This much-linked and well-written piece by Paul Begala deserves reading, and quoting:

Such is the hatred of the far right at the dawn of the 21st Century. And my how the optical worm has turned. Today it is the left invoking faith, flag and family, while the right destroys crosses. Today it is the left that honors the war dead, raises up a Gold Star Mother and publicly prays for our troops, while the right viciously attacks a woman who gave her country everything. Today it is the left that patiently and peacefully respects the Office of the Presidency, while the right diminishes the office by claiming it’s more important for the President to go bike-riding with a sports hero than comfort the mother of a war hero.

For the last two presidential elections it has been the Democratic Party whose nominee was a Vietnam War veteran, while the Republicans have sputtered out spurious defenses of their candidate’s deceitful draft-dodging.

On Thursday, Dick Cheney, who said he had “other priorities” in the Vietnam era, and so helped himself to five draft deferments, will address the 73rd Convention of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. I do not think he will express remorse for the callousness with which he explained his cowardice. Nor do I expect him to apologize for the shocking, mocking Republicans who, at their New York Convention a year ago, sported Band-Aids with tiny purple hearts to mock the blood shed by John Kerry and so many other heroes in that misbegotten war.

No, Mr. Cheney, surrounded by body guards who would gladly give their life for him, will no doubt wrap himself in the flag. A flag Larry Chad Northern wrapped around his axle on Prairie Chapel Road.

Larry Northern didn’t come driving out of nowhere.

We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.

Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX)
Mother Jones, 8/1995

I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for.

Rush Limbaugh
Denver Post, 12/29/1995

Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.

Rep. Don Young (R-AK)
Alaska Public Radio, 8/19/1996

Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him.

Rep. James Hansen (R-UT)
11/1/1998

Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past - I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble - recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’ In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.

John Derbyshire
National Review, 2/15/2001

The middle part of the country–the great red zone that voted for Bush–is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead–and may well mount a fifth column.

Andrew Sullivan
London Sunday Times, 9/16/01

Why are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for enemies, when our nation’s worst enemies–communists proclaiming an anti-American jihad–will be right there in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday?

Robert Stacy McCain
Washington Times, 9/27/01

Talk about ironic: the same people urging us not to blame the victim in rape cases are now saying that Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it.

Jonathan Alter
Newsweek, 10/1/2001

We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.

Ann Coulter
2/26/2002

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.

Ann Coulter
New York Observer, 8/26/2002

John Kerry has it tough. As I’ve mentioned before, he’s been trying to send a positive message on the war when many people in his own party are actively rooting for the other side.

Glenn Reynolds
4/15/2004

I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today’s Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Christopher Hitchens
9/27/2004

Bush hatred has become a defining characteristic for many liberals—so much so that they appear to identify with it more surely and swiftly than they do their American citizenship. At times, some extremist liberals seem to be rooting against their fellow Americans and in favor of those who would kill us.

Tara Ross
2/1/2005

One can only admire Hendrickson’s candor in admitting what is usually hotly denied: that even many leading realists, along with many liberal internationalists, are rooting for an American defeat.

Norman Podhoretz
2/2005

Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America’s men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

Karl Rove
6/22/2005

Everybody got it? Dissent, fine; undermining, you’re a traitor. Got it? So, all those clowns over at the liberal radio network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done, please? Send over the FBI and just put them in chains, because they, you know, they’re undermining everything and they don’t care, couldn’t care less.

Bill O’Reilly
6/20/2005

While our men and women in uniform put their lives on the line each day to defend our safety and to protect our freedoms, I am sure the least they expect is the backing and the support of their leaders at home. To the contrary, what we’ve seen from Democrat leaders is a growing pattern of jumping at any chance to point the finger at our own troops, bending over backwards to promote the interests of terror-camp detainees while dragging our military’s honored reputation through the mud.

Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH)
6/23/2005

[It] is just inconceivable and truly incorrigible that in the midst of the war, that the Democratic leaders would be conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops. … [The Pelosi/Waxman proposal for an independent commission to investigate conditions at Guantanamo Bay is] simply another example of some Democrat leaders trusting the words of terrorists over the proven decency of U.S. troops.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC)
6/23/2005

The Democratic leadership priority is to actively engage in the politics of division and distraction that can undermine our national security in favor of a left-wing agenda.

Ron Bonjean
6/23/2005

Wouldn’t it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick ‘em out. We’d get rid of Michael Moore, we’d get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there.

Rush Limbaugh
8/11/2005

We will see worse than Northern.

[Quotes/links via Paperwight, Crooked Timber, and FAIR.]