Georgia Dome
by Dwayne Hood

ATLANTA, Ga. — What would you think of someone who mocked a disabled person? How would you feel if they insulted grieving widows or degraded a tortured child?

These things have happened in the last two years by celebrated millionaires who market hatred and intolerance. Following a rout in the 2008 presidential election, Republicans are now circling their wagons to assess damage and hopefully refashion themselves into a more inclusive party for 2012.

A place to start is in considering the behavior of conservative icons in their attempt to stoke the culture wars. Political differences and spirited debate have built and sustained our democracy. But Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly frequently cross a line into a special kind of ugly that demeans the Republican Party. Here are cases that conservatives, and especially evangelicals, should consider.

In October 2006, Limbaugh was taped mocking and imitating tremors suffered by actor Michael J. Fox who has advanced Parkinson’s Disease. Fox incurred Limbaugh’s wrath by his tremors and rocking motions in a television ad for Democratic Missouri Senate candidate Claire McCaskill who supports stem cell research for battling Parkinson’s. Limbaugh accused Fox of not taking his medication to prompt tremors for the ad.

“This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox ,” Limbaugh scoffed. “Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting, one of the two.”

Fox responded that his tremors occurred because of too much medication. There was a public outcry and Limbaugh admitted he was “wrong” in his assessment. But he then used it as a springboard into further attacks and insisted Republicans were really the victims. “These ads are scripted by Democrat campaigns,” Limbaugh insisted. “And McCaskill’s campaign worked with Michael J. Fox on deciding how they wanted him to appear…. They wanted it to appear this way.” He suggested that Fox was exploiting his disease, “so you will really, really hate Republicans.”

And Limbaugh said Fox was shameless?

In June 2006, Coulter attacked four widows whose husbands died Sept. 11 when the World Trade Center collapsed. The women had called for a government study of security breaches that led to the attack. They also endorsed Democratic candidate John Kerry in his 2004 presidential bid.

In her book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism” Coulter wrote that Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg, and Patty Casazza acted as if “the terrorist attacks only happened to them.” She accused them of being self obsessed and said, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.”

“We have been slandered,” the widows responded. “Contrary to Ms. Coulter’s statements, there was no joy in watching men we love burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again.”

There was also a public backlash but Coulter refused to apologize and renewed her attack by nicknaming the widows “The Witches of East Brunswick” after a town where two of them lived. She accused them of using their grief “to make a political point.”

And Coulter calls liberals Godless?

But truly, a low road in conservative commentary occurred in January 2007 when FBI agents raided the St. Louis apartment of Michael Devlin, a 41-year-old pizza parlor manager. There they discovered two terrorized teenage boys who had been kidnapped and abused by Devlin.

One was a 13-year-old reported missing four days previously. And the other was 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck who had been missing for four years. Hornbeck recounted a nightmare of constant torture and sexual abuse from a man he was too frightened to run from although his family lived only 50 miles away. Mental health experts attributed this fear to a mind control called the Stockholm Syndrome where a captive is terrorized into bonding with their tormentor.

Hornbeck was reunited with his family for only three days when Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly felt the nation deserved his assessment of the boy’s ordeal. He rejected the concept of Stockholm Syndrome and claimed the 11-year-old chose to stay with his kidnapper for four years.

“The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents,” O’Reilly said of Hornbeck. “He didn’t have to go to school. He could run around and do anything he wanted.”

Devlin later pleaded guilty to kidnapping Hornbeck along with a count of attempted murder and 52 counts of forcible sodomy. He was sentenced in both kidnappings to a total of 74 life sentences plus an additional 170 years in prison.

As in the case of Limbaugh and Coulter, there was public outrage at O’Reilly’s initial attack on the young victim and Hornbeck’s parents demanded an apology. But in a breath-taking display of arrogance, O’Reilly refused to apologize. Instead, he admitted that although Hornbeck was a victim, it was a duty of good parents to properly train their children with “survival skills” necessary to escape such horrific abuse. O’Reilly’s spiteful judgment and response begs an important question.

How do you prepare a child to be kidnapped and sodomized?

Hornbeck, now 17, recently told a CBS correspondent about his miraculous survival and slow recovery from a shattered childhood. He said his greatest fear now is being “misunderstood” by his peers and other people. “Some people feel it in their power to judge me,” Hornbeck said. “But they don’t know the pain that me and my parents went through during the worst times of our lives. They weren’t there. They don’t know what it was like…. I’ve been through some things that would send psychiatrists insane.”

Vicious, unnecessary character attacks by these hate merchants are made to sell books and boost speaking fees and television ratings. And conservatives loyally flock to them to indulge in a psychological freak show of rage and public humiliation. But O’Reilly’s comments are especially egregious. Fox and the 9/11 widows entered the public arena in support of Democratic candidates for federal office. Shawn Hornbeck did not choose to be kidnapped at gunpoint when he was 11 years old. To demean a brutalized boy and his parents is unforgiveable and flies in the face of the much ballyhooed “family values” the GOP loves to brag about.

The landslide election of 2008 clearly proves two things. Voters are turning away from the old Karl Rove playbook of demonization and fear mongering that hijacked the last two presidential elections. And in obsessive catering to its social fundamentalist base, the Republican Party is marginalizing itself into an increasingly shrill, angry fringe of intolerant neocons with a “my way or the highway” mindset.

It is truly a one way trip to a political bridge to nowhere.

Dwayne Hood is a former newspaper reporter from Alabama who now spends most of his time in more academic pursuits, although he writes this weekly column exclusively for The Locust Fork News-Journal.

Tags: A Special Kind of Ugly

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under GOP Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.