Daniel Webster is running for Congress in the 8th Congressional District of Florida. He is a veteran Republican politician, having served as the first Republican speaker of the Florida House of Representatives in 122 years. He has also served as the Republican majority leader of the Florida Senate. He is a pro-life conservative. He is not the Devil.
His opponent is Alan Grayson. Alan Grayson is the incumbent, being first elected to Congress in 2008. He is a pro-abort liberal Democrat. He is doing his best to depict Daniel Webster as the Devil.
My good friend Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia has a first rate post on this subject at his bog and has saved me quite a bit of work:
Back during the Bush years, I can recall debates in the Catholic blogosphere in which Catholics of a certain left-leaning ilk accused those on the right of having questioned the patriotism of anyone who had opposed the Iraq War.
The thing is that I don’t recall these instances of anyone’s patriotism being impugned (outside of David Frum’s infamous piece at National Review in which he accused conservative Catholic commentators Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak of being “unpatriotic”; but then, any conservative worth a damn doesn’t give a rat’s patoot what David Frum thinks or says).
And, in fact, the left’s protestations about having their patriotism questioned appears to have been nothing more than collective projection, imagining that their political adversaries were doing exactly what they would do if they were the ones trying to overcome opposition to a particular objective of national policy priority. This has been borne out since the election of President Obama: how many times have we seen the words “sedition” (also here, for example), “un-American” (also here, for example), “unpatriotic”, and even “siding with the terrorists” (not to mention “racist”) applied to critics of the Obama agenda?
But NEVER in my years have I EVER heard someone in politics say about someone in the opposition “He just doesn’t love America like I do.”