That's what has both the "progressives" and the business-as-usual RINOS in a perpetual snit :
They hate that!
Posted on 02/27/2010 8:38:14 PM PST by neverdem
After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment — with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon — is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements.
The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right, anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s.
“A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in The Washington Post. “It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.”
But for Gerson and other conservatives, this is not just an intellectual exercise. They have a very specific political goal: to deprive Democrats and their allies of a potentially potent weapon to use against the GOP in November.
“I don’t believe we should be giving [extremists] a platform or empowering them to do anything based off their conspiracy theories,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, “because they give the left ammunition to try to define the tea party movement as crazy and fringy.”
The attempt “to clean up our own house,” as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary “because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they’re a large part of this tea party movement. And I don’t think they are.”
Until recently, organizers and activists mostly seemed content to ignore, or in some cases tolerate, extremists in their ranks, confident they’d be drowned out by the hundreds of thousands of activists who took to congressional town halls and marches around the country to protest big-spending initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.
But inflammatory rhetoric such as former congressman Tom Tancredo’s racially tinged speech at this month’s tea party convention, reports of the involvement of right-wing militia groups and the continued propagation of conspiracy theories about Obama have sometimes cast the movement in an unfavorable light.
Erickson has advised new tea party organizers on how to avoid affiliations with extremists and this month banned birthers — conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president — from his blog. (He has long blacklisted truthers, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — a conspiracy theory with devotees across the political spectrum.)
“At some point, you have to use the word ‘crazy,’” said Erickson.
Ryun’s American Majority, a group that trains tea party activists and others around the country, has done much the same thing. Its website has moved to close its sessions to activists who identify themselves with the birther, truther or militia movements or the John Birch Society.
Ryun conceded that extremists are involved in the tea party movement. But he said, “It’s just such a small percentage, and it should not be portrayed as representative of the broader movement.”
The fringe fighters’ methods range from censuring signs at rallies or banishing unruly participants completely to challenging the media’s focus on the fringe and highlighting the movement’s diversity and tolerance.
They have gone out of their way, for example, to promote activists and movement-backed candidates of color, including tea party stars Marco Rubio and Allen West, running for U.S. Senate and House, respectively, in Florida, and Texas Senate candidate Michael Williams — all Republicans.
Ryan has another strategy. He has commissioned a poll that he thinks will show that tea partiers share with independent voters a commitment to reducing taxation and government spending and prove that the tea party movement is “very much mainstream.”
But the tea party movement’s decentralized structure, vaguely defined goals and anti-establishment tone make it an attractive place to channel angry feelings. Mainstream media organizations such as The New York Times, which recently ran a 4,500 word story on the infiltration of the movement by a militia-linked group called Oath Keepers, have recently focused on these aspects of the movement.
Independent of their actual numbers, it’s in both political parties’ interests to inflate the influence of the other side’s fringe, said Tom De Luca, a Fordham University political science professor who studies political movements and wrote the 2005 book “Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.”
“That creates this dynamic that seems to exaggerate the influence of the extremes,” De Luca said.
Much as conservatives have sought to link Democrats to environmental extremism or socialism, he said, it’s an obvious countermove for the left to try to link Republicans with the more extreme elements that have gained traction around — and sometimes within — the tea partiers.
So it was that liberals have demanded to know where Republicans stood on Obama’s citizenship, or that last week found left and right debating which side had more in common with Andrew Joseph Stack III, the software developer who crashed his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas.
The left seized on a comment by hard-line conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), reportedly expressing his empathy for the pilot’s anti-tax views. Rush Limbaugh retorted that Stack “sounds like he's blaming Bush and Reagan," asserting that he sounded “almost word for word [like] Nancy Pelosi. Almost word for word [like] Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.”
De Luca predicted that another “Bill Buckley moment” will occur only when the political damage done by extremists outweighs the boost the tea party movement has provided to conservatives generally and the Republican Party specifically.
“My guess is their basic stance will be to try to juggle as long as they can,” he said.
That approach — and its drawbacks — were on display at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of Washington’s conservative establishment. It featured the John Birch Society as a co-sponsor. And while conference organizers nixed a panel on Obama’s citizenship, a birther contingent still made its presence felt, as did the Oath Keepers, who co-sponsored the conference.
After filming a brief segment at the conference, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a leading tea party antagonist, concluded on her show that “the conservative movement right now is really not afraid to let its freak flag fly. … They‘re happy to show off the ‘we want another revolutionary war,’ ‘we think the black president is arrogant,’ ‘we think the apocalypse is nice’ side of themselves.”
Liberal commentators similarly highlighted the extremism on display at this month’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., which included a speech by WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah questioning Obama’s citizenship and one by Tancredo asserting Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
A blogger on the liberal site Daily Kos asserted Tancredo’s speech revealed the “REAL reason” tea partiers are upset: “A black man is President and their White Privelege [sic] is fading.”
Tancredo’s speech was not widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media, but immediately after Farah delivered his, he was confronted in a hallway outside the convention hall by conservative media entrepreneur and fellow convention speaker Andrew Breitbart, who said it was a disservice to the tea party movement to infer its activists are “all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue.”
Others cited the jeering of an anti-gay activist at CPAC who condemned organizers for inviting gay Republican group GOProud to participate. Conservative author and TownHall columnist Ashley Herzog said it was proof that “CPAC, and the conservative movement in general, isn’t a haven for haters after all,” and urged the left to view a video of the incident, which she said is evidence of “a lack of bigotry [that] must be painfully puzzling to liberals.”
Conservatives similarly pushed back against a New York Times blog post that accused a CPAC speaker of ripping Obama “in racial tones," partly by affecting a "Chris Rock voice" to mock the president.
They noted that the speaker — like comedian Rock — is from Brooklyn and speaks with a regional accent, and demanded an apology.
And in a clever Web video that went viral this week, the Dallas Tea Party called out MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who had mocked the mostly white makeup of the Nashville convention of what he called the "Tea Klux Klan," comparing its racially diverse leadership to MSNBC’s mostly white host lineup.
Judson Phillips, the Nashville tea party activist who organized this month’s convention, said it’s incumbent on local tea party leaders across the country “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.”
In the run-up to a July tea party convention he’s planning in Las Vegas, Phillips said, he’s planning to ask speakers “to stick to our message, which is unity headed into the fall.”
You said it best! Nobody has the right to speak for this group! And for some prick to decide what beliefs are off limits for legitimate voices in the political arena is arrogant.
So as a Catholic and social conservative, I should now be purged.
Why?
To satify the RINO’s, the media, and leftist.
Well then goodbye and good luck.
Thanks, CM.
Thanks, Clump. It’s good to see I’m not alone in my thinking.
Stalkers always try to make out the other to be the “estranged party”. They are traitors, manipulators, weak extorters.
Our government perverts full of gays is joining this new chorus of nonsense not seen out West since Hitler.
STALKERS! They will not just “target”, they will stalk and murder.
bookmark
How come nobody ever suggets that liberals disavow their fringe?
Oh wait, there is no difference between the liberal fringe and “mainstream” liberals.
nevermind
Close as I can tell, politico is just DU with fewer 4-letter words, and the vogel is another GLBT pervert with seething rage and a dictionary.
The object of the article being simply a repetition of the charge that the Tea Party Movement is racist and extreme fringe movement, based entirely on 10 weird signs and persons among hundreds of thousands.
Only using 1500 words and a dozen empty knee-jerk name-calling phrases to arrive at the same "brilliant logical conclusion."
*** Yawn ***
LOL!!!!
parsy
No, they’re just getting rid of Birthers and Truthers. They think Birthers are giving a bad name to Tea Party and the conservative nature of Tea Party. Somehow, some truthers got into Tea Party, probably because nobody else wanted to play with them.
parsy, who thinks it is probably a good move, but wonders if Tea Party can coalesce
I worked with a left wing agitator type once, and she once said something that I thought was profoundly wise: Never let somebody else define you.
Words and notions like “extremeist” and “right-wing” and such have been cheapened from overuse, as has the increasingly impotent “racist.”
I think, or at least I hope, that the majority of Americans have moved beyond the effects the Progressives hope these words have on us.
The author seems to agree with Napolitano: In her statement Wednesday, Ms. Napolitano defended the report, which says "rightwing extremism" may include groups opposed to abortion and immigration, as merely one among several threat assessments.
That's what has both the "progressives" and the business-as-usual RINOS in a perpetual snit :
They hate that!
And so the RINOS in charge of the party begin the purges to insure the victory of the democrats in November. They are in for a rude awakening. The paradigm is shifting and these clowns don’t have a clue. The real danger however, is a preemptive strike by the far left to eliminate the leadership on the right.
“At some point, you have to use the word ‘crazy,’” said Erickson.
______________________________________________________
At some point, you have to use the word ‘wienie’.
Their new slogan will be "conservatism you can believe in"
~SNIP~
Kenneth P. Vogel – who goes by "Ken" when he's not in ostentatious reporter mode – tracks the confluence of money, politics and influence for POLITICO.
He’s analyzed politics on CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio and radio and television stations around the country.
parsy has got to be on some list somewhere of fringe radicals.
-cPete, who road the Peace Train with Tom Hayden in 1980, but only because Linda Ronstadt was in the club car.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.