Targeting Dissent, the Liberal Way

Consistency has never been a liberal strong suit.

Though all-too-familiar with filling the streets with their own anti-government bile during the Bush years, much of the left is now awkwardly offended by the recent activism of their political counterparts. The object of their scorn? The anti-tax tea parties.

During Wednesday’s national ?Tax Day Tea Party,? more than 800 of these protests took place all across America, many featuring live concerts and New Years Eve-type treatment from Fox News. Since late February, thanks in part to prompting by CNBC?s Rick Santelli, thousands of citizens have been gathering to evoke the 1773 Boston Tea Party as a way to vent their frustration over the massive spending of tax dollars by the federal government.

As Ross Douthat at The Atlantic put it:

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush’s first term. ? ?They’re anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree.

Overall, they fear that the Obama administration and Congress are slowly transforming the nation into a European-style socialist state. Most have brought signs or flags; others have worn costumes. The marches have been peaceful and the antics remain harmless, even if a bit silly. Any additional causes that have found their way into the mix (i.e. ?Is Obama really a Muslim??) have been widely seen as uninvited sideshows having nothing to do with the main attraction.

Nevertheless, the tea parties have quite visibly gotten under the skin of many liberals who remain extremely defensive of President Obama and find any conservative challenges to his agenda irritating, to say the least, and in need of swift belittlement.

While most of the jeers and smears have been juvenile and forgettable, the very worst hit job on the tea parties came Wednesday at a protest in Chicago. There, CNN reporter Susan Roesgen forfeited every bit of her composure and professionalism live on camera when she ditched the more passive derisiveness of her liberal contemporaries and got downright aggressive and nasty.

After acidly describing the Chicago protest as just ?a party for Obama-bashers,? Roesgen felt compelled to tell viewers, in an extremely annoyed tone, ?I have to say, this is not entirely representative of everybody in America.? She then pulled a protester in front of the camera and, pointing to his Obama-as-Hitler sign, angrily demanded to know, ?What does this mean?! Why would you say he?s a fascist?! He?s the President of the United States!?? While the man tried his best to respond, she angrily continued, ?Do you know how offensive that is?!? When he told her that ?the real pirates are in the White House,? she asked in dismay, ?Why be so hard on the President of the United States, though, with such an offensive message??

(That it was only a couple years ago when liberal protesters claimed that the real terrorists lived in the White House, etc. seems to have escaped from Roesgen?s memory. Did she take time to emphasize that these people were ?not entirely representative of everybody in America??)

Roesgen eventually moved on to talk down to another man holding his two year old son. While repeatedly interrupting his pointed argument she breathlessly defended Barack Obama?s policies with more passion than Robert Gibbs could ever muster?all while ?reporting? her story for CNN.

Mark Hemmingway at National Review Online agreed that the episode was ?pretty unreal? and rightfully added:

Of all the leftist protests I’ve covered over the years ? and I’ve covered many of them ? I have never seen a reporter enter the fray and act personally offended by the many, many examples of outrageous behavior at a protest. There’s little to be gained by it, and it’s simply not professional. What Roesgen is doing is doing here pure hackery. Even as grandstanding, she fails. She goes about things with all the subtlety of a brick through a window, and in the end it appears she’s just an angry jerk.

She?s not only ?an angry jerk? but an inconsistent hypocrite as well. Hemmingway also referred to a Newsbusters report that features Roesgen at a 2006 anti-Bush protest in New Orleans welcoming a costumed student in a George W. Bush mask with devil horns and a Hitler mustache as a ho-hum, no big deal ?prop? with which ?to illustrate her story.?

Susan Roesgen may be a sham and an embarrassment to journalism, but she?s not the only anti-tea party liberal guilty of the double-standard.

Paul Krugman saw fit to dedicate his entire Sunday column in the New York Times to describing how ?crazy? and ?clueless? the Republicans are because, of all things, the tea parties which he said deserve ?considerable mockery.? But Krugman was notably silent when, for example, Code Pink protested and defaced a Marines recruitment office in Berkley. They surely gave fresh meaning to the terms ?crazy? and ?clueless? and deserved ?considerable mockery? of their own but, of course, got none from Krugman or anyone at the Times.

Marc Cooper of the L.A. Times complained about the ?collective insanity? at the tea parties, the participation in which he compared to sniffing glue. ?The Tea Party movement,? he wrote, ?is a rather garish display of a Republican right that seems to have lost not only the national elections but also any semblance of political bearings.? It?s a shame that Cooper and others like him didn?t sense the ?collective insanity? when, say, antiwar leftists gathered to burn Americans flags or torch effigies of U.S soldiers. He then could?ve easily concluded that such ?garish displays? are of a Democratic left that must have seemed ?to have lost not only [their] national elections but also any semblance of [their] political bearings? at the time as well.

MSNBC?s David Shuster, filling in for fellow lefty Keith Olbermann on Countdown, took to sophomorically renaming the events, ?tea-bagging parties.? In an interview with Shuster, Daniel Gross of Newsweek disparaged the protesters as a ?fringe group of people.? On the same network, Rachel Maddow spent a seven minute segment trashing the tea parties as a ?celebration of inchoate rightwing bad feelings? and factiously asked, ?Is there a radical message here?? Her guest, Anna Marie Cox of Air America radio, responded, ?Well, yes?I think the tea-baggers would like it to be more radical than it is.?

But of course the whole gang at MSNBC never flinched during the antiwar rallies where masked men carried obscene signs like the infamous ?We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers? banner. A ?fringe group of people? is there ever was one. And they never stopped looking the other way at the crude depictions of the Bush administration as the true Axis of Evil, nor the comparisons of Bush to Hitler or America to the Nazi empire. There was your ?radical message,? Rachel, not at the tea parties.

Mary Katherine Ham reported the following at The Weekly Standard?s blog:

?I actually went to a tea party, in a small town in North Carolina. It was filled with ?retirees trying to protect their grandchildren from debt, mothers of two with “Don’t Tread ?on Me” flags, sweet church-going ladies with American flags flying from their Hover-?Rounds. This was not a raucous, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-government crowd of ?revolutionaries.

One of the factors of every leftwing anti-tea party gripe has been the contrived suspicion of rich rightwing supporters, shadowy activist groups, and sympathetic networks daring to back the protests and the cause behind them. Needless to say, such manufactured triviality did not matter in the least bit when far-left elements like George Soros, ANSWER Coalition, and MSNBC provided the exact same services to their side.

The other thing that every display of tea party disapproval continues to share is that they all come across as part of a strange episode of the Twilight Zone where liberal Democrats have never heard of political protests and stand appalled at the very notion of speaking truth to power. Regrettably, this is not science fiction. This is the Obama Era. And in these new times, suddenly in full power and outright incensed at dissent, the left conveniently has dementia.

-tom