Dems: Bias and Bigotry

Which party is intolerant? It's the Ds, not the Rs, as Powerline co-founder John Hinderaker explains in the daily edition of the Weekly Standard:

One of liberals' chief motivations these days is fear of the religious right. Ask people on the left to explain their loathing of President Bush or the Republican party, and the answer often comes around to Jerry Falwell, evangelicals, theocracy, and so on. The left's fear of conservative Christians is fed by a steady stream of news stories. Some are accurate: religious conservatives oppose gay marriage. Some are fanciful: Sponge Bob Square Pants has been accused of being a homosexual. And some are simply false.

Hinderaker tells of uber-liberal Bill Moyers's atrocity in the Minneopolis Star-Tribune, blaming the supposed Republican indifference to the environment on Christian belief in the Rapture:

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? [Grist magazine] reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious.

Here, though, it was Moyers, not James Watt, who was trafficking in delusion and fantasy. For Watt said no such thing. The quote that Moyers attributed to Watt is fictitious. It originated in a 1990 book called Setting Free the Captives by an eccentric former circus ringmaster named Austin Miles. Miles didn't claim that Watt made the bogus statement to Congress, however; that embellishment was another layer of fabrication, added by Grist and repeated by Moyers.

Moyers just made it up--yet bloggers are supposedly too inaccurate to replace the mainstream media!

Moyers eventually acknowledged his mistake and apologized to James Watt. But, as Byron York explained in The Hill magazine:

by then, the “last tree is felled” quote had slowly begun to spread.

• On Dec. 11, The Miami Herald reprinted a portion of Moyers’ speech, including the quote.

• On Dec. 19, an Indianapolis Star columnist quoted Watt’s phantom statement.

• On Jan. 7, a Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist quoted Watt.

Then a few more small papers published the quote.

Finally, on Feb. 6, last Sunday, The Washington Post published a front-page story titled “The Greening of Evangelicals: Christian Right Turns, Sometimes Warily, to Environmentalism.”

The Washington Post printed a half-hearted retraction, admitting only that "Although that statement has been widely attributed to Watt, there is no historical record that he made it." And Hinderaker notes that the far-left Jon Carroll, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, repeated Moyers's theme while acknowledging that the fictitious Watt quote was "not verifiable." Bulletin to brainiacs at the Post and the Chronicle: Congressional testimony, especially by a member of the President's Cabinet, is transcribed and printed. The lack of any proof is itself proof Watt didn't say it.

Howard Dean's selection as DNC chair confirms the party's descent into the gutter, says the February 28th National Review (dead tree edition):

He is a northeastern liberal who is aggressively secular and believes the party can prevail by shouting its orthodoxies ever more loudly. In the course of his DNC campaign, he announced that he “hates” Republicans. His victory is a sign that the party’s left-wing base has an unquenchable thirst for irrelevance. It also is a testament to the incompetence of the Democrats’ congressional leadership. Senate minority leader Harry Reid and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi couldn’t manage to find a plausible alternative, as their designated candidate, former representative Tim Roemer, sank without a trace because of his undue regard for unborn life and his past interest in modernizing Social Security. Dean’s ascension is bad for the Democrats and — insofar as we all have an interest in a responsible Democratic party — bad for the country.

So don't believe the hype: Democrats are only tolerant of those who agree with them. They're biased against everyone else. Modern Democrats look less like a political party and more like a religious cult. Maybe they should demonize and excommunicate themselves.

More:

Jonah Goldberg:

Dean is, famously, a man of considerable rage. Just this week he remarked that he "hates Republicans." (Presumably all of those bumper stickers in Burlington proclaiming that "Hate is not a family value" will have to be scraped off.)