Identity Politics and the Right

Writing at the website Secular Right, the Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald has a provocative post on how "Republicans denounce identity politics, except when they engage in it themselves." A snippet:

Is it too much to hope that Republican criticism of Obama stay within a zone of rationality and dignity?  Yes, the Democrats demonized Bush, but that doesn't mean that Republicans have to respond in kind.  Why not be icily factual and coldly respectful, rather than hysterical and hot-headed?  Both parties seem to have forgotten the Clinton and the Bush eras.   Democrats, in portraying right-wing hyperventilation over Obama as a manifestation of covert  hostility to blacks, forget the insane Clinton conspiracy theories that grew like kudzu even in the highest reaches of Republican opinionizing.  Only this year has the right-wing obsession with the Clintons appeared to have finally and thankfully petered out.  But Republican pundits, in portraying Obama as an unprecedented danger to the country-on Wednesday, Mark Levin announced: "We've never been in this situation before at least in modern times . . . They intend to use the system against you"-forget their own dire warnings about the Clintons as the end of civilization.

Whole thing here. Jesse Walker on how conservatives learned to stop worrying and love political correctness here.