(AP Photo/Daniel Lin)
This Politico post was something that I happened upon late Monday night and was considering an immediate response to, but I decided to hold off until today for a specific reason.
There is one quote in it that's so egregious that I wasn't sure if I was just misreading it because I was so tired last night. I thought I would wait overnight to see if the quote was still there today.
It is.
The post is titled "The left loses its cool." At first blush, it would appear to be a sincere examination of the recent goings-on with Stephen Miller and Sarah Sanders -- and Maxine Waters' encouragement of more of the same. It begins with a premise that most would agree with:
In the Donald Trump era, the left is as aggressively confrontational as at any time in recent memory.
So far, so good. It looks like a decidedly left-leaning media outlet is going to engage in some ideological soul-searching.
That got blown to you-know-where a mere two paragraphs later.
Few disagree that Democrats are marching, protesting and confronting Republican officials with more intensity during the midterm elections than at any time in decades. The progressive fervor recalls conservative opposition to the previous president in his first midterm, when Democratic members of Congress were left running from disruptive town halls and ended up being crushed at the polls in November.
We all know that leftists know nothing about history unless it's history that they have made up. This is a persistent lie that is told by them and, as I have personal experience with that which they are lying about, it's particularly irritating to me.
I co-founded the first Los Angeles Tea Party. From February of 2009 until November of 2012 I attended Tea Party movement gatherings all over the United States. Some had tens of thousands of people. Some had a few dozen.
You know what none of those gatherings had? Unhinged people harassing people at restaurants.
The "progressive fervor" referenced has resulted in things like a riot in Berkeley and Republicans being shot while practicing for a charity baseball game, to name a couple. Likening that to the peaceful Tea Party rallies is beyond the pale.
The town hall meetings that got lively in 2010 were public forums for constituents to meet with their elected representatives. The people in attendance were invited there. That's quite different than a mob forming outside the home of an appointed government official to call him a Nazi.
Those meetings that did get loud back then did so because the representatives in this representative republic were either lying to their constituents or not addressing them at all.
That's the real history from the Tea Party era.
We didn't light things on fire. We didn't threaten people. We got permits to gather. We cleaned up when we were done.
We certainly never advocated and embraced public harassment. Now the left has a member of Congress doing that for them.
Rather than critically examine the mental and emotional unraveling that the American left is going through right now, Politico chose to be disingenuous rather than indict the people for whom it shills.
That first cheap shot wasn't even the most egregious of the post. This is Politico, after all.
They returned to the excuse-making for their masters later in the article:
As Republicans complain about the confrontations, Democrats say it’s a simple reaction to the president’s radical policies. It’s little different, they say, than what conservatives did to Democratic lawmakers during President Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, when town halls became spectacles of shouting about Obamacare.
I've already explained why it isn't "little different" but we know they have an agenda here. At least they flirt with the truth in admitting that all that happened at the town halls was a lot of shouting.
Politico follows that shilling with this:
“This is certainly nothing new,” Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat, said in recounting her 2010 loss. During the campaign, tea party activists would use bullhorns at “Congress on the Corner” events she hosted in front of grocery stores. “There was [also] a lady who followed me around everywhere. … I also recall that some of the tea party people spit on some of our members as they walked into the House to vote.”
Once again: yelling through a bullhorn at public events for constituents is not the same as harassing a Cabinet official who is trying to eat at a restaurant. It may be rude, but it also may have been the only way the people had of being heard, as most Democrats were ignoring anyone who opposed Obamacare then.
I am skeptical of Congresswoman Titus' recollection, however, as the last thing she said is completely false. It's a lie that was thoroughly debunked at the time.
In fact, the entire scene was set up by Democratic members of Congress just to create friction with Tea Party people.
Rather than proceed to the House floor for a vote as they usually would, the Democrats decided to march through a Tea Party rally outside. Some members of the delegation then said that the protesters were spitting on them, which the MSM dutifully reported as fact.
It became a "he said, they said" kind of thing, with only the "victims" having witnessed the offenses. None of the hundreds of video recording devices present managed to catch them.
Eight years later, Politico is pimping the lie to justify the behavior of people who become more progressively (pun definitely intended) unhinged by the hour.
Somebody posted something on Facebook yesterday that I had forgotten about. The last Tax Day Tea Party I ever spoke at was at an outdoor public venue that was besieged by leftist protesters who were trying to drown me out with air horns. My suggesting to the audience was that we deal with people like that by working hard to get more people like us elected.
I know, I'm history's greatest monster.
The reality right now is, as my friend and colleague Roger L. Simon put it, that the American left is in the midst of a nervous breakdown. It's not manifesting itself well. As many have pointed out, if their magical "Blue Wave" doesn't materialize in November, it's only going to get worse. There are any number of indications that it may not materialize.
The insane, toddler-like tantrum that the left has been throwing since late 2016 is pathetic but not surprising from people who want to get everything without working for it.
They didn't like the results of the election. Boo-hoo. Rather than engage in the tedious, protracted work of getting a different result in the next election, they've opted for a media-aided insurrection to disrupt the current government.
It's perilously close to becoming violent AGAIN, and this is all on them. They don't get do engage in "whataboutism" and defer some of the blame because the people on the other side didn't systematically engage in this kind of behavior.
Despite what Politico tells you.
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