The Co-Ordinated Demagoguery of the Left

By preface, I’d like to show you what turned up in my inbox yesterday from Bernie Sanders, headed “Why the American People Are So Angry and Disillusioned”:

July 29, 2011

In Sen. Bernie Sanders’ column that appeared in The Wall Street Journal today, Bernie explains why Americans are growing angry, frustrated and disillusioned as Congress ignores their call for shared sacrifice.

Why Americans Are So Angry

Republicans want the entire burden of deficit reduction to be carried by the elderly, the sick, children and working families.

BY BERNIE SANDERS

The rich are getting richer. Their effective tax rate, in recent years, has been reduced to the lowest in modern history. Nurses, teachers and firemen actually pay a higher tax rate than some billionaires. It’s no wonder the American people are angry.

Many corporations, including General Electric and Exxon-Mobil, have made billions in profits while using loopholes to avoid paying any federal income taxes. We lose $100 billion every year in federal revenue from companies and individuals who stash their wealth in tax havens off-shore like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

Read Bernie’s column in The Wall Street Journal »

My emailed response to Senator Sanders I won’t show you, because it was a personal communication, not to the Senator, but to the man.

There’s no money.  There’s nothing left to tax that won’t cause greater joblessness.  And those who have built their policy on the idea that American capital was a commodity that would never run dry, in contrast to those precious natural resources that they don’t want us to tap, are arriving at various stages of grief, whether denial (in this case), or bargaining (the Boehner plan).

Among the institutions that have Caymans accounts would be the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a quarter billion socked away there to escape the American tax system.  And yet, the moment Anders Breivik is rumored to have had connections (which appear mostly to have existed in his demented fantasy) with anti-Islamist organizations abroad, the left resorts to explanations that derive from  the SPLC’s handbook of designated hate-groups.  Mind you, the SPLC at least had the integrity to categorize the New Black Panthers as one of those groups, but Eric Holder doesn’t have to agree with every choice, does he?

And so, as Da Techguy reminded us yesterday, there has been a furious fusillade of blame directed at Pam Geller from the usual suspects, but also picked up by the New York Times.  Other anti-Islamist blogs, such as the Brussels Journal and Jihad Watch have also been singled out by name.  Writing in Forbes, Abigail Esman noted that Breivik was known to have read and positively cited Little Green Footballs, at which Charles Johnson, who’d been blaming everyone else that the killer was known to have read, pitched a fit and disingenuously declared that all of the posts Breivik had approved were written by Fjordman.  In fact, there was a point at which the popular speculation in the left’s fever swamps was that Fjordman was the murderer.

At the same time that The New York Times was helpfully pimping the meme that anti-Islamist bloggers were, at least in part, responsible for Breivik’s rampage, and despite Breivik’s having begun chronicling his journey to madness in 2000, before any of the named bloggers were blogging, Pfc Nasser Abdo was appearing in court on terrorism charges and giving a holla to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who slaughtered 13 American soldiers at Ft. Hood.  It’s a verifiable fact that YouTube and other websites are slower to dump any jihadi provocations than they are to remove anything that might be construed as anti-Islam.  And it’s also a source of continual puzzlement that Western leftists will not make the distinction between Islam and Islamist, when they are so quick to state that anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism.

So yesterday’s co-ordinated lefty roll-out of the meme that TEA Party recalcitrance in the face of the debt “crisis” was a form of terrorism was part and parcel of a larger orgy of demonization.  I mentioned in particular that William Yeomans had fired off one of the first crazy shots in a post yesterday, but Verum Serum has compiled a substantial (though probably not comprehensive) list of others parroting the same hatemongering stupidity.

A: You shouldn’t do that stuff.  You’ll get addicted.

B: Nah, I won’t.

. . . . . . . .

A. Really, you’re going to get addicted.

B. I can quit anytime I want.

. . . . . . . .

B. OMG!  I’m addicted!

A. Told you so.

B. Get me more, or you’re . .  you’re . . . a terrorist!  You’re holding me hostage!

So, it comes as no surprise that Nancy Pelosi’s just gone after Michele Bachmann by saying, in effect, that she should shut up about the budget and deal with the suicide of teens in her district.  Mind you, I’ve not conned the statistics (though Google shows me some of them are helpfully co-ordinated with relevant co-efficients such as public support for the arts), but even supposing that the rate of teen suicide in Pelosi’s district is lower than that in Bachmann’s, I have this feeling that the rate of teen overdose and STDs might be higher in Pelosi’s.  So, y’know . . . get on that, Nancy.

Oh, and shark attacks.

I reckon that the chances San Fran Nan actually consulted some comparative stats on this are about as great as the possibility that Barack Obama has actually put forth a detailed budget plan that’s ultra super secret because of the negotiations.  In other words, zero.

From a memetic point of view, all of this is rather dull and predictable.  The funniest one this week has to be John McCain’s designation of TEA party folks as Hobbits.  Mordor on the Potomac declares that Hobbits are holding Middle Earth hostage, because they won’t turn over the ring.  Sheesh.  As far as failure to understand the symbolic valence of your reference goes, that one’s in rare company.

What have they got in their pocketses? Constitutionses?

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