The Angry Left Attacks the Tea Party

Watch out, Tea Party. The angry left is after you. It’s hopping mad. And, that’s putting it mildly.

Serious thinkers, people who pride themselves on the power of their intellect, are spewing rage. They are irate, furious, and splenetic. Like venomous vipers, they are attacking you.

They are not even pretending to be judicious any more. You have driven them over the edge. Now, they have lowered themselves to the level of insult and invective. They are flinging withering assaults on your patriotism, your loyalty, and your honor.

They hate you so much that they have taken leave of their reason. At least they know what it means to be mad. It doesn’t just mean being angry; it also implies that you have lost your mind.

Unfortunately, when you lose you mind your displays of all-consuming rage tend toward the histrionic. They seem to have more to do with you than with your target. In the end, they make you look like a fool.

Whether by accident or design, liberal pundits have all been parroting the same party line this last week. They have taken to calling Tea Party Republicans, the ones who serve in the American Congress... terrorists.

Bernard Goldberg suggested that  they have fallen back on “terrorist” because they have overused their preferred slander-- “racist.”

Besides, let’s say that you are a white liberal pundit. Do you see yourself calling Tea Party favorites like Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Allen West, and David Webb... racists?

I do not know who got it started, but last Wednesday Tom Friedman compared the Tea Party to the terrorist organization: Hezbollah.

Not wanting to be outdone, his fellow op-ed columnist, Joe Nocera, took it a step further yesterday: “You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them. These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. . . . Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that's what it took. . . . For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They'll have them on again soon enough.”

Liberal luminaries like Chris Matthews, Margaret Carlson, Fareed Zarakia, and Steven Rattner have all echoed what seems to have become the party line. It’s become a password that gains you entry to any leftist speakeasy. It makes you feel like you belong to the illiterati.

For all you and I know, these great minds are resorting to a cheap propaganda trick: the more often you repeat it the more people will think it’s true.   

Personally, I suspect that this special slander is not going to stick. It is too easy to make it look ridiculous.

Bernard Goldberg delivered a coup de grace on The O’Reilly Factor Monday evening. He simply declared that the only people that liberal elites refused to call terrorists were... “terrorists.”

Slander does not work when it makes the slanderer look like a fool.

Actually, Maureen Dowd showed us the limits of terrorist-baiting when she chose this morning to express her own limitless anger in a new set of metaphors.

Dowd wrote this about Tea Party Republicans: “They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country’s reputation, credit rating and compassion. They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama. They were like the metallic beasts in ‘Alien’ flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner’s stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones. (Conjuring that last image on Monday, Vladimir Putin described America as ‘a parasite.’)”

And I had thought that everyone liked vampires these days.

Say it ain’t so, MoDo.

But, why have the liberal elites become consumed with rage? What is wrong with them?

The question deserves a serious response.

I have several possible explanations. The first one should not surprise you. In think that they have all had too much therapy. Where else would they have learned that they have to express their deepest feelings while putting their minds in slumber mode?

I don’t know this for a certainty; I have no inside information about the treatment records of any members of the liberal elites. But considering that therapy has been functioning as an initiation ritual for leftist intellectuals, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they had all spent some considerable time on the couch.

Yesterday, James Taranto offered a different explanation, one that does not require us to speculate about anyone’s mental health treatment.

Taranto suggests that since liberal elites have invested all of their ideological capital in Barack Obama, his failure is theirs. With the debt ceiling deal, liberalism’s stock just crashed in the marketplace of ideas.

In Taranto’s words: “The Obama presidency has reduced the liberal left to an apoplectic rage. His Ivy League credentials, superior attitude, pseudointellectual mien and facile adherence to lefty ideology make him the perfect personification of the liberal elite. Thus far at least, he has been an utter failure both at winning public support and at managing the affairs of the nation.

“Obama's failure is the failure of the liberal elite, and that is why their ressentiment has reached such intensity. Their ideas, such as they are, are being put to a real-world test and found severely wanting. As a result, their authority is collapsing. And if there is one thing they know deep in their bones, it is that they are entitled to that authority. They lash out, desperately and pathetically, because they have nothing to offer but fear and anger.”

Taranto is corect to say that leftist intellectuals have simply run out of ideas. Absent ideas or plans, they are left baying at the moon.

They may not be quite fully aware of it, but the liberal elites do not feel the need to have a plan. They have a narrative, a scenario, a story on which they have placed their bets.

Allow me to explain. If you have a plan you are proposing a way out of the current crisis.

If you have a narrative, you are thinking about how a crisis was resolved in the past, and you are assuming that history will repeat itself. You do not need to manage the crisis; you need merely to get on the right side of history.

The angry left believes that the Republican resurgence of 2010 is repeating the Republican resurgence of 1994, and that, in a just world it will meet the same ignominious defeat.

That means that everyone in the current grand historical drama has a role to play. Everyone is supposed to follow the script that was established in 1995. The script was supposed to lead to a shutdown of the government. A strong liberal president would stand up to Congressional loonies and win a grand victory for himself, his party, and their cause.

If it did not happen this year as it happened in 1995, the liberal elites are enraged especially at those actors who refused to follow the script. Can you image the unmitigated gall of those Tea Party Republicans; they did not repeat the same mistakes as Newt Gingrich and his rebellious class of 1995. They are not following the script that would lead to the re-election of Barack Obama.

If you see yourself as a screen writer and if you believe that all the actors in Congress are obliged to read the lines you provided for them, you would be sorely displeased too.

If you recall, the Gingrich revolution began to fall apart before the November, 1995 government shutdown. First, it fell victim, by association, to an act of homegrown terrorism.

In April of 1995 Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, murdering scores of government workers.  

In a pre-9/11 world, the terrorist attack fed perfectly into the Democratic party line that the Republican Congressional insurgency resembled a homegrown terrorist network. Liberal elites were more than happy to attack Newt Gingrich for having created the conditions where American citizens would hate the government.

So if you ask yourself why it is so important for liberals to try to label the Tea Party as a terrorist organization, why it was so important to label Jared Loughner a home-grown terrorist, why it was so important to connect Anders Breivik with the right wing... the reason is that the liberal elites see history repeating itself. If it isn't repeating itself, they are simply lost.

For people who believe, as an article of religious faith, in the power of government, and who despair at how little the American people appreciate government, it will take more than an act of domestic terrorism to show the American people the error of their 2010 votes. Liberal elites believe that a government shutdown is a good thing, because then people will see how much they depend on government, but, most especially, how much they should depend on the liberal elites.