Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right Read Online Free PDF Page B

offense.” 65
    In the careful analysis in the Washington Post, reporter Robin Givhans wrote that Harris “seems to have applied her makeup with a trowel.” 66 Givhans continued: “Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid.” This major investigative report graced the front page of the Post’s Style section. The issue of Harris’s mascara no-no’s was framed as a matter of national urgency: “One wonders how this Republican woman, who can’t even use restraint when she’s wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship.” The public, it was said, “doesn’t like falsehoods, and Harris is clearly presenting herself in a fake manner.... Why should anyone trust her?” 67
    Al Gore advisor Mark Fabiani later explained the Democrats’ attacks on Harris, glibly telling the New York Times, “We needed an enemy.” He said attacking Harris was “the right thing to do, and it worked.” 68
    A central component of liberal hate speech is to make paranoid accusations based on their own neurotic impulses, such as calling Republicans angry, hate-filled, and mean. With no sense of self-irony, the left spitefully stereotypes Republicans as—among other loathsome characteristics—spiteful stereotypers. There is maybe just the tiniest element of projection and compulsion in all this.
    New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote an entire column on the Republicans’ “Mean Strategy.” As Herbert wearily explained, “Back in 1998 I offered the Republican Party some unsolicited advice.” It was: “ ‘Give up the politics of meanness,’ I said. ‘It’s killing you.’ “ Alas, he concluded, “the G.O.P. never seems to learn.” 69 Liberals have compared conservatives to Down’s syndrome children, wished them dead of cholesterol-induced heart attacks, malevolently attacked women for their looks, called Clarence Thomas every racist name in the book, repeatedly stated they “hate” Republicans, and now—in addition—they say Republicans are “mean.”
    After a rape victim spoke to the Republican National Convention in 1996, NBC’s Tom Brokaw interviewed the speaker, posing this conundrum to her: “[The Republican Party] is a party that is dominated by men and this convention is dominated by men ... Do you think before tonight they thought very much [about] what happens in America with rape?” 70
    When Juanita Broaddrick went public with her claim that Bill Clinton had raped her, liberals wouldn’t give her the time of day. Having flamboyantly accused Republicans of ignoring rape victims, liberals were later freed of the responsibility of having to pretend to care about rape themselves. In polls—considered determinative on most matters by Democrats—80 percent of respondents who heard Broaddrick’s allegations thought they were true (62 percent) or possibly true (18 percent). Only 20 percent of respondents did not believe Broaddrick’s assertion that a sitting United States president committed rape. 71 NBC had spent months investigating every aspect of Broaddrick’s claims to rout any possible inconsistencies in her story. They found none. As is often the case with rape, no eyewitnesses were present for the actual rape, but as far as rape allegations ever go, Broaddrick was, at the very least, an extremely credible witness.
    Still, out of pure political calculation, NBC refused to run Lisa Myers’s interview with Broaddrick describing her rape at the hands of Bill Clinton until after the Senate had acquitted Clinton in his impeachment trial. Dan Rather did not mention Broaddrick’s rape allegation once on the CBS Evening News. He later explained that he had refused to report a plausible charge that the president