A paean to Liberalism

Bob Herbert consistently writes excellent columns. This is a good example.

Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal? Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.

O'Brien, Sean Colmes, Coulter and Limbaugh scream and insist it is all liberal imaginings, and that makes them unpatriotic sentiments.

Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.

And liberals cower.

Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals -- from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers -- the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.

Indeed.

Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud. The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.

Some have never stopped hating FDR.

When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.” Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”

That last quote is the one Palin, the last of the conservatives who venerate Reagamn and lie to the people, used, but entirely out of context. Of course.

Running While Black

Bob Herbert exemplifies hard-hitting, unabashed opinion column writing. This column is so very much on the mark, it makes pieces written by other columnists seem trivial.

Gee, I wonder why, if you have a black man running for high public office — say, Barack Obama or Harold Ford — the opposition feels compelled to run low-life political ads featuring tacky, sexually provocative white women who have no connection whatsoever to the black male candidates.

That sets the stage, as it were. Why, I wondered, when the McCain campaign run the infamous celebrity ad this past week, did they choose Britney and Paris? Why not Angeline, or Brad?

Now, from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”

That ad helped Ford lose; it was despicable.

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women.

Consciously, or subconsciously, that is the fear that is being addressed: uppity black men taking white women sexually.

Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.

If he complains, he'll come across as a whiner, be charged with inventing slights, with not addressing important issues.

Whatever you think about Barack Obama, he does not want the race issue to be front and center in this campaign. Every day that the campaign is about race is a good day for John McCain. So I guess we understand Mr. McCain’s motivation.

Nevertheless, it’s frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades.

He’s obviously more than willing to continue that nauseating tradition.