Manufactured Outrage: The Whining Never Ends
Republicans' 'outrage' can't mask their fear of liberals who fight back.

TBTM Commentary by Don Waller

The first thing you should realize about the Republican party and all their assorted spokespeople, representatives, mouthpieces and surrogates is this - they can dish it out, but they cannot take it.

Over the past ten years, conservatives have defined the rules of the game as it is played today. Throughout 8 years of non-stop attacks on Bill Clinton - despite his unparalleled success as a two-term, legally elected president - they nearly perfected the technique of sliming their political opponents. Remember the 'Clinton Body Count?' Remember The Clinton Chronicles, in which Clinton was accused of everything from drug dealing to outright murder? Sure you do. You couldn't swing a dead cat in Washington, DC without hitting some Republican who was pushing one outlandish allegation or another about Clinton. So effective was the rumor-mongering that many otherwise intelligent Americans still believe that Clinton either raped someone or killed someone or stole something.

Key in the Republicans' tactic was the technique of 'manufactured outrage.' Remember the righteous anger of Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich during the failed impeachment? Well, you can't possibly describe it as anything other than manufactured outrage - because while they were railing about how Clinton's conduct was rending the very fabric of our society and threatening the existence of our nation, every one of them was practicing the exact same conduct. Newtie was, to put it coarsely, bending his secretary over the desk. Hyde had wrecked his share of marriages by that time (of course it was, in his description, a 'youthful indiscretion' - if you can count age 40 as anything vaguely resembling 'youth'). And Livingston was engaging in conduct so potentially embarrassing and so deviant, that he resigned as Speaker of the House rather than have his personal sexual proclivities revealed.

But that's all in the past. There's a whole new - and even more bogus - form of manufactured outrage being practiced by today's Republicans, and it's proof that they are beyond shame and more than willing to do anything to win. Case in point - MoveOn's 'Bush In 30 Seconds' ad competition, the Bush family's connection to and financial support of Nazi Germany, and Ed Gillespie's efforts to conflate the two.

Prescott Bush's connection to the Hitler's Germany is a matter of public record. Last year, Miami reporter John Buchanan went to the National Archives in Washington and walked out with literally hundreds of documents linking Prescott Bush to financial dealings with the Nazis, both before and during World War II. This is fact. The National Archives do not make stuff up. The archivist who supplied Buchanan with the Bush-Nazi documents said he would stake his career on the veracity of the documents, and while Republicans whined like babies over Buchanan's three-part series in the New Hampshire Gazette, not a one of them disputed any of the charges raised in the series.

But let's get back to the MoveOn competition and Ed Gillespie's very special brand of whining.

MoveOn received over 1,500 entries to 'Bush in 30 Seconds' - so many, in fact, that they enlisted the opinion of their vast membership in order to choose the finalists. Among those 1,500 entries were two which compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, and the people who voted on the finalists for the contest voted them out - neither one made the cut, and they were taken down from the 'Bush in 30 Seconds' web site. Case closed, right? Well, no.

Somehow, the Republican National Committee got hold of a copy of one of the ads in question. In the week when the real finalists were announced (including this site's submission, Symbolman's brilliant 'Army of One'), the RNC - led by the Head Whiner, Ed Gillsepie - went to the press with tales of outrage, telling anyone who would listen how those nasty liberals at MoveOn were accusing George W. Bush of being a Nazi. Gillespie cried in his best imitation of a victim of hate speech that MoveOn and the big, mean liberals were polluting the public discourse with 'political hate speech.' A mass email went out from RNC headquarters with a link to the offensive ad, so that the Republican faithful could see how the mean liberals were so full of hate that they put together an ad that no civilized person should have to see. An ad that was so hateful, it should never be out on the internet.

But the link for the offensive ad led to the web servers of the Republican National Committee.

So here we have Ed Gillespie practicing the worst sort of manufactured outrage. On one hand, he was on Crossfire and any other TV program who would have him, all over the news, crying like he was smacked in the head with a monkey wrench over the outrageous behavior of those nasty, hateful liberals - while he was hosting that hateful ad on his own party's web servers.

C'mon, Ed - either the ad is beyond the pale and shouldn't be viewed by right-thinking people, or it isn't. You can't cry like a schoolgirl about the ad being out there if you're the one putting it out there.

Of course, Gillespie got all of his pals like Matt Drudge and all the slime in the swamp of right-wing Hate Radio to play along. Hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Boortz, Beck - they were all just so appalled and outraged and shocked by the repulsive ad, which was being provided to the public by the Republican party. Drudge 'broke' a story about a second Bush-Nazi ad. The cable nets picked up the drum beat. Suddenly, it seemed as though the entire country was shocked and appalled and outraged.

All this outrage, for an ad that was so hateful, Ed Gillespie couldn't wait to put it on his server and link to it.

To digress for a minute - I wrote an article very similar to this one last August, after Byron York went on Fox News and proclaimed us 'Bush-Haters' over a flash animation that was produced by this site in early 2002 entitled 'Bush Is not A Nazi, So Stop Saying That!' York's manufactured outrage (over a flash that was over a year old already at that point) was good for an article in Naional Review, and it also got him on Fox, so I'd guess his outrage was assuaged somewhat by the check he got from National Review for writing about us. Now, back to the story at hand - and who should make an entrance at this point than Byron York, once again earning a paycheck by writing aout lil' ol' us.

A column appeared on today's National Review Online, in which York pointed out that one of the finalists - Symbolman - was the same person who produced the 'Bush Is Not A Nazi' flash animation. Well, someone must have tipped Matt Drudge (or Drudge just went and stole the story without attributing York), because this afternoon, the Rabid Right's favorite Drama Queen was 'breaking' the news about another Bush-Hitler animation (At this point, nearly two years old!) done by a finalist in the MoveOn competition. You could almost hear Drudge wetting his drawers at the prospect of 'breaking' the story (or stealing it from York, whatever). He mustered the biggest font that his limited HTML skills would support and put up the headline on his site.

Now we should make it perfectly clear, here and now - despite Drudge's little hissy fit, MoveOn has nothing to do with the 'Bush Is Not A Nazi' animation. It is not a finalist in the competition. It was never even entered in the contest. But of course, that doesn't stop crybabies like York and Drudge, who wake up every morning yearning for something to be shocked and appalled and outraged about. And if they can smear TBTM and MoveOn at the same time, so much the better. But their outrage, and the outrage of that big whining baby Ed Gillespie, tells me something.

They are all afraid of liberals who stand up to them. Each and every one of them are scared to death of people like us.

Gillespie has become accustomed to dealing with Beltway Democrats, who roll over and pee on themselves on his command to show how 'bi-partisan' they are. Gillespie is used to Democrats who go along to get along.

And he, and Drudge and York and all the slime in the swamp of right-Wing Hate Radio are all coming to the same realization - that people like us, and web sites like TBTM and MoveOn, are anything but pee-on-yourself Democrats. and it scares them like they've never been scared in their lives.

I'm sure that Ed and Byron and Drudge, were they to read this, would cluck their tongues and shake their heads and make some remark about how uncivil and impolite and downright rude we are, and right on cue, they'd all be outraged and appalled and shocked. Like I said at the top of this article, they can dish it out, but they cannot take it. And where they have come to expect Democrats in the past to be remorseful and regretful and apologetic, Symbolman and I - and thousands of other like-minded sites and blogs - have a slightly different message instead.

We're fighting back this year. You won't go unchallenged any longer. We don't care how outraged or shocked or appalled you are, not any more.

To put it in terms you're more familiar with - get over it.

Don Waller is co-founder of Take Back The Media. Send all requests for him to move to France to stranger@takebackthemedia.com.