Mean week for the Democrats

Daniel Sims, Columnist
Published On: 09/23/2008

 I had some trouble writing my column this week because I didn’t want to give it the appearance of the very theme I am writing to criticize. The examples that I needed to find, however, aren’t that plentiful.

I wanted to write about how people who feel they are supporters of a particular political party can harm the very party they want to support by what they feel are “justified” actions. This idea was born when a photographer for the Atlantic magazine, Jill Greenberg, this past week admitted to and boasted about, purposefully staging and manipulating photos of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

She took the photos to accompany an article about him in the magazine and her admitted purpose was to make him look as frightening and as old and as unappealing as possible. Hardly what one might expect in a fair representation of a candidate.

The closest I could come to a similar occurrence effecting Democratic candidate Barack Obama was the supposed manipulation of some images to make him appear to have either lighter or darker skin.

How is it a person who could believe themselves to be supporting the party of affirmative action, equal treatment for the disabled, protection for gays, women, and the environment think this would be acceptable?

On the September 14 episode of cable’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” comedian Janeane Garofalo was running down a vitriolic list of her complaints about the Republican Party. When conservative Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund asked jokingly if she wanted to have all Republicans arrested and jailed, her response was “That would be great!” She then went on to say how Democrats are fundamentally much more decent people than Republicans.

The closest I could come in this venue might be to quote some of the bilious vitriol from conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, but since he has attacked McCain and Obama, I don’t know how good an example that would be.
Why do Bill Maher and Janeane Garofalo, supporters of a party who has had many of its prominent members jailed for merely protesting the denial of basic human rights, think it would be OK to joke about this?

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin also had her personal e-mail account hacked last week, and the information from the account posted on a Web site, including personal information on her children. No one knows who was responsible, but it can be reasonably assumed the person doing this would not consider themselves her supporter.

Since this activity was actually a crime it received some news coverage, and the people responsible will more than likely be caught. But for months Democrats have been critical of the general electronic surveillance of things like e-mail. The idea that Big Brother may be monitoring our communications is a disturbing one, but when it actually happens to an actual person, the lack of reaction was remarkable.

I can’t help but wonder what sort of uproar would have occurred if it had been Obama who had his e-mail account hacked and private information about his family made public?

The Democratic party is one based on ideas of compassion, equal rights, and fair treatment of others. Why can’t the people who support it live up to those ideals?

I wanted to write this article to illustrate how excesses by so-called supporters of either political party can hurt that party. I wanted to use recent high profile examples of both, but I was sadly unable to do that. Maybe it is just a fluke. Maybe this just happened the be the “mean week” for Democrats. I certainly hope so.

Email: drake7@uab.edu