Seen and Noted

I’ve gotten pretty honked off of late at the right-wing; not that that isn’t pretty much a constant state. However, the problem I’m having right now is that in several forums here on the interwebs, I see posters and commenters tasking the left with massive hypocrisy.

For example, a right-wing acquaintance of mine posted a story on Facebook about how someone on the left compared conservative pundit Ann Coulter to both Stalin and Hitler (which takes considerable mental gymnastics in and of itself). His comment following the posting ran along the lines of, “No agenda here.  But let Ted Nugent make a comment, and the liberals go nuts”.

OK, here’s my problem with all this. First of all, Ted Nugent essentially made a thinly veiled threat of violence against the President, for which the Secret Service wisely had a chat with him. I remember back in Bush’s day that anything that even mildly hinted at criticism of the President had the right foaming at the mouth and excoriating that individual or group as “unpatriotic” or “dangerous”.

I recall hearing about a man over in the Albany area who appeared in a shopping mall wearing a T-shirt that merely stated his dislike of Bush – no threats, no slanderous comment, just basically saying that the end of Bush’s tenure wouldn’t come soon enough. He was told to remove it or leave the mall, both of which he refused to do, as he was in a public place and well within his rights.  He was arrested!

Yet the current President has endured lies, slander, egregious and frequently racist insults, and the left is called hypocritical and overreacting. Go figure.

However, when it comes to genuine hypocrisy I have two words for the right: Newt Gingrich. The man is a serial adulterer, not to mention an outright cad, having unceremoniously dumped two wives — one on her deathbed. Yet when the left brought these serious character flaws up during his campaign, the response from the right was pretty much that this was his own private business, and a non-issue. However, when Bill Clinton peeked up an intern’s dress, the right wing was willing to destroy the country and make us the laughing stock of the world in their never-ending quest to have his head on a pike.

Well, if that isn’t hypocritical, then I don’t know what is.