The Politics of Personal Destruction

The recent vicious attacks and ridicule of VP candidate, Sarah Palin, sent me trundling down memory lane to the Clinton Administration where Hillary coined the above phrase. She was attempting to deflect moves by Republicans to impeach Bill for perjury and numerous charges of sexual harassment. While not as famous as her “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” quote, I found the “politics of personal destruction” line to be particularly ironic and even humorous considering she and her mates developed and perfected the technique.

Hillary’s team became quite adept at dealing with “Bimbo Eruptions”, women who came forward with charges of sexual harassment and rape. Remember Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick and of course, Monica of blue dress fame? Hil and her BU team set out to publicly destroy these women using private investigators and by leaking false or misleading information to their friends and allies in the media. Trash them! That was the goal.

Hillary and her liberal-left fellow travelers in the media and Hollywood had already honed this skill in previous battles. She was, you may remember, one of the prosecutors in the Watergate trials that forced Nixon out. Later their techniques came to full flower in the fight over Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, giving rise to a new verb for the English language… “borking”. Bork had only one failing, other than being intelligent and principled, he was a conservative. They trashed the guy and it worked. They tried the same thing with Clarence Thomas and only failed because he stood up in front of the Senate hearing and called it what it was, “a high tech lynching”. An embarrassed Senate confirmed him… barely.

Of course, for the last eight years there has been a steady drumbeat of attack and ridicule on George Bush from the left, the media and entertainment figures. “Bush is stupid” is the mantra, although he has a degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard and had better grades than either Kerry or Dean. (Bill, Hillary and Obama have never released their college records). The hatred is quite amazing and cumulatively effective. Bush has the lowest approval rating of any President in recent history. Only two institutions have lower public approval ratings: Congress and the media. Hmmmmm?

Where does this hatred come from? The technique of teaching hatred is as old as Marxism itself. Karl Marx once boasted that “he was the greatest hater of the ‘so called positive’.” Lenin said, “We must teach our children to hate.” Bill Ayers, founder of the Weather-men, sixties bomber and admitted Marxist said, “Bring on the revolution, kill your parents, teach hatred.” He also is quoted as saying, “… the community organizer must first rub raw the resent-ments of the people and fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.” I wonder if this is what famous “community organizer”, B. Obama was doing in Chicago? Just a thought.

Dr. Mark Hendrickson in a Townhall.com piece opines that while it’s a hate crime to express distain or denigrate gays and minorities, it is not to show outright hatred for people on the right who disagree with you politically. He also points out that the flip side of hatred is inflated self-love and self-righteousness so extreme that respect for other human beings diminishes and feelings of moral superiority allow for any tactics.

The tactics employed by the liberal-left are credited to the late Saul Alinsky, the philosophical guru of the radical movement in the late sixties. Alinsky wrote an extremely popular book called The Rules for Radicals. He said, “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."

A brief summary of Alinsky’s rules clearly demonstrates that today’s leftists are operating right out of his handbook.

The only question about means is, do they work?
· Attack multiple issues.
· Target the middle class rather than the poor.
· Decisions are not necessarily driven by the good of mankind.
· Pretend morality
· Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
· Lead people to class based interpretations of their own grievances.
· Use the church to further your agenda.
· Pick a target, freeze it, and polarize it.
· Ridicule is the most powerful weapon.

Hillary was a big fan of Alinsky while at Wellesley and wrote her senior thesis on his book. Her paper entitled, “There is Only One Fight… An Analysis of the Alinsky Model” was kept under wraps while the Clintons were in the White House. Written in her senior year, 1969, it only became public in 2001. In her 92 page paper she made it clear she found much to admire in Alinsky’s work and at the same time was already thinking ahead. One observation that stands out was that “politics needs an enemy to mobilize against.” Or, as Amanda Carpenter pointed out in “Human Events”, “the village needs an enemy.”

If you look at the last two rules on Alinsky’s list you get a pretty good feel for what has been going on in the last eight years and during the current Presidential campaign. The liberal-left, including their allies in the media and Hollywood have selected targets and polarized them and using ridicule and fueled by hatred tried to destroy them. The list is long: Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Gonzales, Karl Rove, Halliburton and Big Oil, Wall Street and “The Rich”.
It explains how, acting in lockstep, they can ridicule Palin and attack anyone as “racist” who questions Obama’s relationships with Ayers, Reverend Wright, Syrian convicted felon, Tony Rezko or Jew hater, Louis Farrakhan. Ayers, Hillary and Obama were all fans of Alinsky. BHO even worked for the Industrial Area Foundation, an organization founded by Alinsky and financially supported by Clinton. Saul can certainly be credited with originating The Politics of Personal Destruction. Today’s leftists only perfected it.

Americans need to think carefully before putting Obama, clearly a radical and likely Marxist in the White House.