It's the Spending, Stupid!

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips addresses the elephant in the living room. (h/t: Memeorandum)

I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

There's a word for having to explain something brain-blitheringly obvious to those who refuse to see it:

It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid.

Listen up, proggies.

Death threats are bad. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to say so.

Civility is good. Everyone knows this, and everyone is supposed to speak up for the civil against the uncivil.

You aren't supposed to excuse the uncivil when they happen to sit on your side of the aisle. You're supposed to keep them under control, or at the very least, not encourage or defend them.

So when unsubtle threats and extortion demands get sent to those who dissent from the Proggie sense of entitlement vision, everyone is supposed to call those people what they are: vain, ridiculous petty tyrants with the manners of Vandals and the morals of pimps.

You're supposed to call it out, in the interests of a better, more civil society for all of us, not just the people who agree with you.

And if you can't or won't do that, then don't be surprised when your caterwauling about how awful and scary the people who disagree with you are falls on deaf ears and rolled eyes.

Ball's in your court.

This is Not Racism

But the Tea Party? Totally racist. Totally.

Old and Busted: Sarah Palin Made Loughner Shoot People

New Hotness: Zeitgeist, which is anti-semetic and right-wing, made Loughner Shoot People

You have to ignore a LOT to make Zeitgeist a Republican film. You also have to ignore a lot to make it a Democratic one. Mainstream American politics -- of which, like her or not, Sarah Palin is a member -- has as little to do with this sort of vision-dreaming. These people aren't on the political fringe. They aren't even cranks. They're nothing, detritus, the equivalent of the tinfoil they doubtless wrap around their heads to avoid the CIA mind control.

Kooks. Jared Loughner was a kook. And kooks do kooky things.

The Left likes to portray Tea Partiers as kooks, for the same reason that Federalists called Thomas Jefferson the Anti-Christ: for rhetorical purposes, an entirely cynical exercise in fear-mongering. And if I wanted to stretch it, I could make a comparison between that and the fear-mongering of Zeitgeist. But I'm not going to do that, because there's a world of difference between "You guys are lunatics!" and "the Federal Reserve is poisoning the wells, the Bilderbergers are unwittingly causing us to bow down to the Beast, Jesus is the Devil!!!eleventy!!!" Cynicism does many things, but it does not willfully deny reality.

On the New Civility

Jim Treacher calls out Richard Cohen for being the hypocrital swine he is:

Go ahead and insult anybody you want. But please excuse me if I don’t take you seriously when you turn right around and call on the rest of us to be nicer to each other.

And then, of course, there's Don Surber's Rant Heard Round the Right-osphere:

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

The problem with all this is we don't even have an agreement about what civility consists of. What is it about the Tea Parties that the Left finds uncivil? The entirely peaceful protests, which usually leave the site cleaner than it was found? The dissent from the Keynsian Consensus of 2008? The accusations of socialism/fascism/communism levelled at Barack Obama? What?

If we could agree upon what was out of bounds, and we could trust the other side not to violate those bounds, perhaps we could establish this new civility.

As it stands though, I'm off to buy a bigger soapbox.

The Essayist #22: Politics and the Oedipus Effect

The Greeks believed in destiny. Unlike Old Testament prophets, Greek oracles weren't interested in changing behavior. If the gods let you know that something was going to happen, then that thing was going to happen. That thing was not going to change, no matter what you did. The message was not "Check yourself," but "Brace yourself."

Oedipus proves this perfectly. His parents, and then he, were told that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. Everything that Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus did to prevent this guarunteed that it would happen. By abandoning baby Oedipus on a hillside, Laius and Jocasta guaruntee that Oedipus grows up not knowing who his real parents are. By getting away from the people he thinks are his parents, Oedipus puts himself into his true parents' path. As Camille Paglia put it in Sexual Personae: "Oedipus, fleeing from his mother, runs right into her arms."

Civility? I Don't Think That Word Means What You Think it Means...

Stop Shouting:

I remained stoic when your acolytes spit on my car and called my husband a “baby killer” when I crossed through your phalanx at Walter Reed to take my children for medical care. I refused to respond as you smashed your fists into the hood of my car, destroyed my mirrors with bottles and keyed my doors in California, my children mute and terrified as you screamed your hate and bile.

Just because they've managed to toss all this down the memory hole doesn't mean we have.

Hippes = Tea Partiers

Zombie » The Electric Tea Party Acid Test

Come for the amusing premise, stay for the neat graphic and stipulation of the difference between bums and hobos.

Just so.

If a $1.4 trillion federal budget deficit represents sanity, they would prefer a candidate who escaped from the psych ward.

Steve Chapman, no friend of the Tea Parties, on why the're necessary.

Will Saletan: "Glenn Beck is Not a Racist"

At least, not anymore:

The resemblance doesn't mean that Beck wants to take us back to the days of segregation. It means the opposite. Crying "socialism" is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It's a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn't end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That's because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it's a really slow bus.

It's always a good idea when reading the Left to assume projection, or as Breitbart put it, that they accuse others of doing what they do. So when Saletan says "you know, these wingnuts really don't hate on black people," he's the one making the real concession. He's conceding that there's another principle operant in his opponents than bigotry, that opposition to racism is an idea that the Right has fully, finally embraced. And he's admitting that them crazy crackers do this all the time.  And if this is true, then what animates the right must be something else.

It's official: the race card is maxed out. The cudgel lacks only a ceremonial bronzing.

Here be Racists...

Over at the Patheos blog, Theodore Dalrymple explains why the Left returned to their "Teabaggers = RACIST!" meme as soon as the leak in the Gulf got plugged. He chalks it up to the Theory of the Missing Motive:

Unable to see a rational and noble motive at the center of the Tea Party movement, liberals supply a darker and more convenient motive instead. Just as ancient cartographers wrote "there be dragons here" beyond the bounds of the world they knew, so liberals write "there be racism here" because the mind of the Tea Partier is undiscovered country in their map of the world. The Tea Party cannot be rationally and nobly motivated, the liberal believes, because the Tea Partiers are not rational and noble.

In other words, the problem is not that liberals dislike the principles promoted at Tea Party rallies. Most do not understand those principles. The problem is that liberals dislike the kind of people who go to Tea Party rallies.

I wrote similarly a few years ago, summing up the source of the fevered antipathy to President Bush:

There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.  

In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous

From 2005 to now, despite a slew of victories, the Progressives have not changed. 



 

Garafalo = PWNED

Change the context, and she's suddenly talking about something very different. Except she isn't.

I guess the foot's on the other hand now, isn't it, Kramer?

E.J. Dionne Merits Another Fisking...

...insert your own joke here.

Oh, THAT Liberal Media...

Channel One is lame. It's on during homeroom and I usually pay no attention. But today's broadcast featured their "coverage" of the outrage against Democratic Congressmen, and a more biased account could hardly have been offered. All the victims were Democrats, all the perps, Tea Partiers. No mention of the bullet in Cantor's office, no mention of the voicemail Jean Schmidt (R-OH) received. And obviously, no mention of this.

Why can't Lefties be honest?

"I Hope You Die," is not a threat.

This morning, the radio played what it described as "death threats" left  on the voicemails of various Democrat Congressman who voted for ObamaCare, especially Bart Stupak, who got played like a cheap fiddle by the President and Speaker.

Not one of them actually constituted a death threat. The worst of them was "I hope you die!", a hot-headed and uncivil thing to hear, to be sure. You could call it a "death wish" if you want, and you could call it a narrow distinction. But the reason language exists is so that distinctions can be made. And wishing that someone would drop dead, however morally lacking, is leagues away from promising to kill them, even unseriously.

What I don't understand is the media and Left clutching their fans and smelling salts as though this did not happen during the Bush Years. Politics is a sport played by the passionate. People lose their minds and shout hyperbole. Why can't we have a media that either decides it's all horrific rudeness and a threat to the republic, or it's all bold speaking-truth-to-power? Pick a standard and apply it equally.

What's the problem with that?

UPDATE: See this, this is a threat:

Cantor said "a bullet was shot through the window" of his campaign office. The incident happened Monday, Fox News has learned, the latest in a rash of apparent threats and acts of intimidation against members of Congress. Most of the threats so far have been reported by Democrats, but Cantor -- the No. 2 Republican in the House -- is one of about 10 lawmakers who has asked for increased security protection, Fox News has learned.

Golly Goshers! A Person of Color!

At a Tea Party Rally!



You may say it's one lone black man, but that's still one more than MSNBC has hosting its news lineup, if you care about that sort of thing.

The Essayist #16: Today's Special Comment -- Keith Olbermann is a Racist Swine.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel, cheap shot, giving him attention he doesn't deserve, yadda yadda. Don't care. For reasons passing understanding, while flipping through the channels last night, I left it on MSNBC long enough to catch Olbergruppenfuhrer's Special Comment, all about how anyone and everyone who has any affinity for the Tea Party movement is merely a Klansman in drag.

That means you, honky.