The Real Anti-Americans
As Democrats, after a Sunday rally on the Capitol grounds, marched to the House hand-in-hand to vote health care reform, Tea Partiers reportedly shouted the "n-word" at John Lewis and another black congressman. A third was allegedly spat upon. And Barney Frank was called a nasty name.
Tea Partiers deny it all. And neither audio nor video of this alleged incident has been produced, though TV cameras and voice recorders were everywhere on the Hill.
Other Democrats say their offices were vandalized and they've been threatened. A few received, and eagerly played for cable TV, obscene phone calls they got.
If true, this is crude and inexcusable behavior. And any threat should be investigated. But Democrats are also exploiting these real, imaginary or hoked-up slurs to portray themselves as political martyrs and to smear opponents as racists and bigots.
This is the politics of desperation.
Majority Whip James Clyburn accuses Republicans of "aiding and abetting . . . terrorism." New York Times columnist Frank Rich compared the Tea Party treatment of Democrats to Nazi treatment of the Jews during Kristallnacht:
"How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht."
Kristallnacht, "Crystal Night," the "Night of Broken Glass," was the worst pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages. Synagogues were torched and hundreds of businesses smashed. Shattered glass covered the streets. Women were assaulted and men beaten and murdered. After that terrible night, half the Jews remaining in Germany fled.
To compare a brick tossed through the window of a congressional office and two shouted slurs to Kristallnacht suggests a growing paranoia on the left about the populist right.
Not since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made "some Americans run off the rails," said Rich, have we seen anything like this.
Was Rich awake in 1964? Because it wasn't the right that went off the rails. The really big riot in 1964 was in Harlem, lasting five days, with 500 injured and as many arrested. The Watts riot in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, Washington, D.C., and 100 other cities in 1968, all bringing troops into American cities, were not the work of George Wallace populists or Barry Goldwater conservatives. They were the work of folks who went "all the way with LBJ."
Nor was it Young Americans for Freedom that burned ROTC buildings, vandalized professors' offices, toted the guns at Cornell or took over Columbia in 1968. And it was not the Birchers who set off that 1970 explosion in the Greenwich Village townhouse that killed three radicals and aborted the terrorist bombing of the NCO club at Fort Dix.
No, this was not the New Right. This was the New Left, and it was Obama not John Boehner who used to "pal around" with one of the boys who did the Pentagon and Capitol Hill bombings.
As for calling Barney Frank a naughty name, that is not nice. But one wonders what Rich thought of the students marching under Viet Cong flags chanting, about the man who signed that Civil Rights Act, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" and, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win," when American boys were dying in the hundreds every week fighting the communist NLF?
The 1967 attack on the Pentagon, where thousands tried to break through military police to get into the building, was the work of left-wing radicals. Did the Tea Party folks who chanted, "Kill the bill," outside the House behave worse than that?
Some of us recall the anarchy of May Day 1971, when 15,000 leftists tried to shut down Washington on a Monday morning by rolling logs onto Canal Road, smashing car windows, blocking traffic circles and wilding in Georgetown. Most wound up behind a chain-link fence at the Armory.
How many were arrested on Capitol Hill Sunday a week ago?
Not one Tea Partier, man or woman.
The "mass hysteria" of the Tea Party right, writes Rich, is at root about race. "By 2012 . . . non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party is virtually all white. . . . Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded."
Rich is implying that when America's white majority disappears, in 2042 according to 2008 Census Bureau projections, the day of the white conservative is over.
Given the rise in ethnic consciousness among all Americans, Rich may be right. But it is not just white folks who want illegal aliens deported and legal immigration curtailed, while 25 million of our own are out of work or underemployed.
A Zogby poll for the Center for Immigration Studies found that 56 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of Asian-Americans and 68 percent of African-Americans think legal immigration is too high.
If the Tea Party folks think it is leftist elites who detest and wish to be rid of the America they grew up in and love, they are right.
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It's Frank Rich who's cracking up. He must make $500K a year at the NYTimes, a typical limousine liberal. The top columnist of the "news"paper that perpetrated Judith Miller and Jayson Blair, he's blind to America's bankruptcy. He doesn't see that not just whites, but also blacks, Latinos, Asians -- everybody -- can't pay for his beloved Welfare State anymore, and are revolting against the massive taxes and debt that pay for it.
When the NYTimes finally dies, I'm going to throw back a couple shots of Old Crow in celebration.
Old Crow? That's for metrosexuals and guys like Frank Rich.
Real men drink Jack Daniels Single Barrel.
And like Col. Frank Slade, only those of us who are intimately familiar with Mr. Daniels may call him John.
#2. Speaking of Jack Daniel, I would recommend the biography by Peter Krass entitled "Blood and Whiskey." Fascinating character and damned good whiskey.
Ahh, the liberal "mind." I remember when, not five minutes after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the word went out: the assassin was some kind of right-wing kook, a KKK'r or some other Southern segregationist, a Bircher, blah blah blah. It should have been a little embarrassing to liberals once they found out it was a man who called himself a communist and passed out pro-Castro literature for the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." It should have been. I don't remember their being all that embarrassed.
#4. Mr. Flinn. Right you are. I distinctly remember that afternoon Walter Cronkite ("the most strusted man in America") reporting that Kennedy had been killed by "rightwingers in Dallas."
And time magazine reporting that Emmet Till, a black killed in Mississippi, was the son of an American hero killed in WW II---when he was actually a criminal executed by the Army for rape and murder.
Some excellent points all. I'd like to also point out the response by the liberal media to the decorum displayed in South Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King verdict.
The limousine liberals didn't seem so bothered that Korean immigrant shopkeepers bore the brunt of the wanton destruction perpetrated in those days that included video of truckers being pulled from their vehicles and beaten.
All that we heard was how this "rage" was somehow a natural reaction to a verdict; a verdict in another city involving no one any of the rioters even knew. Liberalism and criminality always seem like they are two sides of the same coin (and the coin is counterfeit)
Of course, borrowing the phrase Prof. Wilson used on another topic, if America were really a true country anymore the NY Times, Newsweek, Time and the major networks would already be on the ash heap of history.
Mr. Kirkwood: I can't afford Jack Daniels with all the taxes I pay. It's either Old Crow or, during even worse times, Ancient Age.
I'm sure Frank Rich drinks $200 bottles of wine, courtesy of his massive salary from Walter Duranty's paper.
@ Seiler and Kirkwood
My Paw Paw was from up in the hills of West Virginia (the exact opposite of a "metrosexual") and drank Old Crow for the same reason he drank Busch beer. It's affordable on the salary of a diesel mechanic. If someone had made fun of him for drinking it he'd have punched their lights out.
P.S. Maw Maw used to say she was going to the store to buy some Old Crow for an old buzzard.
#4. And that, Dr. Wilson, is why Cronkite was the "most trusted man in America." We always knew he would have his facts straight. (snicker, snicker).
Cronkite actually used the words "rightwingers in Dallas" on a news broadcast? I could see that today with the nuts on MSNBC, but even for Walter Cronkite that seems too much. Wow.
To compare a brick tossed through the window of a congressional office and two shouted slurs to Kristallnacht suggests a growing paranoia on the left about the populist right.
I wish it was paranoia on the left, but I believe this just an engrained, standard tactic of the left to detract and villify their opponents. During the recent health care debacle the left was comparing Obamacare to the 1964 Civil rights Act, therefore any opposition was racist.
Does anyone remember when the DC snipers were the cable news obsession and the so called experts, profilers, etc, were all saying this had to be the work of right wing, white man?
What if the leftists are now the "real Americans" and the Teapartiers are the submerged and defeated remnants of the former occupiers of the land?
"What if the leftists are now the “real Americans” and the Teapartiers are ... "
Dr. Wilson,
This is the missing observation. Whatever "WE" are, "we" have become whatever "they" say "we" are --- Catholic Molesters, Teaparty Racists, Christian Militia, Criminals, Republican extremists from the far right wing, Mad White Males, Disgruntled WASPS envious of power, etc.. Truth has no place and only categorys reamin, so even if there ever was a "Moral Majority" or a determinate number of "Reagan Democrats" they are either dead, dieng or soon to be finished off in the cultural and public imagination. What few the Republicans didn't betray during the last seventy years, The Left is going to place into categorical confinement.
How could America exist for 150 years without the FBI and ATF? How could we get by without the CIA until the late 1940's? Why didn't we need a Dept. of Homeland Security until 2001? How did we ever get along without the Patriot Act?
What if the leftists are now the “real Americans” and the Teapartiers are the submerged and defeated remnants of the former occupiers of the land?
The end of the Bronze Age the surviving Hitites are absorbed by the conquering Sea People
"This is the missing observation. Whatever “WE” are, “we” have become whatever “they” say “we” are — Catholic Molesters, Teaparty Racists, Christian Militia, Criminals, Republican extremists from the far right wing, Mad White Males, Disgruntled WASPS envious of power, etc.."
I think you should remove 'Catholic Molesters' from the list. All the others are nonsense.