“To believe“, Bruce tweeted last night, “that no one in @BarackObama White House knew about IRS scandal is to, in words of @HRClinton ‘willingly suspend disbelief’.”  Perhaps, I was in too generous of a mood last night when I read that, aware that there was as yet no evidence linking top Obama officials to the scandal.

Though given the information asked of Tea Party groups — and the fact that the IRS was approving liberal groups while leaving Tea Party ones “in limbo”, it is pretty clear that some political appointee had a say in that. Once again, who decided to ask for all this information from the Tea Party folk?

Seems the IRs was interesting not just in gleaning information about the organizations, but also about learning the names of citizens participating in the organizations. Why would they need know the names of all the group’s members and its donors?

Was their goal to get those names? And for what end?

Seems there was more to this than just string out the process.

And now Breitbart is reporting that an Obama campaign co-chair was attacking Romney with leaked IRS documents. (And that co-chiar just happens to be a Mr. J. Solmonese.)

Maybe we should be asking these questions, “What did David Axelrod know? And when did he know it?”

UPDATE: Even the names of high school and college kids?

UP-UPDATE: Sounds like David Axelrod is acknowledging Obama’s incompetence, the president’s unfitness to preside over the executive branch?

UP-UP-UPDATE: The answer could be nothing and never, but one’s gotta wonder how Obama’s political allies manage to get copies of confidential forms his ideological allies filed with the IRS.

For years, the Left has been trying to link the Tea Party with terrorism. Examples include:

• Vice President Biden agreeing with House Democrats that the Tea Party are terrorists. (Biden later denied it, but not convincingly.)
• Senate majority leader Harry Reid likening the Tea Party to “anarchists”.
• Semi-retired Congressional dumbass Barney Frank claiming that al Qaeda and the Tea Party are “aligned”.
• The New York Times accusing Tea Party-inspired Republicans of “economic vandalism” for opposing debt ceiling increases, the very stance that then-Senator Obama took famously in 2006. Other editorialists also referred to “hostage taking” and “terrorism”, or even called the Tea Party “totalitarian”.
• Media coverage in general showing great bias against the Tea Party. Some note that the media ignored real union violence, while covering imaginary Tea Party violence.
• The media repeatedly trying (and failing) to link the Tea Party to each new mass killer, such as: the Boston Marathon bombers, the Gabby Giffords shooter, the Aurora shooter (wherein ABC rushed to blame a certain Colorado Tea Party activist), the guy who tried to crash a plane into the IRS building in Austin (but who proved to be left-leaning), and more.

Given the climate of bias, hate and fear that our top leaders and media have sought to foment against the Tea Party for years, is it any wonder that self-important IRS bureaucrats would act unethically toward it?

UPDATE: As long as my list is, I know that I’ve missed some juicy examples of our top leaders and media fomenting bigotry against the Tea Party. Please feel free to add more in the comments.

UPDATE: Rick Santelli points out the logical endpoint of the IRS’ approach – namely, your Obamacare death panel Accountability Board saying “No stent for you!” based on your politics – and predicts that Obamacare will be altered partly to prevent such a nightmare.

UPDATE: How could I not mention how they’ve also tried to link the Tea Party with racism? Latest example: a top NAACP leader claims that America’s racist Taliban deserved the IRS scrutiny.

In his post yesterday about the Los Angeles shooter, Jeff pointed out the noteworthy lamestream media silence on certain key elements of the shooter’s manifesto.  Indeed, as Noah Rothman notes today at Mediaite: When crazed shooters can’t be linked to the Tea Party, the media displays admirable restraint.  The story of the shooter in Los Angeles, in fact, is–like several other recent shooters–only of interest to the press corps to the extent that it helps feed the narrative about “gun violence” and the need for more gun-control.  Elements of the story that don’t fit with the narrative are omitted, and especially those elements that contradict the narrative or help to fuel competing narratives.  Because the Los Angeles shooter’s manifesto complains about perceived “racism,” this could theoretically turn into a story about how the racial grievance industry has created a monster, but of course it never will because that is not an agenda the media has any interest in promoting.

Most of the times these days it seems that the press corps is pushing several different agenda items at one time, and news stories are only of interest or worth covering to the extent that they help advance one of those agenda items.  Rather than report the facts and let things fall where they may, the press tries to shoehorn as many stories as possible into the service of one agenda item or another.   The other day, for instance, I woke up to this story on NPR explaining that:  “The gun violence that scars some Chicago neighborhoods has been a plague for one woman. Shirley Chambers first lost a child to gunfire in the mid 1990s. In 2000, a daughter and a son were shot to death just months apart. On Monday, Chambers buried her last child.”  The story could have focused on the horrible failure of gun-control in Chicago, it could have talked about the problems with gangs in the city or crime related to drugs, it could have talked about the plight of inner-city blacks caught up in a dysfunctional culture, but it didn’t do anything like that.  No, the story had to be forced to fit the current narrative about the evils of “gun violence.”

But it’s not just “gun violence.”  As I write, a huge winter storm is bearing down on the Northeast.  When I spent a few years in New England in the 1980s, this sort of thing was to be expected and was known simply as “winter.”  These days, every storm of any magnitude is a big story, people are encouraged to panic and to scurry about, and inevitably, the articles begin to appear linking the storm to “climate change.”

Other common themes of note these days include the repeated focus on “bullying” as a way of pushing “anti-bullying programs” and “anti-bullying” legislation.  Hence, this horrible story is of interest to the media because it is seen as a way of advancing the “anti-bullying” agenda.  In years past, it may have been reported simply as a brutal fight in a school yard, but not any more.   I’m curious to know more about the attacker, but the story doesn’t tell us, nor does the journalist who wrote the story have any interest in reporting what the actual issues in this case are, because doing so would only undermine the “anti-bullying” agenda.  Even NFL cheerleaders are of interest largely to the extent that they can help advance the cause.

And of course, gay issues are another big agenda item for the press corps, but only insofar as gays and lesbians can be portrayed as either victims (of hate or discrimination or abuse) or as inspiring and selfless humanitarians.  Hence, this story about a supposedly “gay” dog in Tennessee was picked up by the national press because it helped advance the narrative that people in “red states” are stupid bigots who hate gays;  in truth, it is really a story about how there are people in all states who shouldn’t own dogs either because they are irresponsible and self-centered or because they have no knowledge or understanding of normal canine behavior.  Had the dog been euthanized after having been abandoned by a gangster or a meth addict in the inner city, you can be certain it wouldn’t have made the news.

The first post in my ongoing, periodical series about “social liberalism” generated a lively discussion (which was still continuing last time I checked).  I had originally planned a second post about the implications of the socially-perpetuated nature of liberalism on both the arguments (or lack thereof) and pundits that seem to dominate on the left side of the political spectrum.  I still think that’s a fascinating topic, and I plan to write more about that in the future.

For the time being, though, I’d rather call attention to this noteworthy post by Bookworm which I learned of as a result of this post by Neo-neocon.  Bookworm’s post is about the need for conservatives to focus largely on messaging which captures something that Malcolm Gladwell refers to as “the stickiness factor.”  Bookworm explains:

The Stickiness Factor?  That’s what it sounds like:  it’s a message that doesn’t just amuse or intrigue people for a mere minute.  Instead, it sticks with them and, even more importantly, makes them act.  During the Bush years, the Dems came up with a great one:  No War for Oil.  The fact that this slogan had little relationship to the facts, or that a ginormous number of people stuck it on the back of their gas-guzzling SUVs was irrelevant.  Those four words convinced too many Americans that the Republicans were fighting wars on behalf of Standard Oil.

She goes on to reflect on examples similar to the kinds of things I was reflecting on as I imagined some of my future posts on the socially-coercive power of contemporary liberalism:

The Progressive penchant for ignoring facts undoubtedly makes it easier for them to come up with the pithy slogans and posters that sweep through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and email chains before ending up on tens of thousands of bumper stickers that subliminally drill into every driver’s head. People could laugh when reading “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot,” never mind that George Bush was a highly educated, accomplished man with an academic record better than or equal to his opponents’.

Conservatives used to have pithy sayings (“Live free or die,” “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” “That government is best that governs least”), but we don’t seem to have come up with any clever ones lately.  As you may recall, during John McCain’s failed candidacy, his slogan — “Country First” — managed to leave supporters cold, while allowing opponents to mumble about racism.  I doubt that we’ll ever get another “I like Ike,” but we can certainly do better than Romney’s “Believe in America,” which sounds more like the beginning of a fairy tale than it does a rousing call to the ballot box.

And finally, there’s the Power of Context, which at its simplest level means that a message has to capture the zeitgeist.  People have to be primed and ready to receive the message.  In 2012, Americans, fed on decades of anti-capitalist education and entertainment, were more than ready to believe that Romney was a dog-abusing, woman-hating, religious nut who wanted to enslave poor people and blacks.  Thirty years ago, people would have laughed at this message.  Last year, there were too many people who thought it made a good deal of sense.

(Read the whole thing.)

Conservative thinkers may have some level of disdain for the demagogic nature of most political slogans, but one can’t deny their force or their effectiveness.   People on the left, for instance, love to make assertions about “social justice,” “sustainability,” and lately “gun violence” which rarely stand up to close scrutiny, but the mere application and repetition of the terms is usually enough to persuade a certain sector of the population that these must be serious ideas deserving of merit.

Bookworm argues that conservatives need to focus more on generating catchy and timely messages  and that doing so will help advance our ideas more effectively.  I think it’s a great point.  Conservatives are certainly capable of it:  the early Tea Party rallies were filled with all kinds of clever signs and slogans, but the creative force of that movement seems to have dispersed lately.   How can we reignite it?

Last week, I think it was — or maybe it was the week before,  I caught on Anderson Cooper that helps explains the GOP’s image problem.

That CNN anchor was talking about Todd Akin (does seem our friends in the legacy media devote more time to that failed Senate candidate’s crazy statement on rape than they do to the failure of elected Democratic Senators to pass a budget) and wondering what his defeat meant for the Tea Party, given the support, Cooper claimed, of that dynamic, grassroots movement for the Missouri social conservative.

Fortunately, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was on Cooper’s panel and quickly corrected him; Akin was not the Tea Party candidate, in fact, he won the GOP primary earlier this year because he was competing against two candidates who hailed from that wing of the party.

Three points/questions about this exchange stand out:

1. Anderson Cooper’s prejudices; he should have known better; had he bothered to researcht the 2012 Missouri GOP Senate primary, he would have quickly learned that Akin was definitely not a Tea Party candidate.  The supposedly even-handd “news” anchor just assumed that because Akin had some extreme views, he must be Tea Party, that is, he appears to see the Tea Party as an extremist outfit.  And Cooper seems unaware that the Tea Party lacks a social issue focus (as Mr. Akin has).
2. Cooper’s ignorance about the Tea Party seems to help foster popular misrepresentation of the movement.
3. If Fleischer had not been there to correct Cooper, his misrepresentation would have gone unchallenged.  How many other similar media misrepresentations go unchallenged?

Just something to consider.

Four years ago, appearing on PJTV the night of the election, I said that Rush Limbaugh had then become the interim leader of the conservative movement. Roger Simon, as I recall, disagreed.

In retrospective, I may have had a point. Rush did give a great speech at the following CPAC (2009) challenging the new president and articulating the conservative vision. But, that talker is more a cheerleader and a motivator, than an actual leader. To be sure, he helps us deliver our message and encourages us.

Perhaps Rush came to mind at the time because, in the first eight years of this century, the conservative movement had become increasingly moribund. The Tea Party was not yet born. Few outside Florida had ever heard of Marco Rubio. Bobby Jindal hadn’t even completed his first year as Governor of Louisiana.

Two years later, a whole host of articulate conservatives would rise to the fore, with Bob McDonnell elected Governor of Virginia the following year, then several thoughtful Republicans including Rubio elected to the U.S. Senate, including Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Rob Portman from Ohio and Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania.

Paul Ryan would soon take over the chairmanship of the House Budget Committee. The Tea Party would become even stronger. (more…)

I knew Chris Barron would come to his senses.  He now joins Wayne Allan Root, the 2008 Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee, in backing MItt Romney for President:

There is a time for idealism and a time for realism, and for me, the time for realism is now. I endorsed former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson back in December of 2011, when he was still seeking the Republican nomination for President. I continued to support him even after he left the Republican Party and became the Libertarian Party’s nominee for President.  Indeed, I am a DC elector for Gary Johnson.  On Tuesday November 6^th, however, I will not be casting my vote for Gary Johnson – instead I will be casting it for Mitt Romney.

I still believe strongly that Gary Johnson would make the best President of the three candidates running, however, it is time to recognize he will not be President. The next President will either be Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, and without hesitation I can say that Mitt Romney will be a vastly better President than Barack Obama.

He’s exactly right here.  Gary Johnson may have a better economic plan than does Mitt Romney, but the next president will be one of two men.  Chris echoes Root who said in September:

The only two candidates who can win are Mitt and Obama. Among those two the choice is clear. Mitt is a capitalist businessman, not a career politician. (more…)

Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock yesterday defeated 36-year Senate veteran Richard Lugar in the Hoosier State’s Republican primary.  This Tea Party favorite who has defeated an establishment Republican has, unlike other such victors, a better than even shot of winning the seat for the GOP.  Mourdock is very much in the mainstream of his state’s politics, an accomplished public official who has served on Vanderburgh County’s Board of Commissioners and in his current position.

His opponent, “the longest-serving Senator in Indiana’s history”, recently celebrated his 80th birthday and was first elected to public office when the 60-year-old Mourdock was 13. Lugar doesn’t seem to have maintained a residence in Indiana, the state he has represented in Washington since Barack Obama was in high school.

It does seem time for him to retire to spend time with his grandchildren.

Not only did Mourdock defeat an octogenarian legislator, but he did so by running on on the principles which secured Ronald Reagan’s rise, favoring a smaller federal government with fewer regulations.

Although “a lot of pundits have been prematurely writing the obituary to the Tea Party,” writes Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner, “Mourdock’s victory demonstrates that the movement still has a lot of power.” Indeed.

UPDATE:  Jennifer Rubin echoes — and builds upon — my point:

At first blush this might seem to be a repeat of 2010: Diligent, moderate incumbent taken out by wide-eyed Tea Party loony. But Mourdock is no Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell. And Lugar had gotten out of touch with his constituents and had long ago ceased to be an effective reformer or constructive player in the Senate.

Read the whole thing.

Sobering, yet important video to wake you up from your Monday morning stupor….

(background on video at this link)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Ari Fleischer nails it:

Today, grass-roots Republicans want to drink a bottle of 2010 small-government wine, but our candidates were bottled in another era, before the tea party’s ideas took root. (more…)

Yesterday, in a piece manifesting a misunderstanding of conservatives prevalent on the gay left, Peter Casseis discussed the dilemma facing conservatives in the Sheriff Babeu hullabaloo, given that the story falls at the intersection of “the twin hatreds of gay men and immigrants.”  He then calls the tough-talking conservative “ne of a long line of anti-gay conservative government figures forced out of the closet”.

Seems that for some on the left, a strong advocate for conservative principles must necessarily be (to borrow an inaccurate depiction of another outspoken conservative) “a racist, sexist, homophobe.”

Turns out, however, as Casseis, to his credit, begins to acknowledge (in the second page of his article), that anti-gay sentiment really isn’t a defining issue for many, if not most, conservatives and Tea Party supporters.  Over at Big Journalism, Brandon Darby reports something which comes as little surprise to gay conservatives:  most grassroots activists couldn’t care less about his sexual orientation:

The state’s tea party grassroots continued to see Sheriff Paul Babeu for what he is; namely, a man who has done a good job in the many positions of service he’s held throughout his life and career.

An Associated Press article from February 26^th says it best: Tea Partiers Stick with Outed Gay Sheriff. In the article, members of rural Arizona’s Yavapai Tea Party spoke out on their support for the Sheriff the Left needed to stop. The AP writer quotes 64-year-old Air Force pilot and Tea Party leader Bill Halpin as saying: “I care less. I just care less. Don’t preach it on me. Don’t push it on me and, by golly, I respect your rights.”

Read the whole thing.

Most criticism of the Koch Brothers comes from hyperventilating leftists or hyperpartisan Democrats.  Now, we hear some from principled libertarians, concerned that they want to change the focus of one of the nation’s premiere think tanks:

Now, billionaires Charles and David Koch, who are among the institute’s four equal shareholders, are trying to gain full control and remove [Cato President Ed] Crane, for reasons they have not spelled out publicly.

Crane says their goal is to turn it into “yet another political arm of their vast empire.” If so, they will be turning gold into straw. Cato’s value is precisely that it’s not a political entity but an idea factory, where the goal is sound research and intelligent advocacy on important issues. It’s hard for me to imagine that getting rid of Crane, who has steadfastly upheld its mission, will be for the good.

Emphasis added.  Cato is a first-rate idea factory, an institution which owes its strength in large part to its independence from the political “wars” of the nation’s capital.  Its experts offer sound and principled analysis of public policy, showing how statist solutions tend not to solve social and economic problems, but exaggerate them.

There are a number of free-market advocacy organizations out there, a good number which have grown with the emergence of the Tea Party.  Let Cato be Cato.  And let other organizations to do the advocacy work that this successful think tank shuns.

More here.

Where, I asked in January, “is the conservative candidate at this conservative moment?” “In the current contest, . . . no candidate has emerged to take on Reagan’s mantle.”  In their search for a charismatic and principled conservatives who could rally the party faithful, many Republican voters, dissatisfied with the frontrunner and eager to find an alternative, have embraced, at various points during the campaign, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and now Rick Santorum.

Unlike Bachmann, Cain or Gingrich, however, Santorum has never really embraced the libertarian economic policies which defined the Gipper’s domestic policies — and now form the basis for the Tea Party’s agenda.  Moreover, as Ace observes, echoing John Podhoretz, Santorum lacks Reagan’s sunny disposition:

Santorum’s problem, again and again, is that he doesn’t want to make apositive uplifting case for things. He might have given a speech encouraging a newfound, recovered respect for the trades. He might have given a speech about the positive virtue of sweat. And it’s importance in America.

Instead he just brands those who wish their kids to go to college “snobs.”

Taking issue not with Santorum’s tone, but with the content of his recent robocall (faulting Romney for supporting TARP while opposing the auto bailouts), Jay Nordlinger seems dumbfounded, “And this is our guy? Santorum is the conservatives’ guy?”

Many conservatives supported the bank bailout and opposed the auto bailout. You can look up arguments within NR editorials. Conservatives all over the country, in all sorts of forums, made arguments for and against — for and against either bailout. Those arguments continue now, retrospectively.

But is there any thinking or respectable conservative who uses Rick Santorum’s language — the bank bailout was for Mitt Romney’s “Wall Street billionaire buddies” while Michigan workers got their faces slapped? (Santorum opposed the auto bailout, too. Was he slapping workers’ faces?) (more…)

Sometimes you read a column by a liberal that seems it was written by a conservative to caricature his ideological adversaries. And when you realize it’s probably legitimate, you wonder at the editors who approve this piece for publication.  Are they so contained within their liberal bubble that they’re blind to how narrow their ideological confrère might comes across to someone with a broader perspective?

Such were my thoughts when I chanced upon this Op-Ed in a paper I used to receive every morning on my doorstep.  The author writes about a political argument that changed her feelings for neighbors she describes as “the best neighbors in the world. Always ready with a tool, an ingredient or a jump-start for the car. Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it. They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.”

Already there, we see her prejudice, assuming that nice people must be Democrats.

When while playing poker and drinking with the author and her spouse, the aforementioned husband, a white man married to a black woman announced that that tea party was not racist, indeed, that he was part of that dynamic grassroots movement. The argument became heated.  Insults exchanged.

The following morning, the tea party conservative came over with his wife to apologize.  His contrition, however, could not soften the hardened heart of his erstwhile hostess:

But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before. And as they headed back across the street, I saw the look they gave each other: They don’t like us anymore either.

How does she know what that look meant?  Well, we do know what she feels.  She spells it out pretty clearly

I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. (more…)

Refusing to understand conservative objections to the president’s economic policies and reluctant to acknowledge the failures of said policies, Democrats  – and their allies in the mainstream media — have been peddling the notion that Republicans are engaged in economic sabotage, obstructing Democratic legislation in order to forestall an economic recovery and so prevent Barack Obama’s reelection.

The New York Times even called the Republican method “economic vandalism.”  Guess they missed all those bills the Republican House passed only to see them die in the Democratic Senate.  Or, maybe the paper’s editors missed the classes in college on free market economics (that is, if said classes were taught at all).

Well, some participants in free market movements aren’t waiting for Times editors to take remedial courses in free market economics.  They, like resilient individuals do in a (mostly) free society tend to do, are taking action on their own to help get the economy moving again:

Liberate Philadelphia/Liberate America, a Tea Party coalition of groups countering the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, are challenging the latest move by Occupy Wall Street protesters to occupy or boycott publicly traded retailers on Black Friday by instead encouraging consumers to shop on Black Friday to help the economy recover.

“At a time when our economy is most fragile and ratings agencies are talking about another downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, it’s completely irresponsible for Occupy Wall Street to attempt to bring the U.S. economy to a halt on the busiest shopping day of the year,” Liberate organizer and a spokesman for the Tea Party, John Sullivan, stated in a press release.

Emphasis added.  (Via Instapundit.)  Wonder if any of those folks who accused Republicans of “economic vandalism” will level the same charge against the #OWS folks.

Looks like the Tea Party coalition had some success, as Glenn reports, “RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE SITREP: Black Friday sales up 7 percent over 2010. Some people worried that it had become a “hollow army,” but these magnificent troops rose to the occasion one more time.”

“We can,” Stacy McCain contends with examples abundant, “no longer tolerate media assertions that this is a non-violent movement.”  Media cluck-clucking and left-wing blogging notwithstanding, he’s not talking about the Tea Party.  In this case, he’s referencing violence instigated by the “Occupy” movement outside the “Defending the American Dream Summit” hosted by Americans for Prosperity where a 78-year woman was knocked down cement stairs.

And it’s not just in Washington, D.C. where the various Occupy movements — and their various members acting individually — have engaged in violence — just as many in the chattering classes, in highest dudgeon, warned us about the Tea Party.

Well, those in the chattering classes did exult in the rise of the left-wing movement, seeing it as the left-wing Tea Party!  Does seem like the Occupy movement has become just like the Tea Party of the left-wing narrative.

UPDATE: Calling this “The Worst Media Double Standard in Recent History“, Ed Driscoll writes:

In 2009 and 2010, the media trashed the Tea Party, using the crazied, hyperbolic language possible — and yet were envious of their success at the polls last November, and wanted a Tea Party of their own. Hence, Occupy Wall Street. Richard Fernandez asks a great question at the Belmont Club. Did the MSM’s intensely negative reporting cause them (directly or indirectly) to amp up the craziness at OWS to waaaay past 11 on Nigel Tufnel’s Marshall stack, or is that simply what happens when a mass of people with an ill-defined cause co-habituate in an urban Burning Man festival for months on end?

But regarding the MSM’s coverage, since so much of what passes for “liberalism” boils down to “It’s Different When We Do It,” the amount of double-standards in the MSM is bottomless.

Read the whole thing.

Seeing “videos of youths burning things in Oakland,” Victor Davis Hanson . . .

. . . was told that it “was a small minority” and atypical of the protest. Not long ago I saw no clips of anyone spitting at black congresspeople wading into the Tea-Party demonstration, but was told they did and that it was typical of tens of thousands of racialists on the Mall.

(Via Instapundit.) A Democratic president faults Republicans vying for his job because they failed to condemn an isolated boor at a candidates’ debate.  A self-important (and self-righteous) Democratic Congressman insists that his GOP colleagues need to “‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech” of their supporters.  A lunatic with no apparent political agenda attacks a Congresswoman, murdering a number of people with her, and conservative rhetoric is held accountable.

Why is it that, in the eyes of Democratic politicians, liberal pundits and the mainstream media, a small, often fictional, fringe minority speaks for conservative/libertarian movements and the Republican Paty, but radical, often violent, extremists don’t speak for liberal/left-wing movements or the Democratic Party?

UPDATE:  Over at Reason, A. Barton Hinkle builds on this point:

So consider the disparity in coverage of OWS and the Tea Party. A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin’ cousin of the KKK. But that “Google Wall Street Jews” guy? A lone nut. As for the signs calling for the “death of capitalism” and telling Wall Street bankers to “Jump, you [expletives]” and declaring “capitalism can’t be fixed—we need revolution”? Unrepresentative, surely. Ditto the 5:30 Oakland seminar on Marxism 101, and the dude in the Lenin T-shirt, and. . . .

Don’t feel bad if you missed such tidbits on the nightly news. Every movement has its whack jobs, but those on the left get politely overlooked.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Budding Economist reminds us of how one Tea Party critic was treated by the #Occupy Movement.

“A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin’ cousin of the KKK.”

And the entire General Assembly of Occupy Atlanta isn’t accused of anything when they refused to allow Rep. John Lewis to voice his solidarity.

UP-UPDATE: Allahapundit offers:

This can’t be repeated enough: With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It’s not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it’s that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets — like, say, Occupy Oakland just did.

Via Instapundit.

Remember how when just one protester at a Tea Party rally hoists a sign with a comment that appears racist or a handful call out a mean-spirited epithet or one boor behaves rudely at a Republican debate, the media (and even leading Democrats) in the highest of dudgeon remind us of the racism, bigoted and hateful attitudes on the right, demanding that Republicans, “differentiate themselves” from such language lest it define them.

Heck, even an organizer of OccupyLA refused to say whether the “occupation movement” (at 3:20 in video linked) disavowed a protester’s anti-Semitic rant.  The violence that was supposedly an integral part of the Tea Parties appears to become increasingly manifest in the #OWS movement, with one protester threatening to stab a Fox reporter as a nervous police union warned “the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park that any assaults on police officers — or at least sergeants — will result in lawsuits.”

The police wouldn’t be issuing such warnings if they weren’t worried.  Now, you could saw that that threat isn’t legitimate as the police union is issuing the warning, but a flier at OccupyPhoenix asked, “When Should You Shoot A Cop?”  Alerting us to this flier, Ed Morrissey is

. . . curious to see how the media in Arizona and the rest of the nation approach this development.  They went into convulsions retroactive to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that killed six other people because Sarah Palin used crosshairs on a map once (as had Democrats on a number of occasions), which the media used to paint the Tea Party and conservatives as somehow responsible for the massacre conducted by a madman with no discernibly rational political posture.  Will they hold the Occupy movement to the same ridiculous standard?  I’m betting …. no.

So the question of the day is, if Democrats fail, to borrow the expression of one of their number, to “differentiate themselves” from the violent threats at these rallies, does this mean they favor assaults on members of the press and law enforcement?  (Particularly when said Democrats have explicitly endorsed — or otherwise praised — the gatherings.)

It’s always fascinating to see how liberals perceive conservatives.  They tend to define us not by our ideas or our most accomplished or eloquent leaders, but by the fringe extremists who cling onto our movement hoping to mean some meaning there.

Yesterday on his eponymous CNN show, Piers Morgan suggested that Tea Party folk harbor some pretty extreme views:

When you see tea party candidates and they are against evolution, climate change, and resolutely so, they think gay marriage is a sin and so on and so on . . . .

Huh? I thought they were primarily concerned about the size of government. If Tea Party critics paid more attention to this phenomenon as it is and not as they imagine it to be, they might realize how diverse are members of the dynamic grassroots movement.

One tea party favorite, U.S. Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.), announced “this weekend that she opposes a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state“:

Ellmers said that while she opposes same-sex marriages, she believes the proposed amendment goes too far because it would also ban civil unions.

“Congresswoman Ellmers has always believed that marriage is a sacred institution and is defined as the union between one man and one woman,” Ellmers spokesman Tom Doheny wrote in an email to the Raleigh News & Observer. “That is why she has and will continue to protect and defend marriage at the federal level.

“When asked about civil unions, which are different than marriage, she said that she finds nothing wrong with people being granted them, but at the same time, it is currently a state issue and up to the voters to decide,” Doheny said. (more…)