Thomas Sowell, a national columnist whose corrosive columns are regular features in the Joplin Globe, presented evidence in his column today that his bona fides as a prominent thinker on the right have all but disintegrated. He is now nothing more than a pseudo-intellectual apologist for the Fox “News” Channel.
The column, titled “Obama is tearing down America,” was a collection of half-truths, quarter-truths, and falsehoods, disguised as a defense of “American values.”
Just one example of the utter dishonesty of this rhetorical assassination of President Obama’s character:
Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get lifesaving medical treatments?
To present such a question as though it is in any way connected with reality is an example of the truth-defying tactics widely employed by people on the right wing who are out to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama, if not Obama himself.
It was conservative extremists (that term is fast becoming a redundancy) who did all the talking about “death panels,” in an attempt to scare senior citizens away from supporting health care reform legislation. And to start such talk and then later use it as the basis for asking, “Does any of this sound like America,” is not just a slippery, sophistical trick, but a shameless appeal to the worst angels of human nature.
It’s as if I began a rumor that Thomas Sowell and Rush Limbaugh were homosexual lovers, and then lamented in print, “Did you imagine a year ago that you would see Thomas and Rush at the gay pride parade dressed as Barney Frank? Does any of that sound like conservatism?”
Mr. Sowell asks his readers, “How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path?” And later says,
What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.
He follows that inflammatory rhetoric with this:
How far the president will go depends, of course, on how much resistance he meets.
It is only fair to ask, after all of this sizzling propaganda, just what kind of resistance is Mr. Sowell advocating? What kind of subtle message is he sending to people who buy into the ongoing narrative that Obama is not just insufficiently American, but that he is anti-American?
Sowell ends his hate-piece by telling us that President Obama has “contempt for American values,” and wonders whether “enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece…”
Wake up and do what, Mr. Sowell?
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 
janereaction
/ October 29, 2009Sowell’s column was one of the reasons I gave up on my Globe subscription, Cal Thomas another. And I recall an irritating Puerto Rican or Phillipine woman who was always parroting the editorial policy of the US Chamber of Commerce.
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Duane Graham
/ October 30, 2009Janereaction,
I’m not sure if there are any columnists on the left equivalent to the extremists, Sowell and Thomas, at least in terms of stridency and indecency. And I’m not sure it is even possible to “balance” them with extremists on the left (which I had previously suggested in lieu of dropping them). The other columnist you alluded to was, I think, Kathryn Lopez, whose stuff read not just like an editorial copied from the Chamber of Commerce, but a sophomoric editorial copied from the Chamber of Commerce.
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