Melissa Overbeck
Perspectives Editor
Last week I took a trip to Westlake Village with a friend who insisted on listening to conservative talk radio for the duration of the ride. It was halfway through “The Sean Hannity Show” that I realized what it is that makes me despise partisan talk radio so much — it is absolutely filled with hate rhetoric.
There is only a certain amount of time that a person can sit there and listen to someone ranting about liberals and how stupid and ignorant they are and how much they hate America. These comments are often followed by statements about what liberals think about various issues, which is even more irritating since, throughout this car ride, I disagreed with every “thought” that I, as a good liberal, was accused of having.
Apparently these hosts missed a key lesson from elementary school — name-calling is not a successful (or appropriate) way to resolve disagreements.
Talk radio hosts are not the only people with this attitude. It is also present print articles like Ann Coulter’s weekly column and on political commentary TV shows such as “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Here’s a little sample of the mudslinging:
In a recent column, Coulter said explicitly that “liberals are clueless, amoral sexual degenerates, communists and pacifists.”
In December, she referred to John Kerry and John Edwards as “an America-bashing trophy husband and his blow-dried, ambulance-chasing sidekick.”
And when democrats objected to the confirmation of Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State, Coulter was ready for that one too, saying that “the closest black woman to most of the liberals accusing Rice of being incompetent is the maid they periodically accuse of stealing from the liquor cabinet.”
Coulter is not the only one spreading this kind of hateful partisan rhetoric.
On “Hannity and Colmes,” Sean Hannity had his own colorful words for liberals.
“This is what (liberals) are doing, this racism, overt racism, this condescension, and this arrogance,” he said. But apparently, as he said in an interview with Radio Ink, “conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.”
Unfortunately, this weekend I discovered that this is not a problem unique to conservatives. The new chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean, was quoted in the New York Daily News Jan. 30 as saying he “hate(s) the Republican Party and everything it stands for.” Great start.
This is an important time in U.S. history. The country is currently putting a significant amount of time and resources (both human and financial) occupying and trying to rebuild Iraq, while at the same time dealing with major domestic issues such as Social Security and welfare reform.
These are major projects that are essential to the future of this country, but are projects that will not achieve success without bipartisan cooperation.
In spite of these challenges, the country remains bitterly divided along partisan lines — while Bush did achieve a 51 percent majority in the presidential election, 48 percent of Americans (or 57, 288, 974 people) voted against him. Those people cannot continue to be ostracized.
The truth is that liberals don’t hate America; but neither do conservatives. Both, in fact, care a great deal about this country, and simply have different ideas about what is best for it. Republicans are in control of the White House and Congress and are setting the agenda. Naturally then, Democrats are in the position of objecting to Republican propositions as they believe that those ideas may not be the most beneficial to the welfare of the country. For that, they are deemed anti-American.
This phenomenon is a simple side-effect of being the underdog. If Democrats were in power they could easily make the same accusation—Republicans clearly hate America because they are hurting it by ruining its reputation in the world, driving up the deficit and cutting programs that aid its disadvantaged.
While I do not actually believe that Republicans hate America, this is simply to show that party bashing can go both ways — and either way, it benefits no one.
Rather than fanning the flames of partisanship with this hate rhetoric, leaders, commentators and columnists on both sides of the spectrum must engage in real debate — without name-calling or stereotyping.
2-17-2005