Dems set tone for corrosive rhetoric

WASHINGTON — After a deranged Democrat living in his van nearly assassinated Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), firing more than 70 rounds at House Republicans practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared it “outrageous” that anyone would blame Democrats’ rhetoric for inspiring the shooter. Never mind that the shooter echoed Democratic vitriol against the president, ranting on Facebook that “Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” Now Democrats are doing exactly what they condemned, blaming President Trump’s divisive rhetoric for the recent spate of mail bomb attacks and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The truth is they ceded the moral high ground years ago. Recall that in 2000, the NAACP spent millions on ugly ads accusing George W. Bush of moral equivalence with white supremacists who brutally lynched James Byrd in 1998. “My father was ... beaten, chained and then dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black,” said Byrd’s daughter. “So, when Gov. George W. Bush refused to support hatecrime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.” Barack Obama set the tone for his 2008 campaign against John McCain when he declared, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” A pro-Obama super PAC ran ads showing GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan pushing an old lady in a wheelchair over the side of a cliff, while another ran false ads blaming Mitt Romney for a woman’s death from cancer. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton compared Republicans to Nazis, saying in regard to illegal immigrants, they wanted to “round them up” and put them in “boxcars.” She also compared the GOP to terrorists, declaring, “Now, extreme views on women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups, we expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world, but it’s a little hard to take from Republicans.” None of this excuses Trump’s rhetoric, but it does make his Democratic accusers hypocrites. When you traffic for decades in hateful, violent political rhetoric, you have lost the moral authority to effectively condemn others for doing so. Indeed, Democrats arguably bear much of the blame for creating Trump. One of the reasons voters rallied behind Trump is precisely because, after years of seeing their standard-bearers act like punching bags, Trump presented himself as a counterpuncher who isn’t afraid to fight back and gives as good as he gets. The results are ugly. Trump is wrong to call the media the “enemy of the people” and to celebrate a congressman body-slamming a reporter, and the host of other terrible things he has said. But Democrats were dragging us into the political gutter long before Trump came along. If they think Americans elected a Frankenstein’s monster, they are Dr. Frankenstein.