Fact: Liberals Just Not as Quotable as Mouth-Frothing Wingnuts

Buck Banks

On Fridays I receive a round-up of columns from Human Events, a right-wing tool that has been around since 1944. To give you some idea of how right it is, the site still uses a videotaped promo starring Ronald Reagan: “Greetings, conservatives! Human Events has been spreading the revolutionary news about our crusade for as long as I can remember.”

What piqued my curiosity today was a top 10 list of the most outrageous things liberals have said over the past 20 years compiled by something called Media Research Center. I figured there must be some juicy stuff there, considering all the outrageous things the wingnuts have said in just the last 20 hours.

But it wasn’t. Outrageous, that is. Indeed, what was interesting was the total lack of outrageousness. Here’s an example:

5. Three Cheers for Liberalism
“It is liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?” — Charles Kuralt talking with Morley Safer on the CBS special, “One for the Road With Charles Kuralt,” May 4, 1994.

Outrageous? I don’t think so. How about this one:

8. Extolling Virtues of Fidel’s Prison
“For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.” — Barbara Walters on ABC’s “20/20,” Oct. 11, 2002.

Oooh, that’s really out there, Barb. Luckily, the list only goes on for 10, which truly is fortunate, or my sense of outrage would have been completely anesthetized. But poking around on the site I did manage to find some outrageous stuff — all supposedly stories that Human Events “broke”:

  • Big corporations give more money to liberals. Surprised? Blue-chip companies now give far more money to the Left — although Democrats still cry “poor” and the media still call the GOP “the party of big business.”
  • 45 percent of British Muslims believe the U.S. and Israel planned the 9/11 attacks. This clearly does not square with the media view of Islam as a gentle, rational faith.
  • American companies recently did $1 billion worth of direct business with Cuba. This story gets no play because the press want you believe a “cruel U.S. business embargo” is the cause of Cuban poverty.
  • High energy prices are NOT all bad. For the first time in 15 years, the number of new U.S. oil wells drilled tops the 1,000 mark — and exploration is up 35 percent over last year.
  • Kyoto Treaty can’t alter climate — period. That’s what treaty backers admit. Nevertheless, the global press bends over backwards to cover this up.
  • The North Korean missile launch was helpful — for Red China. Chinese military leaders got a detailed look at U.S. missile defenses – sea, air and land-based detection systems and frequencies used.
  • Since 9/11, Islamic jihadists have perpetrated not 500, not 2,500, but more than 5,000 terror attacks. Liberals hush-up this number, claiming the truth would provoke “reprisals” by “violent” Americans against “peaceful” Muslims.

I think that several of those statements push the outrageous envelope. And that’s not surprising, given the columnists who write for Human Events:

HUMAN EVENTS gives voice to the great conservative thinkers of our era — Robert Novak, Michelle Malkin, L. Brent Bozell, Terence Jeffrey, Bruce Bartlett, Thomas Sowell, David Limbaugh, Oliver North, Pat Buchanan and many more.

There are a few utterers of outrageous speech in that batch. How about Novak’s outing of Valerie Plame, Malkin’s unfettered attacks on a 12-year-old boy, Buchanan’s — well, anything Buchanan says is pretty much outrageous.

But the “outrageous” statements from liberals really don’t fill the bill. I’ll admit this one comes close:

3. Typical Liberal Compassion
“I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease …. He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” — USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, Nov. 4, 1994, on PBS’s “To the Contrary.”

But if we remember that Julianne Malveaux is black, there goes the outrageousness right out the window. And that’s as bad as it gets over the course of 20 years, if we are to believe Human Events that this is the best they could dredge up. Let’s face it — liberals just are not as quotable as bombastic, bloviating, frothing-at-the-mouth blowhards like Rush Limbaugh.

Oh well, I can live with that.

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