Attributing ulterior motives to conservatives is a self-defeating argument

Frank Rich

Liberals playing identity politics is getting downright silly. How can anyone take them seriously when they are always attributing ulterior — sexist, racist, homophobic — motives to anyone who disagrees with them. They are walking, talking, blathering ad hominem fallacies.

Take New York Times columnist Frank Rich's screed in the Sunday Las Vegas Sun as a classic example:

"If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of theHouse — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

"They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The New York Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded."

I quess liberals are born not made. It is in their DNA instead of their reason and education and principles. Their first words are "welfare" and "taxes," as well their last.

Never mind that these all-white males elected Michael Steele to head the Republican Party or went to Searchlight on Saturday to hear Sarah Palin and then to Henderson to hear Ann Coulter. Never mind two to the most popular conservative columnists are named Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams.

Liberals love people of color, so long as they know their place and behave as they are told. Don't get off the plantation like Clarence Thomas or there will be hell and a high-tech lynching to pay.

Principles of self-reliance and free-market economics know no gender or skin pigmentation. To attribute such ulterior motives to those who hold a different politic view reveals a malignant core and devalues the whole liberal message as frivolous and unsustainable in the face of rational argument.