JEFF GREENFIELD: America's Darkest Forces Are Being Unleashed
10/29/2022 10:41 AM EDT Politico
On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, Sen. Robert Kennedy returned to his Indianapolis hotel after delivering a now-famous speech announcing the dreadful news to a crowd of Black supporters. I was an aide to the presidential hopeful at the time, and in the course of a brief chat, he paused and said, “You know, that fellow Oswald… he set something loose in this country.”
It was the only time I ever heard him mention the name of his brother’s assassin.
And his musing took on new force in the coming days as city after city exploded into deadly violence. Along with rapidly rising crime and violent political protests by the fringe left — followed by Kennedy’s own assassination — the sense of upheaval and social unrest dominated our politics and the 1968 campaign, where “law and order” rivaled even the War in Vietnam as a force.
Now we’ve witnessed what was almost certainly an assassination attempt on Speaker Nancy Pelosi amid a brutal attack on her husband in their San Francisco home. 2022 isn’t 1968, but the climate of violence can’t be ignored.
Back in 1996, during his acceptance speech for the GOP presidential nomination, Sen. Bob Dole, talking of President Bill Clinton, spoke of his “opponent” — and then paused to say pointedly: “and he is my opponent, not my enemy.” But even then, Dole was fighting a rearguard action. From the other side of the Capitol, Newt Gingrich had become speaker of the House after a years-long campaign to demonize his Democratic foes. With the help of pollster Frank Luntz, Gingrich convinced his Republican colleagues that it was necessary to define Democrats not as wrong, but as evil. Indeed, he and Luntz offered a list of words to be used, including “corrupt,” “devour,” “greed” “hypocrisy,” “sick,” and “traitors.” (In later years, Luntz appeared to regret his role.)
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/29/pelosi-attack-power-political-violence-00064105
UNfun Fact: Luntz also came up with the term "climate change" for GOPhucks to use instead of the more accurate (and urgent!) "global warming," and the entire media bought into it.
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