The poison that has taken over American politics

David Horowitz writes in his blog at FrontPage Magazine:

As the election approaches I can’t help but be apprehensive that it will not resolve the ugliness that has invaded our political life. The reports of massive of election fraud by the left and the tightness of the election promise that the cancer that Al Gore injected into the electoral process when he challenged the 2000 election result and tried to reverse it in three Democratic counties will haunt our body politic for a long time to come. The ferocity of hate issuing from the anti-Bush side also betokens a bitter political climate for years to come. What I fear is that it will take another terrorist attack to sober us up, and remind people that we are in a war with a savage enemy who wants to kill us not in the thousands but in the millions. The worst legacy of Democrats like Al Gore and Jimmy Carter to this campaign season is to have made the war a partisan issue, dragging matters of national security into the gutter of political duplicity and hype, endangering us all.

I wrote to Horowitz:

I agree with you about the climate of poison created by Gore in 2000. But I think a major factor in this—and I was sayng this back then—was Bush’s complete failure to address the public on all the lies that had been told about him. He should have given a major speech to the nation, talked about the supposed “disenfranchisement” of blacks and all the rest of it, shown that these things weren’t true. It wasn’t enough just to win in Florida, which he did. Millions of people had imbibed fantastic lies about him and he needed to respond to those lies. He never did this. He allowed the lies to fester in millions of minds leading to the poisonous politics we have now. I said this all back in 2000 and early 2001.

It is utterly beyond me that a man, Bush, could have such lies told about him and not want to straighten out the record. If you were falsely accused of a terrible crime, and if you NEVER DEFENDED YOURSELF FROM THAT CHARGE, then many people would naturally believe the charge was true. Bush never defended himself from the charges. It was as though they didn’t matter to him, it didn’t matter to him that millions of people actually believed he had cooked the election, used police dogs to prevent blacks from voting, all the rest of it. It didn’t seem to occur to him that a large part of the county was convinced of these absurd and corrosive lies, and that unless he forcefully explained the truth (and it had to be he, not some spokesman), the anger and hatred resulting from those lies would poison our society for years to come. This was a spectacular failure of character and leadership. The evil came from the left. But in failing to oppose the evil Bush was party to it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 14, 2004 09:40 AM | Send