vandalism since then has been perpetrated mostly against conservative politicians who vigorously opposed the measure.
Despite any shred of evidence, the media persisted in peddling a story for weeks which alleged that a peaceful assembly of Tea Party activists had repeatedly hurled racial epithets at some black lawmakers. But it is left-wing activists who disrupt peaceful assemblies and hurl eggs at buses carrying members of the Tea Party movement as a way of expressing their loyalty to the president.
President Obama has had his share of bilateral scuffles with the only prominent news network that dares to seriously challenge the coherence of his game plan.
And finally, let us not forget that it is so-called progressives, and those influenced by their ideology, who have traditionally employed violence as a vehicle toward social change.
The result of this multi-pronged effort to suppress the voices of constructive dissent, aided and abetted by a biased media's spiteful characterization of its ideological adversaries, is a gradual erosion of a majority party's tolerance towards the opposing party's differences. This intolerance eventually matures into sanctimonious outrage, often manifesting itself in unabashed attempts at blacklisting -- and eventually silencing -- the opposing party's accredited spokesmen, and the refashioning of an alternative narrative which upholds the legitimacy of the majority party's intention and simultaneously depicts the opposition as being motivated only by blind hatred.
But what is most tragic is that this tendency to acknowledge only one side of the tribal rivalry that strains our national discourse is blissfully yoked to an agreed-upon apathy that has virtually blinded us to an issue which poses a more imminent danger: the fact that there are an undetermined number of radicalized Muslims in this country, patiently awaiting their beckoning call from superiors stationed overseas, to splatter their vital organs on the busiest next available public concourse, and thus consummate what they see as the divine purpose for their existence.
