Tea Partiers, Democrats and cookies

On the “real me” facebook, a “joke” is making the rounds:

‎”A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”

I kind of doubt that the people who laugh at that “joke” would appreciate this truly brilliant piece of political satire:

Political violence: from whence does it emanate

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” – President Barack Hussein Obama

I posted this as a comment to Book’s previous post, but have now posted it independently as a challenge to all of us Bookworm salon aficionados.

Here’s the premise: virtually all the political violence that has happened in America as come from people associated with the Democrat and/or the Left.

Here’s my list thus far (continuous updating):

DEMOCRAT /LEFT – LINKED VIOLENCE

1. Mass. Sen. Charles Sumner beaten by S. Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks over perceived insults made in speech by Brooks (1856).
2. John Wilkes Booth (anti-Republican Democrat) assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
3. Southern night riders and the KKK during Reconstruction and into the mid-1900s. (Democrats) – question: do we count each of the lynchings as separate acts of violence?
4. Chicago Haymarket riot (1886)
5. Pres. McKinley’s 1901 assassination by Leon Frank Czolgosz (Leftwing anarchist)
6. Sedition Act of 1918 by Woodrow Wilson (Progressive Democrat)
7. Assassination attempt on FDR, killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, by Guiseppe Zangara in 1933 (left-wing anarchist)
8. FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII (Democrat progressive)
9. FALN attack against Pres. Harry Truman (communist)
10. Sheriff Bull Connors, Gov. George Wallace (Democrats)
11. John Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (communist)
12. Pres. Johnson’s “War on Poverty”
13. 1968 Democrat Convention
14. Robert Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan (leftwing Palestinian supporter)
15. Sarah Jane Moore’s attempted assassination of Pres. Gerald Ford
16. Berkeley People’s Park riot in 1969 (campus socialists, communists and anarchists)
17. Students for a Democratic Society aka SDS (communist)
18. Bombing (1970) of Math Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison (anti-war communists)
19. Symbionese Liberation Army (communists)
20. American Indian Movement (AIM) killing of FBI agents at Wounded Knee (socialist American Indian activists)
21. The Weathermen, incl. Dohrn and Ayers (communist)
22. Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN bombings (communist)
23. Black Panthers (Left-wing socialist/communist)
24. James Jones of Jonestown fame (apostolic socialism)
25. Earth Liberation Front (ELF)
26. Attack on Branch Davidians (Janet Reno, Clinton Administration)
27. Ted Kaczynski – Unabomber (leftwing anarchist and environmental fanatic, Gore acolyte)
28. Left-wing violence, destruction and physical assaults at 1999 G-20 meeting in Seattle.
29. Attack on Washington, D.C. Holocaust Memorial by James Wenneker von Brunn (anti-U.S. socialist sympathizer)
30. Left-wing violence, destruction, physical assaults and weapons convictions at 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis.
31. Joe Stack, Austin IRS bomber (anti-Republican, anti-capitalist, anti-wealthy people)
32. Physical attacks on conservative speakers at university campuses
33. Multiple physical attacks against Tea Party rallies by SEIU and others (2009).
34. Shooting of pro-life demonstrator James Pouillon in Owosso, MI (2009)
35. Physical assault by S. Carolina Rep. Bob Etheridge against student, caught on video.
36. Discovery Center attack and hostage-taking by James Lee in Sept. 2010 (leftwing environmentalist)

REPUBLICAN, CONSERVATIVE – LINKED VIOLENCE

1. John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry (?)
2. Attacks on abortion clinics and murders and attempted murders of abortion providers (conservative Christian group-affiliated (?) individuals)
3. Firearm attack by Jim D. Adkisson against Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, claiming opposition to its policies (2008)
4. 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing by Eric Robert Rudolph (see “attacks on abortion clinics” above).

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Please delete, amend or add-to the list as you see fit.

Or, let’s have even more fun: how about a comparable list of CONSERVATIVE acts of political violence?

We shall then be able to offer two lists for posterity.

Comments and contributions? Please make them as specific as possible.

UPDATE***

I have broken these out into two lists and will make additions as they come in.

UPDATE***

OK…I’m convinced. I’ve taken the Tuscon, Ariz. shooting off of the “Left” column.

Tea Party Derangement Syndrome

I’ve noticed lately, in talking to liberals, that their frontal lobes have been taken over by the Tea Party.  Sadly, when I say this I don’t mean that they’ve embraced the Tea Party’s commitment to smaller government and greater individual freedom.  I mean instead that the idea of the Tea Party sits in their brains, stimulating them to bizarre flights of rhetorical fancy.  Two examples:

First example:  I was talking with someone about vaccinations (in which I strongly believe).  I mentioned that in my neck of the woods, despite the high level of education, many people are hostile to vaccinations, preferring “holistic” remedies, none of which have a strong track record when it comes to measles, polio, small pox, etc.  The person to whom I was speaking instantly said, “Well, educated people often have completely irrational beliefs.  Look at Nazis or the Tea Partiers.”  A more accurate observation might have been that the people near me, most of them Ivy Leaguers, didn’t get a lot of bang for their bucks when it come to learning logical, scientific thinking at their expensive Ivory Towers.

Second example:  I overheard someone talking to a colleague about someone with whom they both worked:  “Ignore him.  He’s a completely fruitcake.  When it comes to this project, he’s like one of those insane Tea Partiers.”  Tea Party = Crazy.

This is not a local phenomenon.  David Letterman is playing the same game:

Why I am a fascist (according to my liberal friend) *UPDATED*

As I’ve related in past posts, my liberal friend repeatedly calls me a fascist or Nazi for supporting the Tea Party.  Aside from being really rude, these appellations bewilder me.  The historical record is very clear that both the Italian fascists and the Germany Nazis were socialists.  Socialism, by definition, means the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a single government entity:

Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Certainly all governments that have self-identified as socialist have been run along these lines, to a greater or lesser extent.  Without exception, the more extreme the socialism within a given nation, the more tyrannical the power structure within that nation.  That, after all, is how “fascism” and “Naziism” got to be dirty words — because the political collective exerted violent control over its own citizens and, eventually, sought to exert that same control over citizens of other nations.

Given that the Tea Party is about lessening, rather than increasing, government’s power over its citizens, calling me a fascist or a Nazi seems like a misnomer of almost heroic prop0rtions.  Yet my liberal friend is well-educated, as are most of the other so-called liberals tossing those insults around with such abandon.

One is tempted to dismiss the repeated use of these insults with the classic Princess Bride put-down:  “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”  To do so is a mistake.  Just because the Progressives and so-called liberals keep misusing the word does not mean that they don’t ascribe meaning to the word.  I think I’ve finally figured out what that meaning is.

Tea Partiers advocate lower taxes and less government spending.  As to the latter, because they aren’t anarchists, they recognize that the federal government needs to engage in certain types of expenditures in order to have a functional nation.

The most obvious necessary expenditure is national security, which gets an inordinate amount of space in the Constitution.  We also expect the federal government to provide a stable economic environment (commerce and banking) and to exercise itself to prevent endemic and epidemic illnesses.  We’ve acknowledged the need for a national police force (the FBI), although we leave most of our policing to local government.

I’m sure that all of you, with little effort, can think of other basic functions that federal and local governments need to fulfill.  The bottom line is that Tea Partiers do not want those basic government services to end, although I’m sure that they’d like to see waste cut down, whether that’s through better management, or through the services of competitive private companies whose work is merely overseen by the government.  (But that’s a post for another day.)

Once you remove from the equation the essentials of governing, you’re left with only one thing:  entitlements.  Tea Partiers are attacking entitlements.  That is what makes us fascists or Nazis.  It’s not that we want to exert more control over citizens in the traditional tyrannical socialist (fascist/Nazi) sense, it’s that we want to limit entitlements.

By the way, we tend to toss around the phrase “entitlements” with fairly careless abandon.  It’s worthwhile to think about what an entitlement is:  It means paying money or services to someone, not because he has earned that payment, but because he deserves it merely for being himself.  (I’m very familiar with this concept, because my children have a massive sense of entitlement.)

Some entitlements are almost certainly a reasonable part of a decently functioning nation.  A humane, moral nation doesn’t allow a 90 year old to starve to death in a gutter merely because he hasn’t worked enough lately to pay the rent.  (Although the North Koreans are happy to do this with people who don’t sing the party tune loudly enough or, worse, who fail to contribute to the state any more.)

Since the 1960s, though, we’ve extended the notion of entitlements far past the minimal requirements of human decency.  A perfect example is welfare.  By the early 1990s, welfare was a huge leviathan, with families that had been on welfare for generations.  The generational aspect of welfare wasn’t a result of a poor economy; it was the result of an entitlement mindset.  Back in the 1960s, just as blacks were beginning to make economic strides, well-meaning social workers, flush with the notion of the Great Society, flooded black communities, urging blacks not to work:  Let the government pay you.  It owes you for the insults that have been visited against blacks since they were first forcibly shipped to these shores.  For many families, not working became normative, because they were entitled not to work.

For those of you wondering why I’m mentioning welfare here, in 2010, when “welfare as we know it” ended it around 1994, I do so for two reasons. First, the Dems are using the bad economy to reinstate the welfare rolls. Second, many of you who were around during the 1994 debate must surely remember that the Left assured Americans that, if “welfare as we know it” ended, Americans would be dying in the streets, a la Calcutta or Ethiopia. Of course, that’s not what happened. When the entitlement was cut, able bodied people who were getting money, not because of any inherent failure in their ability to earn but because of a sense of entitlement, began to work. The world did not end, but the welfare rolls shrank, and the federal government shucked off some of its debt.

There is no doubt that attacking entitlements now will cause a temporary dislocation to those who have come to believe that they have no obligation in this life other than to sit back and take government money just because of who they are.  In the end, very few of those feeding at the government trough are “entitled” to anything, and I weep no tears for their temporary hardship.  I do know, though, that cutting the federal government by cutting entitlements will decrease government power and government profligacy, both of which are what the Tea Partiers seek.

And if that makes me a fascist, so be it.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

UPDATE:  Here’s another example of a Leftist re-defining settled terms to suit his beliefs.

UPDATE II:  A graphic example of entitlements, and what happens when the spoiled brats think they’re about to lose them.

Time for Obama to read the tea leaves — by guest blogger Sadie

After being dismissed and diminished by the media and administration as [fill in your condescending or derogatory epithet here], the Tea Party, which was a response to the Democratic tidal wave in 2008, has changed the face of politics into the foreseeable future. Sarah Palin is no small part of the grassroots movement. I think she was the catalyst. Palin was unmercifully berated in the press and still stood her ground, never capitulating.  Add to the mix the internet, the fact that Fox News stayed on message, and Glenn Beck’s growing list of supporters.

There’s a green theme here:  Obama started in the land of grass skirts, moved to a world of smoking grass, and is now feeling the power of the grassroots. If the president had been on the show Dancing with the Stars, he would have been booted in round one for stepping on his partner’s toes. The adage that black people have rhythm is certainly a myth — not only is his timing awful, he is also tone deaf, since he hasn’t heard a word we’ve been saying.

I wonder if he can read the tea leaves., If not, he might get help from a new book they’re in a new book arguing — with facts! — that the grassroots surge is here to stay.

Bottom line:  Populist uprisings go hand in hand with economic hardship in America, and this one has been brewing for years, according to political pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen.

John Yoo’s perspective on Marin’s GroupaPalooza

I attended the Marin GroupaPalooza, and did a tongue in cheek blog post here, imagining how a Progressive would have perceived the event.  John Yoo has just published his take on the event, which is straightforward and clear — and nicely rebuts Obama’s (and the rest of the Left’s) paranoid fantasies about the event.  I think you’ll find Yoo’s post interesting.

A couple more related points:

First, on the subject of denigrating the Tea Partiers, Stanley Fish, writing at the NYT, urges liberals not to make the mistake of doing so.  After eight paragraphs of compelling arguments urging that the Tea Partiers be treated with dignity even as the Left opposes them, Fish wraps up his article with some rousing paragraphs that . . . yes, you know where this is going . . . insult the Tea Partiers.  Honest to God, they just can’t help themselves.

Second, did I tell you what happened when I saw my liberal friend, the same one who castigated me for attending Tea Party gatherings because they are nothing more than Koch-funded, racist orgies (conducted in code, of course)?

Well, when I saw him, he asked, “How was it?”

I have to admit here that I’m not a very nice person, because I could not resist the impulse to yank his chain.  In breathless tones, therefore, I replied, “It was awful.  It was a bloodbath.”

“What happened?!”

“Well, when Ward Connerly got up to speak, people started pelting him with eggs and hollering the N word.  It was really ugly.”

My friend couldn’t help himself:  “They didn’t!”

To his credit, he framed that last one as a negative, meaning that even he couldn’t believe what I told him — yet he must have believed it just a little bit, or he would have realized instantly that I was pulling his leg, making his horrified exclamation unnecessary.  It says something that he could even entertain the possibility that I might be saying that Ward Connerly, a conservative invited to speak at a conservative gathering, would be subject to that kind of treatment.

The Bay Area Patriots’ GroupaPalooza — from the Progressive perspective *UPDATED*

A little imp made me tell my Progressive friend that I would be attending the Bay Area Patriots‘ GroupaPalooza, which is, essentially, a convention for the small but robust number of conservatives in the Bay Area.  I’ve mentioned this friend before.  He’s the one who assured me that the Tea Party is a direct descendant of the John Birch society, and that it is using dupes like me to advance its evil racist agenda.  When I challenged him to give one example of a racist word or act emanating from the Tea Party, he earnestly assured me that the racism was all in code, with the initiated understanding the anti-black and antisemitic invective animating every Tea Party statement.

My friend brought out the same guns today, in a rear guard effort to steer me away from the GroupaPalooza.  Indeed, he added something new to the arsenal.  This Tea Party organization, he told me in portentous tones, was so evil it was funded by (insert Psycho music here) the Koch brothers.  I was suitably unimpressed.

As I drove home from the event, I amused myself by imagining how my friend would report on the Bay Area Patriots’ GroupaPalooza if he had attended.  So, for your reading entertainment, I hereby present “The Bay Area Patriots’ GroupaPalooza — from the Progressive perspective”:

Good evening, Progressive Womyn and Myn.  This is Soul-Talks-to-Trees Chang-Guitierrez-Goldberg, with a special report about the secret gathering of a bizarre conservative organization, located right here, in the heart of Marin. Who would have guessed that the Mill Valley Recreation Center, a destination spot for Marin’s children, would be the selected forum for these extremist political rituals?  (And not to complain or anything, but I think it’s grossly unfair that I got sent to this gig, instead of to the Folsom Street Fair.  This is a clear case of discrimination against a junior reporter.  It’s like the opposite of age discrimination, you know?)

On this sunny Sunday in Marin, hundreds of people, all a strange whiter shade of pale, streamed into recreation center.  Their entry was so uneventful — so lacking in protest signs, litter and nudity — this reporter could only conclude that they had been given mind-altering drugs in advance.  This would, of course, serve the dual purpose of disguising their racist and antisemitic agenda from the surrounding community (by making them look “normal”), and of preparing their psyches for the drumbeat of racial invective that rained down on them all afternoon.  Several of the women entering the building carried large handbags, which this reporter thinks could well have contained KKK hoods.

Once inside, I saw that myriad groups had set up tables and were handling out literature.  No matter where I wandered, I was assaulted by information from the Marin County Republican Party, the Republican Party of Sonoma County, the San Francisco Republican Party, the Republican Jewish Coalition, the NRA, and many other known racist and antisemitic groups.  All of them, of course, were careful to keep their cover intact, so the only information they provided to the GroupaPalooza’s attendees had to do with lower taxes, smaller government, freedom and liberty.  Naturally, I’ll have more to say about those code words and phrases later in this report.

Also present were representatives for those Republican political candidates who have the temerity to try to take away the state and federal seats rightfully belonging to Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Lynn Woosley, Jared Huffman, and Tom Ammiano.  In some cases, the actual candidates were there themselves!  In the interests of full fairness and disclosure (because I am nothing if not fair), I can tell you that these weasely challengers included John Dennis, Carly Fiorina (who had appeared in the same venue two weeks ago, so she did not show up today), Jim Judd, Bob Stephens, and Laura Peter. There may have been other challengers there, but I was already so overwhelmed by the racist vibes in the room that it was hard to keep track.

Although no one manning these various tables was overtly hostile, I could feel them look me over, just as if they actually knew that I have a black friend.  Or I had a black friend.  Well, to be perfectly honest (because I am nothing if not honest), my mail carrier is black and I always say “hello” to him.  I’m also very close to my Hispanic housekeeper, Rosa.  (Or is it Flora?  I always forget because, to tell the truth — and I always tell the truth — I try to stay away when she cleans ’cause it’s kind of uncomfortable to have to stop and talk to someone who scrubs your toilet, you know?)

Shortly after I arrived, five vertically challenged adults disguised as young girls gave a five-part harmony rendition of the United States’ warmongering national anthem (complete with references to bombs and rockets and, believe it or not, in a later verse, “God”).  Then, with the crowd pacified by music (and, as I said, possible sedative drugs) the speakers began their indoctrination.

Thanks to the Tea Party Code Book that this news station provided (I am told that it was “liberated” from the Koch Brothers’ secret headquarters), I was readily able to translate what was really going on.  Since there was a certain amount of repetition to the whole thing, the better to brainwash the attendees, I won’t repeat for you every speaker’s words, but will instead focus on the events’ main speakers and the gist of what they purported to say and what they actually said.

Thomas Lifson, who publishes American Thinker, a site I’ve never actually visited but have been told is racist and antisemitic, actually praised the attendees for their very existence.  He likened them to the bacteria that live in the heart of the volcano, sturdy life forms that cannot be destroyed.  He seemed to think that, somehow, there’s a virtue in standing up against our Dear Leader . . . um, sorry, I’ve been told not to say that.  He seemed to think that, somehow, there’s a virtue in making a stand against Barack Obama, divine leader of the American people.  What’s that?  I’m not allowed to say that either?  Well what can I say?  He was challenging The One!  Who does he think he is?

Consistent with the war mongering that permeated the atmosphere (they had American flags all over the place!), Lifson announced that American Thinker would soon launch a spin-off dedicated to the military.  This site is intended to humanize those same troops who air-raid villages and kill civilians.  As if!  I mean, Lifson has all sorts of plans for the site, such as letting family members write about what it means to have someone in the military, or have troops review the accommodations made available to them at various airports.  The crowd actually applauded this jack-booted claptrap.  I shuddered, and clutched my fingers tightly around the peace sign I wear on my neck, and thought longingly of my car, with it’s cool “Coexist” sticker on the bumper, made up of all those religious symbols some people believe in.

Lifson also seemed to think that Hillary Clinton might challenge President Obama, and I kind of just seized up.  ‘Cause you know, she’s a woman — uh, pardon, womyn, and I really want a womyn in the White House, ’cause then we can call it the Pink House.  But our Dear Leader, I mean, Obama, is black, and it would be racist to give a black president only one term.  So really, the only challenger I can think of is a black womyn like, maybe, Maxine Waters.  You know?  Or maybe Beyonce.  She’d be cool.

After Lifson, there was this dude from the Pacific Justice Institute named Brad Dacus, who just droned on and on and on about all these lawsuits his organization has filed just because some church or synagogue or something like that got all tweaked when the government said “Hey, you can’t have a church there because, 50 years ago, we gave permission for a hardware store to be there.”  This group also works really hard to force public school kids to say things like the Pledge of Allegiance (and, like, how totalitarian is that?) or to keep that old phrase “In God We Trust” around.  I mean, I may have all those religious symbols on my coexist bumper sticker, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe in God, right?

Worst of all, Dacus and the Pacific Justice Institute actually think that parents shouldn’t have to worry about the government stepping in when they spank their kids.  I mean, I was never spanked, and look how well I turned out.  He kept throwing around words like “freedom” and “liberty,” so I knew, from my Tea Party Code Book, that he was talking about lynching black people and concentration camps.  I mean, it was so obvious.

The next person to talk was John Yoo, a law professor at Berkeley who wants to torture all of us, every one of us, all the time.  I was actually really shocked that he was one of them.  You know, he’s Asian so he should understand how he’s been victimized by the man.  I mean, just because you’ve been to Harvard and Yale, or because you’ve clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, doesn’t meant you’re not a victim.

But Yoo didn’t understand that.  Instead, he kept talking about the Constitution as if it applies to all citizens.  He totally didn’t seem to get that the Constitution is meant to be used as an instrument of social justice by The One.  Oh, sorry!  Did I slip up again?  “By Barack Obama” is what I meant to say.  Anyway, he was going on and on about the fact that Barack Obama seems to have this weird backwards view of the Constitution.

According to Yoo — and what does he know, really, with his Yale Law education, his Supreme Court clerkship, and his job at Boalt Law School in Berkeley? — the president, is supposed to have a fairly small role domestically, one that consists primarily of reining in an extreme Congress; and a large role overseas, one that requires him to protect American interests abroad and national security at home.  Yoo seemed to think that it was wrong for our beloved President to push Congress even further Left than it wants to go, or to weaken America’s interests abroad.  As I said, Yoo just doesn’t get it, which must mean that he’s a racist.

Things only got worse after Yoo.  Brian Sussman, a media figure at the fascist station KSFO, gave this talk where he told all sorts of sob stories about some of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence.  He actually told the crowd that those men probably got their wives to agree to let them sign a document that would result in their being hunted down and killed by the British.  That was a laugh.  Like, can you really imagine those old white men actually caring what a woman said?

It was weird, though, that the crowd actually seemed moved by stories of these signers being imprisoned, of their losing their families and their homes, and of their living like animals, only to die, heart-broken, in the wilderness, all because they wanted to sign onto the Declaration of Independence.  Sussman also kept on talking about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which my Tea Party Code Book explains means “lynch blacks” and “Jews own Wall Street.”  No wonder the audience cheered and applauded so wildly when he finished speaking.  They knew what he really meant.

The scariest speaker, though, by far, was Ward Connerly.  You know why he’s so bad?  Because he’s so well-disguised.  There he stands, a slightly rotund, open-faced, neatly dressed older man, who speaks in clear, measured tones.  He tells his life story, which he interlineates with little jokes.

These sneaky techniques got the audience all wee-weed up as they heard how his father left him when he was two, and his mother died when he was four, so that he was raised by his aunt and her husband.  Now that everyone was on his side, Connerly kept going on and on and on about how his uncle worked really hard, and how his uncle loved America, and how his uncle had this incredible dignity despite the indignity of Jim Crow laws, and how his uncle was truly color-blind when it came to people’s race.

From all this, Connerly somehow concluded — and, like, I don’t know how he did it — that, just as it was bad for America to draw racial lines with blacks on the bottom and whites on the top, it’s equally damaging to the American psyche to draw racial lines with whites on the bottom and everyone else on the top.  Connerly actually thinks we can have a post-racial society, that sees people judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their characters.  I mean, how stupid is that?  Whoever came up with that idea?

It’s clear that Connerly has never attended a diversity training class, which could really help him, you know?  If he attended a class the way he should, he’d understand, just as I do, that the government’s primary purpose is to decide at any given time which race deserves government spoils, and which deserves government discrimination.   Fortunately, I learned from Connerly that ObamaCare, the Stimulus and the new banking laws all carry out this clear government mandate — “we also these truths to be self-evident, that the government decides which people are more equal” — by including provisions that specifically grant preferences to people other than white men.  That just goes to show that people like Connerly can’t push the government around.

I was pretty tired of the hostile atmosphere by this time, so I headed home.  As I drove away, mulling this report over in my mind, I could only shake my head in disbelief that this kind of treasonous activity is allowed to take place in our communities.  It was a relief to know that, if we can just keep our current Congress and administration for a few more years, we won’t have to worry about these racist and antisemitic malcontents any more.  They’ll all be financially equalized with their more victimized fellow citizens (thank you, redistribution!) and properly reeducated.

UPDATE:  A couple of things.  First, I forgot to mention Nick Adams, an Australian who believes that America’s unending commitment to liberty and her generosity make her the greatest nation in the world.  He gave an impassioned speech to that effect, reminding us that, sometimes, it’s the outsider who sees thing most clearly.  His website is here.  Check it out.  It will make you happy.

Also, I’ve been perusing the comments left at the Marin IJ and the SF Chron about this gathering and discovered that the only problem with my post is that I didn’t get the tone quite right — I was too polite.  But you can see there the tropes I mentioned — racist, war mongering, greedy, racist — plus one I forgot:  GeorgeNaziHitlerBush.

Being forgiven for our past sins — or, maybe, O’Donnell has grown up *UPDATED*

I know this will come as a surprise to all of you, but I was not born wise or well informed.  I blush to think of some of the behaviors in which I indulged, and the ideas that I held, when I was younger.

When I was a very little girl, I picked up from the secular people surrounding me the idea that there is no God.  Not only did I refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, although I was scared enough of the teacher that I still moved my lips, I also thought all believers were fools.  I held to this belief for many, many years.

After reading Gone With The Wind for the first time, when I was 11, I came away with the impression that slavery wasn’t really such a bad thing, as long as you treated your slaves nicely. It took me a while to shake this belief too, especially because it seemed to me that the way many American blacks lived, whether in San Francisco’s Bayview/Hunters’ Point, LA’s Watts and South Central, or Michigan’s Detroit, wasn’t a great improvement over the life of a slave.  The concept of freedom, versus mere material welfare, eluded me.

At around the same time, as a child who grew up watching the Vietnam War on the news, as well as all the antiwar protests, I thought the American military was evil, and that Communists weren’t so bad.

When I was 17, and California voters pass Prop. 13, I thought it was outrageous that people should want to keep their own money when it could go to the government, which would spend it for the people’s own good, only it would do it better.

When I was 18, I voted for Jimmy Carter and was deeply saddened when he lost.

When I was a 20-year old student attending Berkeley, and I heard that Ronald Reagan had been shot, I agreed with my fellow students that he deserved it, a sentiment that earned me a harsh and well-deserved scolding from my parents.

When I was 21 and living in England, I wore a keffiyeh, because it was a cool fashion statement.  That same year, I listened in silence as a British Arab man told a terrible and cruel holocaust joke, because I was too socially intimidated to speak up.

When I returned to America in the early 1980s, I was fascinated by MTV, and watched it obsessively, believing that somehow those videos, with their rocking beats and alternatively meaningless or crude images, could enrich my life.

Throughout my teens and 20s, I hated Christian proselytizers, because I thought they wanted to hurt me, a Jew.  It took me decades to understand that they were acting out of great spiritual generosity, and that they would respond immediately and respectfully to a politely given “no.”

Also throughout my teens and twenties, I was mean.  I was an awkward, geeky bookworm, with a quick wit that I used to great effect to hurt people before they could hurt me.  I always had friends, but woe betide anyone who fell on the cutting side of my tongue.  A physical and moral coward, I nevertheless believed that, when it came to insults, the best defense was a good offense.

I was young and I was stupid, stupid, stupid.  I cringe when I look back at the things I did and thought.  What’s really sad is that the only thing that stopped me from making even worse mistakes was my cowardice.  I didn’t really live life.  I observed it from the sidelines, and simply managed to collect a whole bunch of bad ideas as I went along.

The good news is that I grew up.  During those same years, I managed to learn a lot.  At Berkeley, because I couldn’t understand the Marxist cant that permeated every non-science class, and therefore ignored it, I managed to learn about history and art and literature.  At law school (despite a miserable semester with Elizabeth Warren), I learned how to revere the constitution, respect the law and, significantly, analyze data.

Being a lawyer was also a great gift.  It exposed me to activist judges, something that taught me that, without a rule of law, businesses crumble and anarchy arises.  It was frustrating to know that, if I was representing a bank or business in a San Francisco court against an individual, the bank or business would always lose, no matter how rigorously it followed the law, while the individual would always win, no matter how sleazy or careless.  The same held true in employer/employee cases.  I understood that judicial activism increased the cost of doing business, drove businesses out of the Bay Area (and California), and made it virtually impossible for business people to have reliable predictors to control their conduct.

Earning and spending money taught me that capitalism, if properly policed (not controlled, just policed) enriches people, rather than impoverishes or enslaves them.  Living as a responsible adult (rather than a child at home or a cocooned student) taught me that government, even with the best will in the world, is an inefficient engine that moves slowly and that inevitably crushes individuality.  I realized that I prefer to keep power diffuse, amongst myriad people with different ideas about the world, rather than aggregated in one, all-powerful being, whether that being is a person or an ostensibly republican government.  This made me a strong anti-Communist and, indeed, an anti anything totalitarian.

I learned that the old saying was right, and that I could truly catch more flies with honey (especially true honey, not false words of flattery), than I could with vinegar.  I came to regret very deeply the verbal hurts I had inflicted on people.  You will seldom catch me being mean, in act or word.  (Although I admit to slipping when the migraines hit or the kids fight.)

I found it impossible to cling to my prejudices about God and religious people.  The more I learned about science, the more I asked myself, “How did it begin?”  I accept the scientific record and scientific conclusions all the way back to the Big Bang — but what came before?  Could all this something truly have come from nothing?  I don’t know that there is a God, but I’d be an arrogant fool, faced with those questions, to deny a God.  I’m not a believer, but I try to live a moral life as an open-minded non-believer.  I respect believers.

As for Christianity, I learned that people can hold beliefs different from mine, and still be truly, deeply good people, whom it is often an honor to know.  My history studies helped me to understand that the Inquisition is over and that, for the past two hundred years, Christianity has been a uniform force for good in the world.  There are, of course, bad people who profess to be Christians, but Christianity as a belief system is a good thing and we should be grateful for it.  (I also learned, which few Jews accept, that the Nazis were not a Christian movement, but were a violently anti-Christian movement, something that helped me open my heart and mind to Christianity.)

Watching our military during the First Gulf war, and meeting military people as I got older, I began to understand that ours is an exceptional military:  a volunteer organization, controlled by the Constitution, and peopled by ordinary Americans.  Well, “ordinary” in that they’re neither the dregs, nor the aristocrats, as is the case in other, class-based societies.  Instead, they’re people like you and me.  Except, unlike me, they’re brave, even the ones who just joined to pay off their student loans.  Oh, and they’re patriots, which isn’t that common.  And of course, they’re awfully polite and frequently so kind.  But other than that….

So here I am:  someone who was profoundly stupid as a child and young person, but who had the capacity to learn and who did, in fact, learn and grow.

You know where this is going, don’t you?  Christine O’Donnell, of course.

I get the feeling that Christine O’Donnell was a very lost soul when she was young.  The latest evidence of this fact is that Bill Maher is boasting that he has tapes of her admitting to practicing witchcraft (although, frankly, this should endear her to the Left, which loves its Gaia-worshipping Wiccans).

When O’Donnell hit Christianity, she hit it hard, taking a lot of extreme positions (masturbation being the one that has the Left most atwitter) — which is normal for a convert.  The zealots usually come from the recently converted, the ones who still have enthusiasm and who also feel that extremism is an act of repentance.  She’s had financial problems, too, although that leaves her in good company, since it seems that this is a common trait in federal employees.

But O’Donnell has grown up.  Or at least she says she has and, for now, I choose to believe her — because I grew up too.  I wasn’t as silly a youngster as O’Donnell, but I grew up in the 70s and early 80s, which gave me a couple of advantages:  I had a slightly more friendly pop culture (TV still hewed to traditional values) and my youthful idiocies didn’t get captured forever on video tape.

Here’s the difference as I see it between O’Donnell and Obama:  Both of them had idiotic belief systems when they were young, because that’s what a lot of young people do.  But Obama’s belief systems hardened into true-blue (or do I mean true-red?) Marxism, whereas O’Donnell grew up.  She held to her core conservative values (no abortion, small government, etc.), but seems to have abandoned the worst excesses of her youth.

More than that, her conversion to maturity seems sincere.  She has indeed walked away from her immaturity. Yes, O’Donnell is still a pugnacious, somewhat volatile young woman, but she’s not a Wiccan now, she’s not going to set the masturbation police on you, and she’s not going to force all Americans to worship in her church.

If we take her at her word, the O’Donnell of today will go to Washington, D.C. to cut government spending, shrink government’s size, and push for a more Constitutionally run government than we currently have. And there’s nothing crazy or immature about that.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

UPDATE:  I seem to be in good (and forgiving) company, as this related post shows.

UPDATE II:  David Swindle has taken my post and run with it.  He makes the point that O’Donnell’s positions on lust, porn and masturbation are “serious” not “extreme” if you have truly embraced Christianity.  I think he’s absolutely right.

The fact is, though, that the media is selling O’Donnell as “extreme” to Americans who aren’t always that serious about Christianity or who are, like me, fairly conservative, but haven’t fully shaken off a lifetime of urban liberal thinking.  I therefore used the word “extreme” in this post in relation to point of view of people who could be swayed by the media’s attack.  In fact, I agree with David’s take about the smooth and reasonable integration of O’Donnell’s faith and her morality.

The one other thing that informs my use of the word “extreme” is the fact that, as someone older than both David and O’Donnell, the whole “spilling your guts on video about your sexual (or wiccan) beliefs” is just a little freaky to me — and that’s a generational thing.  We didn’t do that when I was growing up probably because, in that pre-video, pre-MTV era, we couldn’t do it.

UPDATE III:  If you’ve read UPDATE II, above, you must read Zombie’s wonderful post mixing up quotations from O’Donnell and Carter.  Both are Christians, but you can tell the O’Donnell posts, because she sounds smarter and less narcissistic.  Oh, and the Left loves Jimmah.

UPDATE IV:  Please visit the Anchoress on this too.

How do you argue with a conspiracy theorist? *UPDATED*

A friend of mine is horrified that I’m affiliated in any way with the Tea Party movement.  They are, he tells me, Nazis.  They are, he says, the direct descendants of George Wallace’s racist, antisemitic, separatist movement.  They are, he assures me, far right wing paramilitary nutcases who want to take over the country for evil purposes.  I am a naive dupe, being used by people who are the reincarnation of the John Birch society.

I keep asking for evidence.  What has anyone said or done that has made you reach these conclusions?  What he’s been able to come up with is the fact that Glenn Beck, a demagogue, held a rally on the anniversary of MLK’s speech and there were almost no blacks there; and that Christine O’Donnell is a creationist (which, it is true, is something I do not support).  Everything else, he assures me, is there, but you have to understand that it’s in code.

The Tea Party leaders, he says, are not friends and neighbors.  They are a cabal who have figured out that they can control naive people by using code about small government and strong national security.  Everything they say is a lie, meant to confuse us into supporting them so that they can bring about their racist, Nazi, antisemitic, xenophobic, paramilitary dream.  They’re just not saying it directly.  You have to understand the subtext.

When I point him to the Mt. Vernon Statement as a fairly comprehensive statement of a commitment to a true constitutional government, I’m told that’s just smoke and mirrors to confuse the credulous, even as their secretive, unknown leaders advance their nefarious plans.

My questions for you:  How can you argue with this?  Because all facts are not really facts at all, but just illusions that hide an incredible ugliness that can’t actually be seen, and as to which there is no proof, what is left to debate?

UPDATE:  What upsets me so much in my discussions with this friend — and it’s a friend who is an integral part of my life, so the discussions are here to stay — is the fact that it’s never about substance.

I’ll happily debate with someone the virtues of big government versus small, whether the Founders meant what they said in the Second Amendment, or just how far Jefferson’s “separation of church and state” should be used in understanding the First Amendment.  But it’s never about the merits.  It’s about name-calling.

It’s also about the bizarre conclusion that the absence of any evidence whatsoever of overt, or covert, racism or antisemitism or theocratic thinker, is itself proof that the Tea Party movement is racist, antisemitic and intent upon a fundamentalist Christian takeover of America.

Every conversation is an Alice in Wonderland world, where I’m trying to have a civil discussion with someone who alternates between Humpty Dumpty’s creative language use, the Queen of Heart’s anger, and the Mad Hatter’s logical insanity.

I finally figured out why the Tea Party is racist *UPDATED*

Aside from the LaRouchites who appear at the Tea Party rallies, complete with their posters showing Obama with a Hitler mustache, I am unaware of any significant racist rhetoric or imagery from the Tea Party.  Certainly the media’s minions, despite their ugly fulminations and accusations about racism, never point to actual evidence of wide-spread or even narrow-spread racist rhetoric and imagery.

Sure, there may be the occasional individual who says things about Obama that are keyed in to his race, not his politics, but you’re going to find that in any large collection of human beings.  Unlike the KKK or the New Black Panthers, to name just two racially charge organizations, the Tea Party’s official platform and rhetoric focus solely on three colorblind things:  small government, fiscal responsibility, and strong national security.

Or are those three things really colorblind?  Answering this question may explain the chasm between the two Americas opens wide.  The Tea Partiers say that they are not racist because:  (a) they do not frame their ideas in terms of race; (b) they do not denigrate any race; and (c) they do not wish any race ill.  As far as they are concerned, that is the end of the story.  The Tea Party is not about race.  It’s about using the Constitution’s emphasis on individual rights to restore America to her pre-Progressive economic and social dominance.

The Left, however, asserts that the third statement (“they do not wish any race ill”) is manifestly untrue, thereby putting the lie to the whole Tea Party claim that race is irrelevant and that they offer something to all Americans.  What bedevils most conservatives is figuring out the logical leap that allows the Left, in the face of all contrary evidence, to claim that the Tea Partiers wish ill upon the blacks, thereby turning the Tea Party into a racist organization.

If you put on your Leftist thinking cap, however, the answer suddenly becomes clear:  The Left firmly believes that blacks can thrive only under tight government control and management.  Any group that is arguing for small government is, ipso facto, trying to harm blacks.

Nor are the Tea Partiers absolved of racial sin for asserting their belief that, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the thriving economy that will result of small government and fiscal responsibility, will benefit all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, sexuality or country of national origin.  Because Leftists are incapable of imagining that anything good can come from trimming back government, they know that Tea Partiers are lying.  The Tea Party rhetoric about the Constitution, about individual rights, about personal responsibility, etc., is all an elaborate sham, aimed at hiding the true goal:  defunding government programs for black people.

And that is why, to the Left, and to those blacks who take their cues from the Left, the Tea Party is a racist organization, making it a profound insult for Glenn Beck to sully the Lincoln Memorial with his presence.

UPDATE:  With perfect timing, this comes along to illustrate my point, albeit with a different identity politics victim group:

As Britain prepares for the deepest budget cuts in generations to tackle a crippling mound of public debt, the government is facing a pressing legal question: Is its austerity plan sexist?

[snip]

Women, recent studies here show, are far more dependent on the state than men. Women are thus set to bear a disproportionate amount of the pain, prompting a legal challenge that could scuttle the government’s fiscal crusade and raise fairness questions over deficit-cutting campaigns underway from Greece to Spain, and in the United States when it eventually moves to curb spending.

Why it is a great benefit that the Tea Party is composed, mostly, of shiny, happy people

One of the big jokes in the blogosphere has been the fact that a Tea Party protest comprised in no small part of smiling grannies (a term I use with great love and respect) standing outside an Obama appearance, was met with riot police:

Yesterday, I asked jokingly just how stupid those riot police felt guarding granny, and I wasn’t the only one in the blogosphere who found the whole thing humorous in way that does not reflect well on the powers that be:

The photos and videos sparked a wave of blogger reactions, including the following comments:

* I hope the riot police have full auto assault weapons with armor-piercing rounds. I hear false teeth can deflect normal NATO rounds.

* Those poor police have to be embarrassed.

* These guys and gals look like my mom or the people in my church. Wake up America!

* Why can’t these racist, violent tea parties be civil like the peaceful pro-illegal immigration rallies we saw in Phoenix!?

* The cops really have to worry since protesters are shown on tape throwing bottles at them. Oh wait …

* SWAT was there because it looked like the ladies were going to break out in a bingo game. Those daubers have ink, ya know.

* Oh my G-d. How beyond ridiculous. This country’s “leaders” have gone stark raving insane.

* Yeah, they look like real hoodlums. Next they’ll be going after the elementary school kids singing those crazy patriotic songs!

* When will the AARP condemn this threatening behavior by team Obama?

Given how the media has been describing the “angry” Tea Parties, I guess the authorities would have been remiss not to take such a protest seriously.  Still, I don’t recall any riot police blocking the protesters who were literally demanding Sarah Palin’s blood when she came to speak in the San Francisco Bay Area. Of course, by 2008, we’d gotten inured to the eight-year long orgy of blood lust swirling about those Progressive crowds, while I guess it’s still surprising to see smiling grannies with protest signs lauding America and its values.  For the authorities, it’s apparent that “new” automatically translates into “dangerous.”

The very different protest styles of the Left and the Right, with the former engaging in violent rhetoric and violent acts, and the latter acting, mostly, like the Church social, have gotten me thinking about the difference between people being angry, on the one hand, and angry people, on the other hand.

We are all, of course, capable of anger when the situation merits it (and, as every parent knows, occasionally when the situation doesn’t).  Most of us, though, don’t value anger.  Our lives have meaning because of family, community, work, spiritual beliefs, etc.  When we’re tired, when people for whom we’re responsible don’t cooperate, and when the things we value are threatened, we will get angry and we’ll act on it, but these occasions are the exception, not the rule, in our lives.

This doesn’t mean we’re pushovers.  I’m certainly an assertive person, when I need to be, but I don’t operate from a wellspring of hostility.  In confrontations, I like to find common ground that enables me and my opponent to work towards a mutually agreeable solution.

What I dislike so much about anger is that, for me, it’s a very damaging emotion.  It destroys my ability to think rationally, or do any thinking at all, it makes me paranoid, and it makes me destructive.  I don’t want to work with my opponent, I want to destroy him.  If a situation that makes me angry occurs, I usually find myself shaken at the end, and less than pleased by the outcome.  Anger so seldom produces smart outcomes.

Those angry people I know are different at a fundamental level from me.  Anger isn’t just a passing emotion that interrupts their lives.  It is, instead, a power that gives energy and meaning to their lives.  They relish a fight, because the fight means that they’re proving themselves to themselves.  There is something about anger that validates them in a way I can’t even begin to understand.  It’s as if their philosophical model isn’t “I think, therefore I am,” it’s “I’m angry, therefore I am.”

The practical effect of being an angry person is that anger is your first response.  You don’t try to downplay differences, you don’t offer excuses for the other person, and you don’t look for face-saving ways out of a situation.  Instead, you just go storming in, guns blazing.  For you, it’s a good day when you leave the battlefield littered with the dead and wounded.  Never mind that you took significant hits yourself.  Never mind even that you lost an entirely unnecessary battle.  Your loss and your wounds are just fuel for your next round of anger.

I’ve commented before that the Obamas (both Barack and Michelle) strike me as angry people.  For both of them, when they’re off teleprompter, their default setting is a worrisome amalgam of paranoia, disdain and hostility.  The same goes for those with whom they surround themselves.  Rahm, for example, is legendary for the anger he wields as both sword and shield.  (Dead fish and knives in the table, anyone?)

Ordinary people have a range of reactions to the angry ones.  On the positive side, sometimes we admire the pure flame that burns within them.  We follow them when they seem to be leading us someplace we’d like to go, because their anger gives them a courage we may lack.  On the negative side, though, we recognize that unbridled anger often leads a culture to the guillotine or the gas chamber.  We also know that, at a personal level, nobody really wants to spend much time in the company of a truly angry person.  It’s too much work.  One is constantly placating, excusing, and apologizing, leaving no time for life’s simple pleasures.

Which wraps me back around to the Tea Party protests.  The angry Left will always have its angry people, ready to transform their personal paranoia or their carefully inculcated identity victim status into a screaming street protest.  It makes for good television, but the average happy person, even the average happy person who is angry about a political situation, does not feel a sense of identity with that foam-speckled ranter.  Instead, those of us who are not driven by a deep and terminal anger that permeates every area of our lives are drawn to Happy Warriors.  We like smiling grandmothers and other friendly people with whom we feel we can make common cause.

So Tea Partiers:  keep smiling.  It matters, and it is what will, in the long term, leave the MSM narrative in the dust, all the while attracting ordinary people to the cause of individual liberty and economic freedom.

What if American blacks don’t want to join the club?

“I sent the club a wire stating, ‘PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON’T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER.'” — Groucho Marx, quoting a telegram he sent to the Friar’s Club of Beverly Hills, as recounted in Groucho and Me (1959), p. 321.

The Democratic Establishment is having a hard time playing “the Tea Parties are a violent organization” card because, to the Left’s chagrin, the Tea Parties aren’t violent at all.  In stark contrast to the Bush era protests (or any Leftist protests), with their violent words and imagery, the mountains of trash left behind, the confrontations with police, and the random vandalism that followed in the protests’ wakes, the Tea Parties have been uniformly characterized by shiny, happy people who just happen to have gathered to laud the Constitution and America’s fundamental freedoms.  These aren’t Clockwork Orange protests; instead, they’re straight out of the Leave it to Beaver playbook.

But the violence claim was always the second arrow in the quiver, not the first.  The first was, is now, and will continue to be, racism.  Because the Tea Party protests are aimed against policies espoused by a black president, the Democratic operatives claim that the protests are, by definition, racist.

This makes sense if you’re a Progressive whose world view is inextricably bound up with identity politics.  To me, Obama can be defined myriad ways:  he’s a man who was raised in a Communist milieu, he’s a former drug user, he’s someone whose hostility to Israel and Jews neatly shades into antisemitism, he’s a product of the most liberal faction of the Ivy League schools, he’s a lousy constitutional lawyer, he’s an avid supporter of Euro style (or, maybe, even Chavez/Castro style) Big Government, he’s a very angry person, and — oh, yes — he’s black.

To someone in thrall to identity politics, though, I’ve got it all bass ackwards.  Obama’s skin color isn’t one factor amongst many.  It is, instead, his single defining factor.  Everything else is a mere subset of his blackness.  Because he is black, he was raised with Communists, used drugs, hates Jews and Israel, fell in with Leftists at his Ivy League schools, understands that the constitution is a fraud, loves Big Government, and is angry.

Because the Progressive world view demands that Obama can only be the sum total of his race, anyone opposing the bits and pieces lurking under his skin color must inevitably be opposing, not the bits and pieces, but the color.  Therefore, such opposition is, by definition, racist.  Q.E.D.

Of course, the above is a subtle argument, logical to those steeped in the arcane race theories of the far Left, but a little bit challenging to explain to people who prefer watching American Idol over reading Noam Chomsky.  So, if you’re a Progressive charged with making a convincing argument to a primitive television audience, logic requires that you go for a visual.  That should convince the rubes sacked out on their sofas.  And the perfect visual is the absence of black faces at the various Tea Parties.  It must be because of racism, right?

Charles Blow, a black writer, provides a perfect example of this simplistic line of argument:

On Thursday, I came here outside Dallas for a Tea Party rally.

[snip]

I had specifically come to this rally because it was supposed to be especially diverse. And, on the stage at least, it was. The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God. It felt like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad.

The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities like the young black man who carried a sign that read “Quit calling me a racist.”

[snip]

I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?

Blow reserves special venom for Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel, who needs no introduction here.  I’ve link to him many times here, ever since I first saw his martial arts/political discussion video.  You and I may see Zo as an independent thinker, who took his life experience and applied it to the political scene, but Blow views Zo as a half ignorant Uncle Tom, half minstrel show:

They saved the best for last, however: Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel. According to his Web site, Zo, who is black and performs skits as “Zo-bama,” allowed drugs to cost him “his graduation.” Before ripping into the president for unconstitutional behavior, he cautioned, “I don’t have the education that our president has, so if I misinterpret some things in the founding documents I kind of have an excuse.” That was the understatement of the evening.

Zo, understandably, has a few things to say on his own behalf in the face of this attack.  I’ll only add that, considering that Blow works for the whiter-than-white New York Times, one has to ask who’s the real token black.  But that’s a discussion for another day, and one best held after Blow has spent some time asking himself why he’s carrying water for a corporation that refuses him, and those like him, access to its highest ranks.

These attacks against whites for racism based on nothing more than pale visuals doesn’t end with political protests.  The whole “no blacks at the party equals racism” approach has invaded the sports world too:

A Boston sports radio host on Friday called Heisman Trophy-winning football star Tim Tebow’s “lily white” NFL draft party a “Nazi rally.”

For those unfamiliar, 98.5 FM “The Sports Hub” in Boston is home to the NFL’s Patriots and the NHL’s Bruins.

The morning drive-time program between 6 and 10 AM is called “Toucher and Rich” as it’s hosted by Fred “Toucher” Toettcher and Rich Shertenlieb.

According to the Boston Herald, Toucher on Friday stuck his foot in his mouth BIG TIME.

[snip]

Fred “Toucher” Toettcher said yesterday on 98.5 The Sports Hub, “It looked like some kind of Nazi rally. . . . So lily-white is what I’m trying to say. Yeah, Stepford Wives.”

Toettcher clearly believes that, if Tebow doesn’t have minorities at his party, it’s because he is a hate-filled, racist, who would cheerfully consign anyone who is neither lily-white nor Christian to the gas chambers.  Right?  That must be what he meant when he compared a draft party to a Nazi gathering.

It doesn’t seem to occur to any of these race baiters that the absence of blacks may have nothing to do with the whites, and everything to do with the blacks.  Story after story about the Tea Party, even those stories written by people oozing hostility and defensiveness, shows that the white Tea Partiers are welcoming to all comers (except for infiltrators, of course).  Nor is there any credible evidence of racism at these events.  (And no, shouting “Kill the Bill” is not the same thing as “Kill the Black person,” no matter how much you wish it was.)

The Tea Partiers are bound together by their love for America, not their hatred for “the other.”  The Tea Parties are part of a constitutionally based movement that embraces all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, sex, sexually orientation, or country of origin.  For example, please check out the Mount Vernon Statement, as a perfect example as one can find of the pure American ideology that animates Tea Partiers.

Why, then, if Tea Partiers have a neutral political ideology and welcome all comers are black people conspicuously absent?  There is, of course, the obvious fact that blacks, who are a relatively small percent of the American population, will therefore be a small percent of the Tea Party attendees.  (For more information on black attendance, this is helpful.)  That’s just a numbers thing, though.  The deeper answer may be that American blacks have been encouraged to love their party more than they love their country.

For generations, blacks have been raised to see America, not as a land of opportunity, but as a land of white racial hatred, a land of slavery, and a land which made its fortune with the blood of blacks.  (Thinking about it, it’s a bizarre inversion of the Rogers and Hammerstein song, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”)  For American blacks, salvation lies in the arms of the Democrats, their only safe haven in a dangerous land.  What’s sad is that this stark Leftist view of history destroys all the nuances that would allow American blacks to approach politics by examining the practical realities of their lives, both at the micro level (their own homes and communities) and the macro level (American politics and national security).

How do you tell people who put their hands over their ears and say “I’m not listening” that, yes, America was complicit in the slave trade, but that she couldn’t have been if it wasn’t for the fact the slaves’ fellow Africans were equally complicit.  (And kudos to Henry Louis Gates for finally acknowledging what every honest historian has always known, a shout out he deserves despite his clinging to the reparations idea.)

How do you explain that, in terms of sheer numbers, America was one of the nations least complicit in the slave trade? That doesn’t remove the stain, of course, but it does make one wonder why the U.S. is singled out for the greatest opprobrium.

How do you explain that America’s wealth was not built on the slavery, which was, in fact, a singularly unprofitable way to run a business, and one that was barely self-sustaining?  Again, that doesn’t remove the stain, but it does rebut the canard that America’s pre-recession, pre-trillion dollar debt wealth was founded on an institution that ended almost 150 years ago.

One also has to ask — doesn’t America get some credit for the fact that she engaged in a savage civil war, with hundreds of thousands of deaths, in significant part to end this ancient institution?

Lastly, shouldn’t American blacks know that, up until the late 1960s, it was the Democratic party that was the slavery, Jim Crow, racist party?  Republicans may historically have been the party of wealth and casual disdain for blacks, but they were never the party that was founded on and dedicated to racial hatred.  Yet is the Republicans who must bear the falsely appended “racist” label for all time.

My questions are obviously rhetorical.  As long as Democrats control the unions that control education, and as long as the black community is in thrall to the Democratic party, American blacks will not know these facts.

As is so often the case, history isn’t what actually happened, it’s what people believe happened.  The truth is irrelevant once the myth is firmly in place.  And the Democratic myth is one that has created a deep schism in America’s psyche.  In 40 plus years, despite Democratic and Progressive denial, the vast majority of white Americans have learned to treat blacks with the trust and equality that Martin Luther King envisioned when he said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”  And in that same time, blacks have been taught to hate and distrust those same ordinary Americans.

And the end result, of course, is that few American blacks can contemplate joining the Tea Parties, a series of clubs nationwide that would happily have blacks as their members.  It’s not that the Tea Partiers don’t want the blacks; it’s that American blacks have been educated to the point in which it is impossible for them to contemplate joining the Tea Parties.

What a great Tea Party sign!

No wonder the Democratic establishment is so terrified of these Tea Partiers.  What they lack in violence, they make up in insight:

Thanks, Earl, for sending this one along.

Mark Steyn on Democratic strategy and cowardice

As they usually do, the Democrats have picked a non-violent party and tarred it with the extremist brush (that would be Democrats v. Tea Partiers), while ignoring and abasing themselves before a genuinely threatening movement (that would be Democrats v. radical Islamists).  And as always, Mark Steyn ties everything effortlessly together.  I particularly like his whimsically savage attack on Bill Clinton’s little rhetorical foray into hysterical rhetoric (emphasis mine):

I suppose the thinking runs something like this. All things considered, the polls on Obamacare aren’t totally disastrous, and the president’s approval numbers seem to have bottomed out in the low forties, and when you look at what that means in terms of the electoral map this November, you’ve only got to scare a relatively small percentage of squishy, suburban moderate centrists back into the Democratic fold, and how difficult can that be?

Hence, Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesman’s dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing tea partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the tea partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends.

Steyn also effortlessly eviscerates the various slurs being heaped on Tea Partiers:

For a long time, tea partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say “I’m becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending,” that’s old Jim Crow code for “Let’s get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson.” Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the tea-party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare’s opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank’s sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank’s sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time’s Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was “seditious,” because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to “educator” William Ayers’s education reforms, nobody knows what “seditious” means anymore.

If only the average liberal was as logical as Steyn. Most of them take the Gospel of Frank Rich and live their lives according to its tenets.

Please read the whole article.  It’s one of Steyn’s best, because he understands that everything the media and the politicians are doing to us amounts to one thing:

Imperceptibly, incrementally, remorselessly, the free world is sending the message that it is happy to trade core liberties for the transitory security of a quiet life.

San Francisco protests on a silver platter

I’m all for reducing pollution, but we don’t need a trumped-up excuse like “climate change” in order to achieve a cleaner environment. Minimizing pollution is a legitimate goal which stands on its own merits; concocting hysterical disaster scenarios (such as those shown in An Inconvenient Truth) only serves to undermine any credibility the environmental and conservation movements once had.

That’s Zombie speaking, in the first of a four chapter journey through a day of protests in San Francisco.  Zombie covers environmentalists protesting environmentalists, madcaps trying to crash a Tea Party, the Tea Party itself and an SEIU Immigration Amnesty protest.  One can say many things about the City (and I often do), but it’s certainly never boring.  Find out for yourself.  Pull up a comfortable chair in front of your computer, and let Zombie do the walking.

P.S.  If you’d like more visuals and some audio of the SF Tea Party, check out Fund 47.

Latest word on the San Francisco Tea Party

The beauty of a Tea Party in San Francisco is that this is home turf for Pelosi, Boxer and Feinstein.  It makes a real impact if their own home town makes a showing against the policies these three gals advance.  Here’s the latest news.

SAN FRANCISCO TEA PARTY UPDATE

1.  VENUE

• The San Francisco Tea Party will take place at Union Square on April 15th from 4 pm until 7 pm.

• I suggest arriving before 4:00.  Some folks are even making a day of it with shopping and lunch, followed by TEA, of course.

• If anyone has any doubt as to the significance of a Tea Party in San Francisco, just remind them that Speaker Pelosi “represents” this district.  Given the close ties between socialism and San Fran, the more we have, the more noise we make, the stronger our message.  Spread the word and bring your friends.  Make an effort to stop by after work–we arranged the time this year to accommodate working tea partiers.   Don’t ever think YOU won’t make a difference.  EVERY BODY COUNTS!

2.  SPEAKERS AND GUESTS

• Political Satirist, Eric Golub, will entertain us with his keen sense of humor and believe me, we could all use some humor right now.

• Officer Vic from KSFO will join us as well!

• Melanie Morgan, former KSFO talk radio host and patriot extraordinaire, who was with us last year, will rally with us again! She’s baaack!

• ALL of YOU will have time to step up to the astroturf and take to the mic!

• Lukas Hansen will sing the Star Spangled Banner and Celestial City, from the GroupaPalooza, will also entertain us with their sublime voices.  

3. THEME

• One Year Later…Are you better off?
• All of the usual: limited govt, lower taxes, individual liberty, free markets, fiscal responsibility and NO to ObamaCare!
• No inappropriate signage–stick to the message.  No matter how much you personally might want to focus on O’s birth certificate or his fascist tendencies, this is not the event for that and, as experience has shown, the press will only focus on the one or two signs like that and miss the point of the protest completely.  We will ask you to leave or put down your sign if you show up off topic or with inappropriate signage.

4.  TRANSPORTATION

• Union square is accessible by BART.
• You can take the Ferry from the North Bay and then walk about 10-15 minutes or take BART.
• Drive and Park:
  • Union Square Garage

333 Post Street (between Powell and Stockton, entrance on Geary). 397-0631.

Underneath Union Square and can take elevator right up to the event.

($3.50 up to 1 hr; $7.00 for 1-2 hrs; $10.50 for 2-3 hrs; $14 for 3-4 hrs; $18 for 4-5 hrs; $22 for 5-6 hrs).

• Sutter Stockton Garage

444 Stockton Street

($3.00 up to 1 hr; $6 for 1-2 hrs; $9 for 2-3 hrs; $12 for 3-4 hrs; $15 for 4-5 hrs; $18 for 5- 6 hrs).

• Try to carpool! I know the parking is an added cost, but it costs money to be in Pelosi’s hometown.  Some tea parties are requiring hefty donations so it could be worse! If you REALLY want to come and cannot afford it, please let me know and we’ll try to help by either finding you a ride or helping you with a contribution.

5.  TEE SHIRTS

Please wear your BAP T-shirts not only to show solidarity but to help us control and identify infiltrators.  You can also wear your own red T-shirt.  If you want a BAP T, but cannot afford one, let me know. Why red?  We’re taking the country back and we’re taking red back…away from the socialist and ACORN!

Tees will be on sale at the event, but I strongly suggest you pre-order. They sell out fast!

If you want to pre-order, send an email to me at sally@bayareapatriots.comcastbiz.net, put Tee in the subject heading, give me your name, the quantity and sizes (S, M, L, XL and XXL).  Order early so I can order more if necessary.  Cost: $15 per Tee.

6.  WHAT TO BRING

–BAP or other red T-shirt.

–A video camera if you can.  [Bookworm speaking:  We know from the protest in Washington that everything needs to be documented to prevent slander.]

–Great, witty, poignant, respectful signage.

–A sense of humor.

–A love of country.

7.  BATHROOMS

There are no bathrooms in the square, BUT, there are some great ones conveniently located in the following locations:

Macy’s: Enter Macy’s main entrance on Geary and proceed to elevators.  Go 2 floors down.  You are in the food court.  It’s behind Ben ‘n Jerry’s.

Saks:  Enter Saks on the corner of Post and Powell.  Take elevators to 3rd floor and make a left.

Westfield Center: This is much further but if you feel like a good stroll, go down Powell and cross Market.  Downstairs in the food court.

8.  HANDICAPPED/ADA ACCESS

There is ADA access on all the corners except Geary and Stockton.

9.  ENTRANCE AND T-SHIRT PICK UP

Try to enter on Powell Street.  Look for the big KSFO tent. We will be there!

10.  CANDIDATES

Candidates! Bring Your Own Table and set up your campaign literature/interface with attendees–free of charge!  You must RSVP to me and receive confirmation from me in order to set up your table. We only have a certain amount of space, so I will take names in the order received and will let you know if you can set up the table.  Tables must be no larger than 4 feet…and I recommend bringing a light one that is easy for you to carry.

11.  RESET 2010

If you have RESET 2010 merchandise, wear it! The upshot of this tea party is “No, you are not better off!  The solution is to Reset the Congress in 2010!!”  If you are interested in purchasing RESET 2010 merchandise, there will be a table at the event.   You can pre-order by contacting info@RESET2010.org.

It sounds like it will be a wonderful and inspiring event, and I greatly regret that I cannot be there.