They told us that if Barack Obama was elected, the nation would unite. Souls will be repaired. The spirits will be healed. Public discussion would be raised. Welcome to civility and tolerance in the age of Obama:
— Famous leech/trash blogger Perez Hilton took to the Internet and television airwaves to humiliate a beauty pageant contestant who gave what he considered an “offensive” answer about gay marriage. Hilton, inexplicably acting as a judge in the Miss USA pageant, asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, if she supported legalizing gay marriage. Prejean respectfully replied, “I guess I think marriage should be between a man and a woman. “No offense to anyone, but that’s how I was raised.” By the way, President Obama defines marriage the same way Prejean does.
Whatever. Hilton immediately criticized Prejean as a “stupid bitch” in a viral YouTube video he recorded after Sunday’s competition. The next morning, he apologized for the attack, then withdrew his apology and then escalated his divisive rhetoric. On Tuesday afternoon, Hilton told the MSNBC anchor that when he listened to Prejean’s response, he had an even more vulgar epithet in mind – the “C-word.” The anchor woman didn’t say anything. Taking advantage of his up-to-date role as gatekeeper of thought and speech, Hilton told CNN’s Larry King that beauty pageant contestants must bow to the tolerant crowd: “Yes. I expect Miss USA to be politically correct.”
And apparently Miss USA organizers agree. Instead of apologizing for Hilton’s terrible behavior, Miss California pageant director Keith Lewis sent Hilton a note throwing Prejean under the bus: “I am personally saddened and hurt that Miss CA USA 2009 believes that marital rights belong only to a man and a woman … There is no place for religious beliefs in the Miss CA family.
But gutter vulgarity and misogyny?
Last week at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo spoke out against legislative proposals that would provide illegal alien students with in-state tuition discounts that are not available to law-abiding Americans and legal immigrant students. In response, protesters at the university blocked Tancredo with huge banners and shouts: “No dialogue with hate.” The adults in the room stood off to the side while the students smashed a window a few feet from where Tancredo was standing. Physically threatened, Tancredo was forced to leave the room without presenting his comments.
According to campus reports, leftists have been preparing for a week to stage a speech suppression demonstration. The same thuggish tactics were used at Columbia University, Georgetown University, and Michigan State University to shut down speakers who support strict immigration enforcement. The UNC administration apologized for the students’ tantrum but took no steps to investigate its own culpability in creating an atmosphere of intellectual vandalism and intolerance.
— Last week, the late-night airwaves turned into a cesspool of tender porn as liberal journalists ridiculed and vilified the hundreds of thousands of Tea Party protesters across the country who oppose reckless taxation and spending by both major political parties. Award-winning CNN host Anderson Cooper, following the lead of his hopeless MSNBC competitors, indulged in sexual puns about “tea bagging.” MSNBC devoted an entire week to sophomoric sexual slang and innuendo, including references to “lunatics,” Dick Armey and “full-throated” protesters.
And White House adviser David Axelrod calls Tea Party members “unhealthy”?
And speaking of unhealthy, irate, white liberal actress Janeane Garofalo, she venomously played the race card: “It’s about hating the black man in the White House. This is pure racism and is just a bunch of tea-packing rednecks.” Returning to the topic was Jeffrey Kimball, a retired history professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who criticized the “far right” for organizing against Obama because “he is black and a liberal.”
Tell that to the thousands of activists in South Carolina who virtually booed and harassed white Republican Rep. Gresham Barrett as he left the stage at a Greenville tea party last Friday night for supporting the trillion-dollar TARP and passing a post-vote pork-packed stimulus bill against it. “Go home!” they screamed. The only color that mattered to protesters: the red ink of government debt.
But in the age of Obama, there is no room for such nuances and uncomfortable truths. A decent adolescent woman is a “dumb bitch” because she has the same view of marriage as Obama. A conservative campus speaker is intimidated as a hate monger by those with wild eyes. The grassroots movement is being denigrated as a bunch of racist vulgarists by the media mob of racists and vulgarists. Civility and tolerance turned left onto a one-way street. So much for changing course.
