Left Wing Media Continues Struggle to Define the Tea Party Movement

Left Wing Media Continues Struggle to Define the Tea Party Movement

Left wing/media + Tea Party = Define. Demonize. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s like watching a 3 year old struggle with a jigsaw puzzle for AGES 14 AND UP.

The 3 year old thinks he’s grown up enough to do the puzzle, but after hours of frustration, throws the box of pieces at the wall in anger and screams “RACISTS!”

Charles Blow of The New York Times hit that breaking point last week.

Mark Lilla, writing in the New York Review of Books is the latest 3 year old to step up to the plate.

Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long.

Apparently, by Lilla’s estimation, Americans should not be allowed to decide these things for themselves. Don’t you cave men know that your social betters know what’s in your best interest? Lilla’s article is long but it doesn’t take him too long to reach the tantrum point…

A new strain of populism is metastasizing [Note the Cancer reference] before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. [SNIP] Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

Forgive me for asking, Professor Lilla but aren’t the words “libertarian” and “mob” mutually exclusive?

Robert Stacy McCain, commenting on the same article observes…

An exaggeration, of course, but you sense the source of liberal Lilla’s frustration. What was the point of the Left’s “long march through the institutions” if, having captured those institutions, they can’t use them to tell everybody else what to do?

Streiff at RedState smartly adds…

This is a very convenient position to take when you’re in Mr. Lilla’s position. The alternative is to admit that your entire world view is being repudiated by most of the country.

Here’s an explanation of the Tea Party for Misters Blow and Lilla that any three year old could understand. Federal spending and the expansion of government under eight years of George W. Bush was bad. Under Obama, it’s already worse.

Libertarianism is not the enemy and the Tea Party movement is not racist.

For links: http://americanglob.com/2010/05/10/left-wing-media-continues-struggle-to-define-the-tea-party-movement/