Projecting Extremism
In my earlier post I cited a few examples of Democrats projecting their bad practices onto Republicans and conservatives. It often skews their analysis of the political landscape, as illustrated by St. Petersburg Times columnist Robyn E. Blummer’s latest column, “A Time when Republicans Could be Moderate.”
Blummer begins with an expression of anxiety over the upcoming congressional elections and the inevitable shellacking in store for the Democrats.
No matter how kooky, mean or incoherent Republican candidates get, voters seem willing to support them.
She proceeds to refer to Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell as a “former witchcraft dabbler and perennial deadbeat.” Even if O’Donnell doesn’t win, she notes, in many other states “radical tea party-backed Republicans have a good (or certain) chance of victory. Extremism, she writes, “is the new Republican must-have accessory for fall, and it’s working for them.”
If you haven’t noticed, that’s the pet Democratic talking point about the elections. Tea Partiers are extremists and they have taken over the Republican Party. They are mouth-foaming, mean-spirited bigots motivated by partisanship rather than love of country and the vindication of liberty.
Just look at the projection in Blummer’s few statements. She accuses O’Donnell of meanness (for who knows what) while she meanly excoriates her as a witchcraft dabbler and perennial deadbeat. (You might also note the flagrant inconsistency of her denunciation of anyone as a deadbeat when the normal liberal line is to glorify deadbeatery.) There is also projection in her depicting of Tea Partiers as extremists and radicals. I’ve been to many (and watched many other) Tea Party protest events and Tea Partiers are the most peaceable, law abiding, rule of law respecting, Constitution revering people on the planet. It is not the Tea Partiers who behave like caged animals and leave filth and destruction in their wake as we saw with the Moonbats' “One Nation” march.
Tea Party “fulminating,” according to Blummer is centered on the $787 billion stimulus bill (it ended up being $868 billion, Robyn), Obamacare, and TARP. She says conservatives ignore the “huge up-sides” to these programs. She says we overlook that Obamacare is already keeping health insurers from dumping people who get sick, and the stimulus bill “probably prevented another Great Depression, according to economists.” You see, “a crowd with pitchforks doesn’t much care about facts, as long as someone hangs, which in this case are Democrats and establishment Republicans.”
To the contrary, facts are precisely what is driving our protestors. How glibly she glosses over the horrors and frauds of Obamacare. Employers are already dumping their plans left and right. Obamacare’s wildly misrepresented costs are coming to light every day. Insurance companies are already denying coverage to people based on their mandated coverage of others. Democrats are already predicting the unfolding of the public option in the short term. Students are bailing out of the medical field in droves.
And the stimulus bill? The Democrats' absurdly improvable claim that the economy would have been worse without the stimulus is insulting, as is their mantra about saved or created jobs – a specious metric by any rational standard. While Obama eschews accountability for his profligate spending debacle, we can at least hold him to his own promise: that unemployment would not exceed eight percent if the stimulus were passed. He said it would jump start the economy. As I document in Crimes Against Liberty, the Heritage Foundation reports that we’ve seen a net loss of 3 million jobs – not a gain of 3.3 million jobs. On top of all this, Obama, die-hard Keynesian that he is, has demanded $50 billion more in stimulus spending, expecting us to believe that this amount will stimulate the economy when more than 17 times that amount not only didn’t stimulate it, but exacerbated the recession.
But what Blummer and her fellow liberal projectionists don’t grasp is that even if Keynesian economics worked, which it doesn’t, it could never be justified because it is accelerating the nation’s path to bankruptcy. What neither liberals nor establishment conservatives understand is that the Tea Party protests are not just about “the economy, stupid.” They are about “America, stupid,” and “liberty, stupid.” They are about the assaults on American ideals and our liberties by a president who doesn’t have the same love for pre-Obama America as they do. They want to stop Obama’s assaults on our liberties, his bankrupting of this nation, and his undermining of our national security.
It is Obama and his band of enablers in Congress who are the extremists. If you need proof of this you haven’t been paying attention and haven’t read my book. Tea Partiers merely want to stop, then reverse their extremism and put us back on a path to restoring American ideals and liberties.
Barry Goldwater famously said, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Well, to put this in perspective, Tea Partiers aren’t even being extreme. They are just trying to defend liberty by working within the system to throw out the extremists who are destroying our nation and our liberties.
Obama has nothing left in his playbook except to demonize his opponents. His phony platitudes of “hope and change” can now be measured against his destructive record and his pledge to usher in a new kind of politics can be measured against his hyperpartisan, bullying record.
Tea Partiers are just conservatives and conservatives are mainstream, not extremists. Just think about it: two times more people identify as conservatives than as liberals. By definition, how can the majority be extremists?
The true extremists are going to get their comeuppance in a few short weeks.
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
No matter how kooky, mean or incoherent faceless columnists for irrelevant publications get, their circulation continues to plummet.
It really is delicious to see how unhinged Leftist thought-leaders have become recently. Their stuff is no longer commentary, it's road rage.
A mere 20 months ago, they were content that Utopia had at long last been imminentized. Their rhetoric of hope and change was lofty, warm and even a bit teary.
Now that their God has failed, they sound more like Norman Mailer in a drunken brawl with his wife.
Jul '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
C'mon Kenneth, quite holding back, tell us how you really feel. ;)
On a related note, I came across this piece written by a young girl who is trying to show us how "Reasonable" she is, but in the end she still reaches the conclusion she wanted to based on an assumption she fostered that is basically untrue!
She is also a coward as she shut off the commentary feature of her article after people began pointing out the holes in her logic.
Aug '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
Kenneth:
Now that their God has failed, they sound more like Norman Mailer in a drunken brawl with his wife. · Oct 10 at 10:24pm
Kenneth, you are waxing positively poetic tonight.
Jul '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Kenneth:
Now that their God has failed, they sound more like Norman Mailer in a drunken brawl with his wife. · Oct 10 at 10:24pm
Kenneth, you are waxing positively poetic tonight. · Oct 10 at 10:44pm
I'm just trying to seduce you, little serpent.
Oct '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
At the risk of being labeled a comment repeater, allow me to extend and amend my remarks on David’s first post. The example from the St. Petersburg Times brings to mind Dennis Prager’s oft repeated point: the Right thinks the Left is wrong; the Left thinks the Right isn’t merely wrong, but evil. After 40 years of accustomed dominance over the media and academia, the Left is intellectually lazy and (hence) bombastic. (See Claire Berlinski’s post on a new Thatcher book, where the author couldn’t be bothered to contextualize the misleading pull-quote used as the book’s very title.) Having become drunk on the heady brew of Hope & Change, the Left is positively somnambulant in the idea department. Thus the Left falls back on its old stand-by of ad hominem attacks based on every Conservative’s putative motivation(s)—sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted (SIXHIRB, another Prager-ism).
May '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
Have you noticed? The Democrats have become the party of hate-speech.
Aug '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
If Christine O'Donnell were a Democrat, the witchcraft charge would be turned into a badge of honor, i.e., "That was years ago and she was very young, experimenting with different ideas... unlike rigid and dogmatic Christian right-wing nutjobs...This is so typical of the Republican Party's attack machine, smearing a bright young progressive woman who has the temerity to defy the special interests and giant corporations who take bread from the mouths of our children!"
Jun '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
Welcome to Ricochet, Mr. Limbaugh. Perhaps I should welcome the Limbaugh brothers because I have reason to believe that Rush is probably lurking silently in the background. Indulge me, please, while I diverge a bit from the main topic.
Not enough has been made of the Codevilla essay here or anywhere else. Rush is one of the few pundits who seems to recognize its significance. I stated on earlier threads that the Codevilla essay could be the foundational document of a second American revolution. Codevilla defines the current political battle as one between the American citizenry and a ruling oligarchy. What's more, this recognition by the body politic, though insufficiently articulated in the press (or deliberately misconstrued), goes a long way toward explaining the sudden rise of the Tea Party movement. We are privileged to bear witness to a spontaneous (small "r") republican uprising. I'm convinced that when the history of this movement is written, assuming it succeeds, historians will conclude that it validates the philosophical principles articulated by the Founding Fathers, shows the brilliance of a republican system codified in the rule of law, and demonstrates the resolve of a free people to defend their liberties.
Aug '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
Exactly. And I say, turn it into a badge of honor anyway: "Take a second look at the Republican party. So open-minded. So diverse!"
Aug '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
Kenneth
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Kenneth:
Now that their God has failed, they sound more like Norman Mailer in a drunken brawl with his wife. · Oct 10 at 10:24pm
Kenneth, you are waxing positively poetic tonight. · Oct 10 at 10:44pm
I'm just trying to seduce you, little serpent. · Oct 10 at 11:05pm
That's no pen Adele ! Ask Abbott.
May '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
David Limbaugh, Guest Contributor:
Obama has nothing left in his playbook except to demonize his opponents.
I agree up to this statement. Demonization isn't something liberals do when all else fails. It is quite often their first attack, and it underlies their every action.
It might have begun as a political strategy, but it's generally not anymore. It's a pervasive attitude embedded in culture. Millions of liberals hate conservatives not because demonization intimidates us into submission but because they genuinely feel no responsibility to respect their enemies as fellow human beings.
That is the greatest danger to America. Our government is in danger of becoming a struggle between peoples, instead of parties. We're shifting from a country where neighbors vehemently disagree to a country where people reject their neighbors outright. And Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated a belief that the end justifies the means. Nothing good will be found down that road.
America can only be saved if there is a transformation in both parties. It cannot survive while half the population disregards the rights of the other half, and constantly provokes them with hateful slander.
Re: Projecting Extremism
Aaron: I agree that the demonization is not only a strategy of last resort. It's what Alinskyites do as a matter of calculation. I document that extensively in my book and discussed it in my column today. That's Obama's Chicago group. Liberals in general seem also to do it, as you say, as a matter of course, apart from political strategy. With Obama it's sometimes hard to tell whether he's venting his personal feelings are playing out a calculated strategy, but it in most instances, it's probably both. When he falsely accused insurance companies of "obscene profits," when their profits were hardly extraordinary, he was clearly demonizing them as part of a strategy. But he also can't stand insurance companies, so I'm sure his animus is real. Is his calling financial institutions "fat cat bankers" just a function of his anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, Marxist orientation, or was he also trying to demonize bankers to facilitate his passage of financial reform? Again, I think both. But there's something I don't understand about your post, which I'll address in a separate comment because I've reached the word limit.
Re: Projecting Extremism
Aaron: Following up on my comment: What I don't understand about your post is that you seem to suggest that liberals and Democrats constantly engage in this negativity and ends-justifies-the-means approach (which I point out all the time myself), but then you make the following statement in the last paragraph: "America can only be saved if there is a transformation in both parties." Do you mean a transformation toward constitutionalism and smaller government or are you talking about their behavior? If the latter, I don't see how you square that with the remainder of your post -- before and after that sentence. That is, the thrust of the remainder of your post seems to suggest that Dems engage in this type of objectionable behavior, but in the one sentence seem to reduce it to moral equivalence between both parties. I don't get that. Please clarify.
Edited on Oct 11, 2010 at 12:41pmMay '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
David, in saying that a transformation of both parties is needed, I did not mean to imply that the same change is needed in both parties.
On the Right, what has been lacking, and is now being addressed by the Tea Party movement, is the courage to be boldly conservative and the humility to protect Constitutional limits which place the burden of government on local authorities. Conservatives have shrunk into weaklings not only because of political and media condemnations but because of the political correctness which has saturated our culture for decades. I am not equating the GOP's failures with the DNC's, however.
On the Left, the DNC has abandoned all respect for Constitutional limits, but just as dangerous is the feud-full tribalism they have inspired among their voters. It's not mere ad hominem, but outright rejection of the notion that their political opponents should be involved in the political process or have any inalienable rights, let alone basic dignity as human beings.
I believe politics reflects culture. Politicians affect culture, but they cannot turn us around. Most of our work must be done outside the Beltway.
I agree the demonization is both strategic and instinctive.
May '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
To further clarify, Americans needn't all accept moral disregard of their neighbors for it to damage us all. If the Left refuses to accept us as "fellow" Americans, our continued willingness to bridge that gap will not hold our nation together forever. We can be different in ways deep and many, but we must have common ground to remain one people. We seem to be losing that common ground.
Politically, we need to win... not with middle-of-the-road politics, but with conservative politics (Constitutional fidelity, at least). However, that victory will be shallow if we cannot put an end to the Left's strategy of dividing Americans with lies and bitterness.
Re: Projecting Extremism
Aaron: Thanks for the excellent clarification. We see eye to eye completely about this. I'm glad to find that I slightly misinterpreted your position. Well done.
Sep '10
Re: Projecting Extremism
witchcraft dabbler
I know this will sound like a trivial point, but I thought Wiccan's were a protected victim minority group of the left. What happened? I'd like to see Rush doing a Halloween special saying "we're all Wiccans now" and see what the reaction would be.