Here we go again. Something bad happened this week, so….fire up the Tea Party-bashing engine. My syndicated column today looks at the Left’s unhingedness over the Austin suicide pilot and the Amy Bishop campus massacre, which as I noted yesterday, reeks of the same craven political exploitation as the Kentucky census worker hoax. Since filing the column yesterday afternoon, there are even more examples to add to the pile. Allahpundit spotlights a Washington Post contributor and Time magazine piece both shoehorning the Tea Party movement into their suicide pilot coverage and commentary.
Damn the facts. There’s a crisis to exploit. You know, now would be a good time for a uniter-in-chief — an agent of hope and change in Washington — to call for civility and healing and a ceasefire on inflammatory attacks against peaceful Americans who had nothing to do with this attack. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, crickets chirp.
Latest development in the case: The suicide pilot’s wife plans to address the media today.
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It’s all the Tea Party’s fault
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
Remember “Not Me?” He was the famous invisible cartoon gremlin in the newspaper cartoon strip “Family Circus.” Whenever toys were left on the floor or other school-age disasters struck, the kids in the cartoon pointed their fingers at “Not Me.” Today, “Tea Party” is the juvenile Left’s new “Not Me” – an all-purpose scapegoat for every crime and disaster.
On Thursday morning, a disturbed pilot flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Several workers in the building were injured and Joseph Andrew Stack, the pilot, was killed in the crash. Local authorities suspect he set his house on fire – from which his wife and daughter escaped — before taking off on his deadly journey. Investigators found a Web posting identified as Stack’s “suicide manifesto” in which he railed against tax laws, inequity, government, and crony capitalism. He also targeted “puppet” George W. Bush and murderous health care insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.
The “manifesto” ended:
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.
This nutball had deadly grudges that transcended partisan lines. But within minutes of the story breaking, a furious, left-wing blogger at the popular Daily Kos website – where countless Democrat leaders have guest-posted – fumed: “Teabagger terrorist attack on IRS building.” The article immediately cast blame on the anti-tax Tea Party movement: “After months of threats on the United States government, and government institutions, the Anti-Government forces known as the teabaggers have struck with their first 911 (sic) inspired terrorist attack.”
At the eponymous mega-website of Arianna Huffington, a 2,000-plus comment thread was filled with allusions to “teabaggers:”
I would bet he has a membership card to teabag nation and the Glenn Beck fan club !
Tea bag bomb
Good to see natural selection still works! Tea party Unite!
This guy sounds just like a teabagger.
Oh please. This has tea bags dripping all over it.
I hope teabaggers are proud!! …. Great opening day for CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference] isn’t it??
This guy sounds like a Tea Partier first class! Maybe that movement is more DANGEROUS to our freedoms than they let on! Be afraid America, BE VERY AFRAID!
He was a Tea Party Terrorist.
In the early aftermath of the suicide pilot’s attack, there was no evidence that Stack belonged to a Tea Party group. In any case, no law-abiding Tea Party group would ever condone what he did. But it didn’t stop the haters from immediately smearing advocates of limited government. And it’s just the latest in a long line of calculated attempts to paint the vast majority of peaceful Tea Party activists as terrorist threats to civil society.
This week, absurd liberal pundits and bloggers also tried to connect the tragic University of Alabama-Huntsville murders to the Tea Party movement. No matter that the alleged killer, Amy Bishop, was an Obama-worshiping academic who repeatedly got a soft-on-crime pass. Or that Democrat Rep. William Delahunt of Massachusetts was the former prosecutor involved in dropping charges against Bishop in the deadly shooting of her teenage brother. Or that liberal-dominated campus officials apparently looked the other way at Bishop’s several red-flag flashes of violence leading up to the U of A shootings.
Tea Party-bashers claimed that the murders were a manifestation of racist conservative influence on the American landscape. CNN commentator Roland Martin pointed out that all the victims were non-white and wrote: “One can imagine that as Amy Bishop continued to shoot, bomb and kill people with impunity, eventually this obsession (with Obama) might have played itself out with some horrific results.” [CORRECTION: This quote was not made by Martin. My syndicate editor caught it last night and removed it from the syndicate version of the column. I forgot to remove it from my blog version. I apologize to Martin and regret the error.] Reuters Foundation Fellow Jonathan Curiel picked up the theme: “The ‘results’ that the Tea Party movement envisions include less government — and less of Obama.”
Curiel bemoaned the rejection of a post-racial society by tying together the Alabama massacre and the rise of the Tea Party movement even more explicitly. Proof of anti-Obama bigotry he wrote could be found in “last week’s shooting in Alabama, where a disgruntled white professor murdered three minority professors; and the growing success of the Tea Party movement, which is overwhelmingly white and increasing vocal in its violent dislike of the nation’s first black president.
The same warped worldview blamed Tea Party conservatives for Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman’s insurance-scam-inspired suicide and for Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn’s rampage (despite his published rantings against Fox News).
The smear merchants, of course, are simply following Rahm Emanuel’s advice to exploit every crisis. Pointing fingers at the Tea Party gremlin demonizes the Left’s most potent political opponents. This is the blame-gamers’ ultimate agenda: Criminalizing dissent.
Krauthammer: Obama Failed Because The System Worked
—DrewM.
A little over a year into a failed presidency and the Democrats already know who is at fault...everyone else. They do this by ignoring the year* they had a 60 vote super-majority in the Senate (something that only disappeared when they managed to lose the seat held by Democrats for over 50 years) or the overwhelming House majority they still enjoy. No, like a child looking to deflect blame for their failure to 'remake' America as Obama promised, they claim to have not have had enough power to overcome 'special interests' 'Fox News' and of course, those pesky 'people'.
Citing the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, Charles Krauthammer takes the, um, hammer to their claims that this some how proves America is now "ungovernable".
It turned out that the country's problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn't. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable. It's 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health-care reform -- lie in ruins.
Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: "America the Ungovernable." So declared Newsweek. "Is America Ungovernable?" coyly asked the New Republic. Guess the answer.
The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its "two parties . . . with their duel-to-the-death paralysis." The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.
Yet, what's new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic -- and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.
Liberals never admit they are wrong or that the majority simply rejects their ideas. It's simultaneously childlike in it's refusal to take responsibility and dangerous in that their answer is always to change the rules to give them even greater power to do what they want.
Ask a die hard lefty about the failure of socialism and communism everywhere it's been tried and they will simply tell you it's never really been tried as intended. The Soviet Union, Cuba, China (before going capitalist) really weren't pure enough examples for them. Give them one more chance, a little more power, a little higher body count and they will usher in utopia!
Obama isn't failing because conservatives lie or cheat. Obama is failing because he's an ideologue who wrapped his hard left agenda in a gauzy film of Hope and Change. Now that people have gotten a look at what it really means they are rejecting it.
Unfortunately for liberals, this system of checks and balances is a feature, not a bug of the American system.
*As Zimrel points out in the comments, the Democrats only had 59 votes until July when Franken was seated. Two things...59 votes is a lot and other than the 'stimulus' (which passed) the big ticket items like health care and Cap and Trade weren't ready for votes until after Franken took his seat. They still couldn't get it done.
Rogue Regime [ace]: As Drew mentioned, the filibuster is singled out as a villain in most of these pieces.
The implication is that the filibuster is an anti-democratic gimmick that thwarts the will of the people.
It may be an anti-democratic gimmick, but note that in this case it certainly does not thwart the will of the people -- by majorities often approaching 60%, the people say they don't want ObamaCare.
So what they are really complaining of is that there is a procedural hurdle in the Senate that is keeping Obama and the liberals from passing into law a bill that the public loathes.
Does that make any sense? They call America "ungovernable" and blame the filibuster (among other things), despite the fact that the filibuster is being used on behalf of the majority of voters to advance their actual agenda (or rather halt a bill that is contrary to their agenda).
America isn't ungovernable. Lacking responsive and responsible governance from the accidental power the Democrats have, America has chosen to govern itself, via the only levers of power over its rogue government it has left.
