While Googling for more information about
Harry Belafonte's recent diatribe against the Bush administration, I ran across an August blog entry from the "Conservative Tymes" with the headline, "
Hate Speech From the Democrat Left Heats Up." This time Belafonte was railing against voting fraud and other things, though it was difficult to figure out exactly what Belafonte was going on about because the author was too busy lambasting him to actually discuss what him was saying.
The headline about "hate speech" got me thinking -- a difficult task on a Sunday morning -- and, while I take issue with anything Belafonte or most anyone else on the Left says as "hate speech," I realized within, oh, a nanosecond, that in one sense, the headline had a germ of truth in it. I DO hate the American Right. I absolutely hate and despise George Bush and everything he and his moneyed, casually criminal, Nazi-leaning ilk stand for.
And that's a good thing. More on the other side.
We've been brought up to think, good liberals that we are, that hate is always bad. That the more we understand someone or something, the less we can hate it, even if we oppose it. That's usually true. And I'd like to say that I don't hate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, that I loathe and despise their policies, their actions, and their beliefs, but I respect them as human beings.
Nope.
I hate them personally, professionally, and as an American. I hate everything they do, everything they say, everything they think. I hate them for breathing in oxygen that could go to give life to someone more deserving. I hate them the way Sam Adams and Tom Paine hated the British. I hate them -- if this isn't being presumptuous -- the way the Jews hated their prison guards. I hate them the way Mississippi blacks hated the whites who blasted them with water hoses and lynched their sons. And for real presumption -- I hate them the way Jesus must have hated, at least for the moment, the moneychangers as he threw their tables over and bodily threw them out of the temple.
In most cases, hatred is a negative, corrosive, one might say evil emotion. Granted. But there's such a thing as righteous hatred. I believe that's what I feel, and what many of you feel, and what millions of decent Americans feel at the depredations these Nazi wolves are subjecting us to on a daily basis.
Like anything else, a righteous hatred can be turned to positive use. This hatred must be used for a positive end -- working tirelessly to remove Bush and his Nazis from office, to clean up his mess, restore democracy to this country, and to ensure that it never, ever, happens again.
Does this make me a bad person? If so, then I accept the karmic burden and will undoubtedly work it off in a future life as a cockroach on Arcturus IV or something equally heinous. If so, if I can put this hatred to use in ridding our country of the wolves at the door, then so be it.
Perhaps our colleague William Rivers Pitt sums it up the best:
"I despise George W. Bush. I despise his Vice President, his Senior Political Advisor, his Chief of Staff, his Defense Secretary, his Assistant Defense Secretary, his Attorney General, his National Security Advisor, and his chosen Ambassador to the United Nations. Those names, in case you are confused, are Cheney, Rove, Card, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, Rice and Negroponte. I despise his Congressional allies, who have shredded their constitutional duties by refusing to investigate a variety of incredible crimes. For the record, these crimes include the fabrication of Iraq war evidence, the outing of a WMD-hunting CIA agent in an act of political revenge, and the serious questions about how four commercial aircraft fooled the entire domestic defense shield and the entire intelligence community long enough to kill three thousand people. I despise any and all of his people who fanned out two years ago to pound into the American consciousness the idea that criticizing Bush is treason. ...I hate George W. Bush and all of his people because they have done an incredible amount of damage to this nation I hold so dear. I hate them because they are professional liars, thieves, brigands without conscience. I hate them, fully and completely, on the record." -- William Rivers Pitt, October 2003