The June 23, 2010 columns of Eugene Robinson and Thomas Sowell provide a case study in the difference between how those on the left (AKA elitist, pinko, nazi, socialist, bleeding-heart liberals) and those on the right (AKA patriotic, freedom-loving, tea-partying, take-our-government-back, just plain folks conservatives) view our country and its duly-elected President.
Both discuss events which followed President Obama's move to ensure that BP would pay for the damage done to the gulf coast by the disastrous oil spill it caused. But the similarity stops there.
Robinson's column discusses Congressman Joe Barton's (R-Texas) apology to BP for what he called a "shakedown" by President Obama. It also addresses the position of the GOP
vis a vis the "proper" relationship between business and the interests of the American public.
Despite his subsequent apology for that apology,
Barton's remarks were no spontaneous gaffe. They came in a prepared statement and represent his genuine view of the situation: that the rights of a private company are absolute even when weighed against the clear interests of the public.
He points out and documents the following:
...Barton was only echoing a statement that Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) had issued a day earlier in the name of the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of House conservatives whose Web site claims 115 members. The statement groused that there is "no legal authority for the president to compel a private company to set up or contribute to an escrow account" and accused the Obama administration of "Chicago-style shakedown politics."
And he dares to use the C-word, which the right-wing echo chamber lambastes as a sign of weakness, but which Robinson uses to illustrate the moral depravity of today's GOP:
A group constituting roughly two-thirds of all Republicans in the House takes the position that President Obama was wrong to demand that BP set aside money to guarantee that those whose livelihoods are being ruined by the oil spill will be compensated. In other words, it's more important to kneel at the altar of radical conservative ideology than to feel any sense of compassion for one's fellow Americans.
Robinson's treatment of the story is (to borrow the misused terminology of FOX Noise) fair and balanced as well as intellectually honest.
Sowell's column, in contrast, is a study in abject duplicity. Don't think so? Consider the following:
His screed is 100% unsupported bull-pucky. There are no links to articles which might lend even a modicum of credence to his assertions.
He begins with an inuendo, designed to invoke the Tea-Party imagery of President Obama as the reincarnation of Hitler:
When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions
Yet he conveniently overlooks the fact that it is the GOP, which is fomenting fear to solicit the support of its ignorant and pliable,
keep your government hands off my medicare Tea-Party faction.
He follows with this blatant example of bait-and-switch:
"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive. In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.
He makes no attempt to justify his assertion that that "democracy is being dismantled." We are, I suppose, to take it on faith that he has the proof but that he has chosen not to clutter up his column with unnecessary supporting links to what is undoubtedly self-evident to any "right-thinking" American.
Instead, he devotes ten paragraphs to repeating the standard litany Republican talking points to: decry the policies of the Obama administration, pimp for the right of big business to do whatever it wants without government interference, remind Americans that our decline started with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and substitute bald-faced lies and distortions for historical fact.
In a final
tour de force of yellow-journalism, Sowell invokes the "czar" bogeyman, which was not to be feared when George W. Bush was appointing one after another of them.
The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed "czars" controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.
Finally, he pretends that he is sounding a warning against "arbitrary power." Yet, his entire column shows him to be nothing more than a shill for the arbitrary rights of powerful business and political interests and an opponent of the rights of the powerless whose livelihoods face extinction in a rising tide of oil.
Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power-- versus the rule of law and the preservation of freedom-- are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?
Allow me to answer your question, Mr. Sowell. Those "useful idiots" are indispensable to you and to those for whom you flack. You count on those "useful idiots' to blindly accept the assumptions of your ideology and to overlook your lack of journalistic integrity.
The Difference between the two columns can be summed up thusly:
Whereas Eugene Robinson's well-documented, thorough, and intellectually honest article should be required reading for every thinking American, print copies of Thomas Sowell's effort would be perfect for use as toilet paper in the heads of the trawlers deploying oil containment boom in the Gulf of Mexico.
