Selective Outrage SyndromeGotta love this Richard Cohen song about how the
right-wingers are shooting down liberals.
I still ride a bike. I do 12 miles, several days a week, and as I do so I listen to music -- the Pandora service on my iPhone. I have created a station that plays folk rock. Lately, it has repeatedly played the Neil Young song "Ohio": "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?" On the bike, I have to repress a tear.
I still ride a bike, too. But for Chrissakes, I don't listen to Neil Young anymore, except for laughs. The right can be sanctimonious at times, but they'd have a hard time catching up to ol' Neil on that score.
Anyway, Cohen's tie-in to today is that the right is being nasty just like they were in May of 1970, with lots of hateful words:
That was the language of that time. And now it is the language of our time. It is the language of Glenn Beck, who fetishizes about liberals and calls Barack Obama a racist.
Where was Cohen during that last 10 years, when liberals routinely compared Bush unfavorably to Hitler? For that matter, where was he back in the 1960s when the Left called LBJ (and Nixon after him) a baby-killer?
Angry and hateful words are not limited to the right, by any means. Neil Young was and is a demagogue just like Glenn Beck. And Richard Cohen? To paraphrase Coven:
One tin liberal rides away...