April 19 may be the most fraught date in American history – for good or evil, instruction or paranoia, right or wrong.  And its’ stacked-up layers of symbolism are going to be popping out from the news, spinmeisters and commentary all day long, and beyond.

The pants-wetting class is knotted up about a couple of marches planned for today; one, a group of armed Second Amendment activists, plans to hold a demonstration at a park in Virginia – the closest point to America’s political and traditional murder capitol, Washington DC, at which a law-abiding citizen can legally carry a gun.  And another group, the “Second Amendment March” or SAM, plans a march (unarmed, unfortunately) on the Capitol.

And that’s got the gun-grabbing left’s paranoia and mania for specious symbolism cranking overtime:

[“Second Amendment March” founder Skip Coryell] claims he chose April 19 “because it is the 235th anniversary of Lexington-Concord.” However, the date also carries a rather unfortunate significance: the day militia sympathizers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Let’s stop right there.

“Militia sympathizers”?  That’s chipped from the same block as Andy Birkey’s swerve into collective guilt by association last week, when he (and, one presumes, the editors at the Soros-funded Center for “Independent” Media, which former Mindy staffers themselves noted actually call the shots and want the site to be a  flak organ for centrally-driven propaganda) used an irate, profanity-riddle phone message from someone who claimed to be a Tea Partier to try to impugn the entire Tea Party.   McVeigh and Nichols were criminals; if they “sympathized” with the Oakland Raiders, “Iron Chef” and “Twilight”, it wouldn’t mean that football fans, foodies and dozey teenagers had some dark inner secret.

“The Militia” in the US is everyone.  “A well-regulated militia being necessary for the preservation of liberty, the right of the people to keep and bear arms…” is what the Constitution says, in that little bit right after the part about freedom of speech that seems to be the only part most liberals ever read.   And the Supreme Court said “The People” means all of us in the Heller decision, two years ago.

The “militia” that the pants-wetting class is exercised about is not “the militia”.  It is a tiny collection of people with unfashionably acerbic views on society that the media and the pants-wetting class have set up as a boogeyman to scare society into place.

But let’s not stop with the significant anniversaries.  There are two more:

April 19 also marks the end of the weeks-long siege of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, TX. Dan Casey of the Roanake Times reported that “[s]ome activists in the gun-rights movement have tried to talk Coryell out of organizing” the march, fearing that the “political timing is bad” or that it “might lead people to believe the gun movement is a paper tiger with a few loud voices.”

It’s also the date of the Warsaw Uprising – which should be the story that people keep in mind when they think of “militias”.  The Jews of Poland had been herded into huge, miserable, starving ghettos while the Nazis built their extermination camps.  By April 19, 1942 many of them were already dead, of starvation or disease or murdered by their guards.

And a small band of Jewish patriots – “extremists”, as someone like Andy Birkey or ThinkProgress might call them today – decided it would be better to die with dignity and have a chance, however thin, at liberty than to quietly be sucked into Hitler’s death machine.  With a few stolen pistols and molotov cocktails, they rose, threw the Germans out of the Ghetto, and for a few weeks became a speed bump to Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”.

The media and left (ptr) focus on the April 19 of Oklahoma City (where a couple of cartoon characters that belonged in a movie about fringe lunatics managed to kill 168 Americans) and Waco (where a group with very unfashionable religious views ran afoul of their own leader’s delusions, a deeply-stupid government raid, and some very bad luck with chemicals) because it fits their narrative; the big mass of people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre need to be controlled, lest they hurt themselves.

But the April 19 of Lexington and Concord is a symbol of the power of We The People – which disturbs that other narrative.  And the April 19 of Warsaw shows why it should be the duty (in the patriotic sense, if not also statutory) for every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with firearms – so that the next batch of Nazis can’t show anyone how very much more powerful than the pen the sword really is.

Of course Coryell’s fears are completely baseless. Obama has no intention of taking any anyone’s gun rights. In fact, during his campaign for president, Obama said, “I believe in the Second Amendment, and if you are a law-abiding gun owner, you have nothing to fear from an Obama administration.”

And why would Obama say that, after a career spent in gun-grabbing governments and working for gun-control-advocating non-profits?

Because of Americans who march to show Congress and the states that we are here, we’re better citizens than most, and we’re not going away.

Citizens like me.  Not Timothy McVeigh.

I wish I could be in DC.

The conservative blogosphere – at least the A through D lists – have been really reticent about assigning blame in the »  beating of Bobby Jindal aide Allee Butsch and her boyfriend last weekend at the Southern Republican Leadership conference in New Orleans.  Conservative bloggers, for example, led the way in showing that the couple weren’t wearing Sarah Palin pins, which was an initial story about the crime:

Allee Butsch suffered a broken leg from the beatdown outside to the SRLC dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans. She had her leg operated on over the weekend and it will take her months to recover. Her boyfriend Joe Brown suffered a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a concussion. They were attacked after leaving the Southern Republican Leadership Conference dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant.

Police have no suspects, and are doing their best not to release uncorroborated information to the public.  And conservative bloggers aren’t jumping the gun in any numbers to call this a political hate crime – something that Steny Hoyer, Rep. Lewis, Rep. Cleaver, Nancy Pelosi and the Twin Cities AFSCME should try.

Now, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions, and I’ll say up front that the following execise is purely conjectural.

But do me a favor and turn on your stereotype radar when you read the lone description available among the five attackers:

Police are looking for a Caucasian male who appeared to be dirty, in his 20’s, 6′1″ tall, thin build with a thin face. He had a beard and auburn color hair in a pony tail. He was wearing a light color T shirt and dark color pants. Up to 5 men beat the couple after they left the GOP event on Friday night.

A dirty twentysomething white guy in a ponytail.  I mean, if it were a dirty fiftysomething in a ponytail and a beard, you’d think  “a bunch of meth addicts jumped the kids”.  But most twentysomethings have to spend a lot of time, money and effort to affect that kind of look.

The Twin Cities AFSCME has not yet told us whether they consider this  a threat to them from the Tea Party.

I just got a message:

I am [name redacted]: I am a big DFLer, who was a key player in our 2008 legislative landslide, and who is working on one of the front-running DFL gubernatorial campaigns.  I am on a first-name basis with every single DFL leader; I am welcomed into every DFL legislator’s and candidate’s office with my first name.  I am, in DFL terms, the shizzle.

I hate you, Merg, and I am going to kill you; I am going to shoot you in the face as your friends and relatives look on in mute horror.  And then I’m going to steal a helicopter and drop a huge firebomb on the Tea Party, killing all you Teabagger wingnuts.

By the way, hundreds of my public-employee union friends helped me write this email, and want you to know they’ll be there to defile the corpses afterward. 

Please don’t print my name.

Since this key DFL player (seriously!  That’s what his message said!) asked me not to print his name, I must respect his wishes. 

But wow – it’s a threat!  Honest!  From someone claiming to be a huge DFL organizer!   At the head of an angry mob!

Wow. 

So will the DFL and all liberals repudiate this violent threat?  Or do they approve of death threats?

Hey, if Andy Birkey can impugn an entire movement based on his blithe assurance that a crank caller claimed to be a key Tea Partier, really, what’s the problem with the above?

[Note to the dense; the above is pure satire; unlike Steny Hoyer, Reps. Lewis and Cleaver, I make no claim that these slandrous claims are true.   And unlike Andy Birkey, I’m not going to insult your intelligence by asking you to generalize about an entire party, union or movement based on – let’s be bluntly honest – transparent bullshit).

Someone left some naughty messages at the local AFSCME headquarters.

Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” notes that AFSCME and the police know who it is, but…:

[An AFSCME spokesperson] revealed the caller’s identity, and states that his business is on record as a vendor for the state of Minnesota; she shared documentation of that fact with this site. The Minnesota Independent’s call to the individual was not returned, so we’ll refrain from revealing his or her identity at this time.

But, all of that aside, Birkey will reveal [I’ll add emphasis] that…:

A local chapter of AFSCME, the national public workers’ union, says it received three expletive-laced phone messages from a person claiming to be a Tea Party member in response to the union’s new ad urging support for fair taxation in Minnesota.

Wow.  That’s a pretty damning conclusion!  And on what does Birkey base this?

[AFSCME’s flak] forwarded audio of the call along with the identity of a person she says the calls were tracked to.  That individual, a local business owner, she says “claims to be an organizer of the Tea Party protest at the State Capitol tomorrow.”

So let’s summarize; Andy Birkey, apparently at the assurance of a PR flak from a group that has a vested interest in attacking the Tea Party, not only claims on the eve of the national Tea Party protests that an “organizer” (we know this because he claimed it on his phone message!) is threatening a local union (???), to the point where he headlined his story “TEA PARTY SUPPORTER THREATENS AFSCME OFFICE“…

…but won’t say who it is, so that we Tea Partiers can find out who has allegedly so sullied the honor of our movement?

Hmmm.  The hell you say.

And what exactly was the “threat?”

“Hey you [expletive] piece of [expletive]. Your days are [expletive] numbered sucking at the public tit. This [expletive] is over. I saw that [expletive] ‘Tax the Rich’ ad again. We don’t you come and visit tomorrow at the [expletive] little party we’re going to have on the 15th at the capitol. Why don’t you show up there with your [expletive] union signs. That’d be just [expletive] wonderful. Come you you gutless [expletive] wonders, show up!”

Um, what’s the threat?  I get it, profanity is unpleasant and all, but the only “threat” seems to be sympathy for cutting government jobs, and an acid invitation to come to the Tea Party with union signs to see what people thought of ’em.

As to the AFSCME flak?  Well, the union can be happy they’re getting their money’s worth; she’s certainly on message…:

“The tea party has a history of inciting angry mobs, so given that, we filed the report…

I’d ask her to provide examples of “angry mobs”, but I’m sure she’ll be on a contractual coffee break when I call…

I’ll be calling the AFSCME office for clarification.  Let’s see if that gets reported as a “threat”, too.

UPDATE:  Welcome, Politics in Minnesota readers.  I update this story in this piece.

I’ve told the story before.  One of the most illuminating lectures I’ve ever gotten on human nature was from my 11th grade history teacher, Mr. Dudley Butts – who was perhaps the most “Big Lebowski”-ish football head coach I’ve ever met. 

He’d been drafted during the Vietnam War; he was proud to point out that he’d been stationed in Washington DC, and the Viet Cong never attacked the Capitol on his watch; mission accomplished. 

And he told us that during basic training, as they were doing any of the things that mimicked killing people – at the rifle range, while doing bayonet drills and hand-to-hand combat practice – the drill sergeants never referred to their targets as humans.  They were always collections of not-quite-human memes; “gooks” and “charlies” and “slopes” and so on.  It took him a while to realize this wasn’t just the mark of a bunch of bigots with sergeant stripes; there was a method to it.  It was much easier to train people who’d spent 18 years of their lives being taught “thou shalt not kill” to kill if you taught them to kill something that wasn’t really human. 

Likewise, the theory goes, it’s easier to convince people you’re right if you get them to believe that your opponent isnt’ operating from rationalism or intelligence.

The Alinski-schooled left has known this for decades, of course.  Which is why over my years of blogging the left has followed such utterly predictable memes in referring to conservatives – “ignorant wingnuts” in their parlance.  Christians are “extremists”; Second Amendment activists are “crazy gunnies”; they never get exercised and motivated, they “Melt down” or “whine”.  Above all – or, in terms of plausibility and intelligence, below all – they never operate from bases in rationality, experience, knowledge of history or cognitive processes of any kind; the only conservative motivation is “fear”. 

I’ve never accused Lori Sturdevant of being much more than a willing water-girl for the DFL and all it stands for.  I didn’t expect any different from her “coverage” of the Bachmann/Palin rally.    I wasn’t disappopinted:

Minnesotans who tuned in to Wednesday’s Minneapolis rally on behalf of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and featuring former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heard a lot about “freedom” and “liberty.” Those words are taking on a new partisan edge in this election year, not unlike the tinge acquired by the words “family values” a few years back.

Well, let’s shoot for accuracy, here – and we’ll have to do the shooting, because Sturdevant certainly won’t; the “partisan edge” to “family values” was pretty much entirely a product of the left and media (ptr). 

It’s a digression – but then, so was Sturdevant’s reference.  Offsetting penalties. 

Onward:

Those words also seem to be acquiring new definitions in the mouths of Republican politicians. Freedom seems to have a lot to do with the ability to avoid buying health insurance, thereby forcing others to pick up the tab for one’s hospital stay, should one’s good health run out.

Right.  That’s the motivation behind the Tea Parties and all of conservatism, Lori; getting someone else to pick up your tab.

It has nothing to do with believing in limited government, let alone the sense that for most people, Obamacare “fixes” something that needed a tune-up, not a complete overhaul.

Liberty, on the other hand, seems to be about building new nuclear power plants, drilling for oil just about anywhere, paying little or no taxes, and avoiding health and safety regulations in one’s business life.

Oooh, can I play?

Liberalism seems to be about being ashamed to be an American, being thankful to Mother Government for allowing you to exist, and shutting up and doing what your lords and betters tell you to do!

Liberty is also evidently compromised or diminished when the federal government takes emergency action to limit the collapse of major banks and prevent the demise of the nation’s homegrown auto industry.

Well, yeah.  As a matter of fact, it is; when there is no freedom to fail, then there is truly no freedom to succeed.  Badly run businesses should fail; in a true free-market economy, no business ever gets to be “too big to fail”. 

Those countercyclical rescue efforts came in for repeated scorn, from Bachmann, Palin and their warmup man, Gov. Tim Pawlenty — although many of the moves were initiated by a president they supported, George W. Bush.

“A President they supported?”  I can’t speak for Pawlenty, Bachmann or Palin, but I don’t know a single genuine conservative who supported Bush’s Kennedyesque spending. 

Let’s step aside for a moment, here.  When it comes to analyzing dissent, there are really two types of commentators; the ones that painstakingly develop taxonomies that shoehorn all of human nature’s wondrous complexity into implausibly neat but inevitably-pejorative, utterly-unnatural and completely self-serving boxes to make themselves sound all academic and serious, and everyone else:

Times of major economic and social change seem to spawn two kinds of political leaders in America — those who seek to help people overcome their fears and adapt, and those who play on fear and offer the vague promise that unsettling changes can be slowed or reversed.

Which is, of course – pardon a rare disgression into Old English – festering, reeking bullshit.

All political motivation is a complex mixture of education, tradition, self-interest, fear, communitarianism, and all manner of base and noble impulses.  Every person’s motivations are different; I’m a conservative because my study of history shows that statism is a cancer, and that limited government leaves the most room for humanity’s most noble natures to emerge, because the Constitution is fundamentally libertarian-conservative and if we don’t follow the Constitution then what the hell do we follow, because I “fear” the competence and motivations of this nation’s current “elite” and what it’ll do to the country I’ll leave my offspring, and because it is my right and duty as a free American citizen to fight for what I believe within our political process.

Likewise, Lori Sturdevant is a liberal because she’s been painstakingly indoctrinated into being a petty statist and D-list elitist, all of the “cool” people in her field have always been liberals, and she fears all of us peasants.

I mean, as long as we’re oversimplifying and caricaturing those we disagree with…

 Bachmann and Palin demonstrated Wednesday why they are among the nation’s leading exemplars of the latter category. Their success, this year and in 2012, will depend in large part on Americans staying fearful for a lot longer than Americans typically do.

I saw no fear on Wednesday.

But I read it all throughout Sturdevant’s column on Thursday.

Like Mr. Butts’ drill sergeants, Sturdevant is trying to tell her audience that her enemies – all us Teabaggers, Gunnies, Taxpayers-Leaguers, Wingnuts, God-Botherers, Bitter Gun-clinging Jeebus freaks and the whole lot – aren’t really as human as they are.

Back in 2006, when a collapse at the Sago mine in Utah killed 13, the left and media (as always, pardon the redundancy) blamed President Bush. The precedent was obvious; mine safety is the Presideht’s responsibility.

Today, after the worst mining disaster in 26 years, though, we learn that mine safety is apparently not the job of the President.

No.

It is, however, entirely related to management’s ostensible political sympathies.

As the left becomes more and more depraved in defense of the administration its’ hold on power, expect to find the plague, the Spanish Inquisition and auto accidents blamed on the Tea Party as well.

But just remember, Democrats – someday you’ll be out of power.  Maybe someday soon.  And you’re setting a crappy precedent for civility in dealing with the minority.  There’s that whole wind/whirlwind thing you might wanna think about.

Again, just saying.

The IRS notes that the wave of Tea Partier threats and violence against that most intrusive and divisive arm of government, the IRS…

…well, isn’t:

The country’s chief tax collector pushed back Monday against assertions that working for the Internal Revenue Service has become more dangerous as a result of growing anti-government sentiment and the recent passage of President Obama’s health care plan.

“No, the risk has not increased,” IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said. “There has been a lot of stuff in the press about increased threats, which is actually inaccurate.”

…

Some liberal groups and bloggers also have raised fears that anti-tax and anti-government rhetoric employed on talk radio and by protesters within the “tea party” movement could incite violence against IRS agents.

Which was really what it was all about, all of it – the specious claims of racist slurs and threats, the victorian vapours about the tiny fringe of Tea Partiers with objectionable signs, and conservative talk radio as a whole – without exception; impugning dissent.

It’s kind of good to see, actually.  I remember how depressing it felt to realize that Bob Dole’s only campaign message in 1996 was “I’m not Bill Clinton”; about the only thing the Dems have so far going into November is an albatross of a “health care” plan, and constant chants of “teh teabaggerz are teh crazee, and we not be they”.

And that’s not so bad.

One of the big political “stories” last week was the “threat” letter sent to thirty-odd US state governors, including Governor Pawlenty.

The City Pages’ “Blotter”  caught part of the “story’s” big problem;

[The putative senders’] agenda: “The Restore America Plan is a bold achievable strategy for behind-the-scenes peaceful reconstruction of the de jure institutions of government without controversy, violence or civil war.”

The letter’s message: Resign in three days, or we’re coming to get you.

Big whoop, Pawlenty told the AP.

And as much as I’ve bagged on the sloppy, trite, meaningless nature of most of the post-Steve-Perry City Pages existence, it’s here that they do a bit of due diligence that most of the rest of the Twin Cities media would have done well to emulate; they did some checking – or, to be accurate, they quoted some people who had some some checking:

And maybe with good reason. Mother Jones magazine traced the group’s Web site owner via a readily-available Internet domain search engine:

Turns out goftr.com and guardiansofthefreerepublics.com are registered to one Clive Boustred of Soquel, California–a British-educated former South African soldier with an apparent knack for “anti-terrorist warfare,” computer consulting, and conspiracy theorizing. The sites–and the “group”–appear not to have existed before he registered them, about two months ago.

In other words, “Guardians of the Free Republic” are no more a “movement” than, say, “Citizens for a Supine “Safer” Minnesota”.

So kudos to the City Pages; they didn’t buy the hype.

Which is more than we can say for much of the media.  I tuned into National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” last Friday.  And Saturday.  They carried the story with breathless credulity, noting that an FBI agent had noted that the “real threat” wasn’t so much from GotFR, but from  people who “might” be inspired to copy them, or follow through on the “Threat”. 

In other words, according to a chunk of the media and Barack Obama’s government, the opposition to President Obama is loaded with people who’d just loooove to start tossing governors from office without waiting for elections.

Which is, again, the meme we were talking about last week; the Administration, media and left’s (pardon the rare and difficult triple-redundancy) are trying to portray all dissent from Obama as teetering on the edge of extralegal depravity.

The arrests of nine “[insert inflammatory catchphrase here]” “Christian Militia” members in Michigan have focused America’s attention the American media and those who still pay attention to it on the “problem” of “militias” which, by the way, have been shrinking since their heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s.

During the 90s, “militias” became the Democrat boogeyman, after a number of well-publicized and very ugly incidents; the Medina shootout, the Ruby Ridge massacre, and of course the Oklahoma City bombing.  Under fire during his first term before his epic setback in the ’94 elections, the Clinton Administration sought to distract the nation with a huge, sinister, conspiratorial internal enemy, the “militia movement”; the 1994 Crime Bill, larded with civil rights violations that dwarfed much of what had the left up in arms during the Bush administration, was at least partly in response to this huge “movement”…

…that, except for the actions of Timothy McVeigh (who, says the government, was not acting as part of a huge shadowy conspiracy), had almost no affect on crime or any other area of life in the US – certainly not as compared to the “war on drugs”, which was a product of a perfect storm of social engineering from both the right (“drugs are bad”) and the left (decades of welfare dependence and warehousing the poor in the inner city).

At any rate, even though the numbers of people involved in the lefty boogeyman version of “militias” was never big, and has dropped since the nineties, the image that the left propagates – paunchy, hate-clogged, drawling,  white rednecks in camouflage with AK-47s – is a control panel full of hot buttons for the left, purpose-designed to scare – is back, for the moment at least, bigger and badder than ever. 

Because with a Tea Party afoot across the land and the President’s poll numbers falling faster than Hillary Duff’s career bell curve, there are lots of center-to-left voters to be scared back into line.

And fear’s first cousin is ignorance.  I’m getting deja vu all over again from the comments, the blog posts, the talk show calls; the left is duly frightened of the great, unwashed horde (and the tiny, unconvicted band that was the excuse for the left to declare “militias” the boogeyman of the month again). 

It reminds me of something I wrote two years ago about the 25th anniversary of the Medina Shootout, and Hollywood’s reflections on all those crazy people between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre:

But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped.  Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (”Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls.  The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance. 

Worse?  While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”’s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.

It was nonsense, of course – and, like the “militia” mania that served to distract parts of America from Bill Clinton’s foibles, and is being rolled out now to distract us from Obama’s economy, and scare “moderates” into line behind The One, it’s a cynical lie.

More tomorow.

With the government’s sudden fixation with violence and terrorism (as defined by Janet Napolitano, at any rate), it’s worth going over what “security” is.

The big picture, of course, is important; government has a constitutional duty to defend the country.  It’s one of a very, very short list of duties actually spelled out for a legitimate government in the Constitution; it’s one of the few legitimate reasons any government exists. 

Secure the borders?  Absolutely.  There is not a nation in the world worth the title that doesn’t protect its own sovereignty.  There’s a reason for this; we formed a nation for a reason.  We intend it to be disctinct from other nations.  If tomorrow all of the world’s other nations upheld freedom, the rule of law, the value of the individual, and (after November, 2012, God willing) the free market.  Of course, the United States is a nation of immigrants, and indeed we need immigrants to keep rejuvenating this nation; nations with unchanging cultures become ossified and stagnant.  But the key is that immigrants must come to the United States, rather than bringing Ireland or Finland or Greece here. 

But that’s fodder for the upcoming “Culture” installment.

Protecting us from criminals?  Yep.  That too.  The law-abiding citizen should be secure on his/her property, with his/her possessions, and his/her rights.  The law should

Which is where government keeps screwing up.  It’s not just governments run by crime bosses and warlords – Russia and Tadjikistan and the Congo – that break this rule.   In the UK, a law-abiding citizen who defends his home, property or self from a burglar, robber or attacker with any kind of force frequently faces stiffer punishment than the criminal involved.  In Chicago – a city prowled by gangs armed barely a degree behind the Fedayin Saddam fashion curve – the full weight of the city’s legal system waits to fall upon the citizen who dares resist the thugs with a .22 handgun.

Any dictator can make you “secure”; the streets of Rome were safe enough under Mussolini.  But that’s not security, any more that a dictator (or university dean) giving you a few minutes to say what you want within a bunch of carefully set-up guidelines is “freedom of speech”.  “Security” that exists only at the pleasure and to the purposes of ones’ leaders – masters, really – isn’t security at all.  It’s the kind of “Security” that a flock of sheep get when escorted by a pack of wolves; it exists only for the needs of the wolves, not the flock.

“No problem, Mitch.  America’s not like that!”

Gun control laws that burden the law-abiding more than criminals – that’s almost all of them – don’t enhance “security”. 

Property forfeiture laws that penalize the innocent (which one is supposed to be, until proven guilty) do not make us more “secure”.

Federal “watch lists” that stimatize mainstream (if temporarily out-of-power) dissent make us less secure.

A government policy that is more accomodating to those that would kill us than to those who have defended us doesn’t make us more secure.

That’s what I want; that’s what this nation needs; a government that knows “Security” protects the nation while upholding the citizen.

Wow.  I am an extremist!

It’s spring break along the Gulf Coast, and that means it’s time for thousands of bobble-headed college kids to flock to the beach, get completely drunk on Mom and Dad’s money, and pass out in pools of their own vomit.

And when you mix alcohol and post-adolescents, you get trouble:

In related news, Steny Hoyer has demanded that House Republicans condemn the “avalanche of violence” that the Tea Parties have brought to Spring Break.

Amid all the accusations and the elaborate flummery about “avalanches of violence and threats”, and as the left works itself into a self-righteous lather about the base benightedness of its opposition, it’s worth keeping things in some historical perspective.

With that in mind, I direct you to “The Paranoid Center” by Jesse Walker.

Here’s your fifteen seconds of exposition…:

We’ve heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we’re sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we’ve heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers’ anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.

When such a story is directed at those who oppose the politicians in power, it has an additional effect. The list of dangerous forces that need to be marginalized inevitably expands to include peaceful, legitimate critics.

…but you really do need to read the whole thing.

The “avalanche of violence” – Steny Hoyer’s “estimated” ten Democrat house representatives who’ve gotten off-color/picqued messages from constituents – has come home to roost.  Rep. Betty McCollum (DFL-MN4) reports getting a shredded flag and a condom in the mail, as well as…

…well, I’m sure there was some violence amid that avalanche.

But I thought – what’s the larger context, here?  Having worked in talk radio, including a stretch as a call screener, I know that threats and ugliness are just part of being in the public eye; some people, regardless of their politics or target, just don’t handle diversity well.

So I asked Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office “what kind of things to you get from people during an ordinary stretch of sessions?”  It may have been an unfair question; Rep. Bachmann is like a red cape in front of insane bulls.

But the office duly obliged.

From email:

Date: Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:20 AM
Subject: I want to share my opinion with you.

You are, in my opinion. one ugly fucking human being. I’m so glad I don’t live in Minnesota. In Fargo, the Coen brothers did a great job of depicting your state as populated by dimwits, and now it’s even easier to believe that that is reality. I’m glad we’re finally closing the door on the amazing stupidity of the Bush assministration, and I will be nearly as happy when you are no longer holding any significant political office, you asshole.

Wow.  If it’d been aimed at a Democrat, I’m sure brows would be getting plenty furrowed!

Comments from Michele Bachmann’s YouTube channel:

phish1085 has made a comment on The Bill Must Be Repealed!:

you dont know what the fuck your talkin about bitch

jim2hal has made a comment on Bachmann Reacts to the Health Care Vote.wmv:

If Micheal pulled her hair back I’m sure that you would see her horns and turn heraround and bet there is a tail there…. so hateful

plzwakeup has made a comment on The President’s Health Care Advisers:

Hope you fucking die. SOON!!

HateRepublicans has posted a comment on your profile:

you are an evil person, you are the devil, you are a person without a moral conscience
I really hope you die, you took part in destroying this once great country
you are one of the most corrupt politicians out there

Would these have made the news – and caused furrowed brows – if they were aimed at Democrats?

Oh, well.  It’s not like anyone’s shooting at Congresspeoples’ offices or anything.

Now, again, kids, don’t be violent.  We’re going to get rid of this administration – or at least neuter it – at the polls.  There’s no need for all sorts of foamy-mouthed Kossing, here.

I say that because, naturally, if I don’t someone will accuse me of grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods, ready to shoot at revenooers.

At any rate, yay for federal law enforcement and all, and goodnesss knows that’s going to come out at trial, but if the news reports are any indication, Big Sis has just “protected” us from the Keystone Militia:

In an indictment unsealed Monday, prosecutors said the group began military-style training in the Michigan woods in 2008, learning how to shoot guns and make and set off bombs.

Shooting guns?  You mean, like 50% of the American people do?

David Brian Stone, 44, of Clayton, Mich., and one of his sons were identified as the ringleaders of the group. Stone, who was known as “Captain Hutaree,” organized the group in paramilitary fashion and members were assigned secret names, prosecutors said. Ranks ranged from “radoks” to “gunners,” according to the group’s Web site.

I’m going to guess they had a secret handshake, to help them tell who was the mole, too.

Prosecutors said Stone had identified certain law enforcement officers near his home as potential targets. He and other members discussed setting off bombs at a police funeral, using a fake 911 call to lure an officer to his death, killing an officer after a traffic stop, or attacking the family of an officer, according to the indictment.

Now, when I first read that bit – that the “militia” planned to draw law enforcement into a huge ambush – I thought “this could have been a serious bunch of people”.  That’s a classic asymmetric tactic.

Why, in the hands of a ruthless, competent insurgency…

After such attacks, the group allegedly planned to retreat to “rally points” protected by trip-wired explosives for a violent standoff with the law.

…oh.  Never mind.

No confirmation on whether they planned to paint huge targets on their foreheads, or go into action with central lines already inserted for the lethal injections.

Hutaree says on its Web site its name means “Christian warrior” and describes the word as part of a secret language that few are privileged to know.

Secret languages.

Oddball internal rituals and ranks.

Inscrutably bobbleheaded strategy.

Janet Napolitano just rounded up the Scientologists.

Of course, this is no laughing matter; threatening to “levy war” is a big deal.

And it’s even less a laughing matter that our government feels the need to make a huge splash over Captain Hutaree and his Christian Avengers at a time when Congress’ Democratic Caucus is actively slandering dissenters with an overwrought, and curiously coordinated, campaign of finding “violence” and “threats” and “racism” under every rock (for which, somehow, no indictments exist; also evidence, other than the kind of thing every dogcatcher and sports reporter in America gets as part of the job).

Fearless prediction:  Look for a brow-furrowing “investigation” of “militias” by Ann Curry.

Stat.

UPDATE: Let me be clear, here.  The Hutarees seem to have been amateurs – but amateurism is no defense when it comes to charges of conspiracy to murder anyone, much less cops.  The Fort Dix Six were amateurs, and they’re in jail – justifiably so.  Major Hassan (and every other mass-murderer, for that matter) was an amateur, but that doesn’t make his victims any less dead.

My beef isn’t with the FBI or the Feds for investigating or arresting them. 

It’s with the media and the Dems (pardon the redundancy), which seem to be using this episode as part of an ongoing smear of all right-wing dissent.  Last night the local news ran a report about “the militia and Hate Groups in the Twin Cities”; it focused on a doughy guy in a house in Apple Valley who ran a white-supremacist online bookstore.  

And it’s with the Southern Guilt By Association Poverty Law Center being taken seriously as a source on the subject again.  It’s Janet Napolitano’s watchlist, and hordes of semi-literate leftybloggers chanting “Avalance of Violence!  Avalanche of Violence!” like a bunch of demented macaws.

It’s that there are so many smears, happening in so brief a time, so closely tied to an epochal, divisive political event.

That’s the beef.

Again, and as always, I reject violence and threats and intimidation in any area of life, to say nothing of politics.

Of course, with last week’s non-events – the unexplained severing of a propane line, a “brick thrown” through a 30th floor window, the non-intentional lofting of spittle and the non-chanting of a racial slur at Congressmen, and the non-news that some people reacted to Obamacare by sending threatening or (more usually) threatening-sounding or socially inappropriate phone messages to Congresscritters (as if a listen through a week of Michele Bachmann’s messages wouldn’t curl their nose hair!) – the majority Democrats in Washington are trying to seize the mantle of victimhood.

And innocence, of course.

Not so fast:

• It was not the fear of conservative violence that caused Ann Coulter’s speech to be cancelled this week.
• It was a liberal who bit the finger off a man who disagreed with him on healthcare.
• It was Obama-loving Amy Bishop who took a gun to work and murdered co-workers.
• Joseph Stack flew his plane into the IRS building after writing an anti-conservative manifesto.
• It was liberals who destroyed AM radio towers outside of Seattle.
• It’s liberals who burn down Hummer dealerships.
• It was progressive SEIU union thugs who beat a black conservative man who spoke his mind.
• It’s doubtful that a conservative fired shots into a GOP campaign headquarters.
• In fact, Democrats have no monopoly on having their offices vandalized.
• Don’t forget it was Obama’s friend Bill Ayers who used terrorism as a tool for political change. SDS is still radical, with arrests in 2007 and the storming of the CATO Institute in July 2008.
• It was a liberal who was sentenced to two years for bringing bombs and riot shields to the Republican National Convention in 2008.
• It was a liberal who threatened to kill a government informant who infiltrated her Austin-based group that planned to bomb the RNC.
• It was liberals who assaulted police in Berkeley.
• It was liberals who intimidated and threw rocks through the windows of researchers.
• The two Black Panthers who stood outside polls intimidating people with nightsticks were probably not right-wingers.
• Every time the G20 gets together, it’s not conservatives who destroy property and cause chaos.

Oh, and it wasn’t conservatives who threw bleach at elderly RNC delegates, or dropped sandbags on delegate buses at the RNC.

Let’s not forget the Minnesota union thugs who attacked the Young Republicans at the 2004 MN State Fair, or burst into the St. Paul Bush Campaign headquarters with clear intent to intimidate.

Let’s be clear, here; Conservatives and Republicans aren’t “victims”.  Just, occasionally, targets.

And – unlike Steny Hoyer and Frank Rich and Ed Schultz – I’m not going to use this long, and by no means complete, list of outrages to try to tar all Democrats.  Unlike many of the left’s most “respected” talking heads, I’m not going to slime all of my opponents by association.  That’s the mark of the intellectual bankrupt and the moral coward.

Still – when you count actual incidents, as opposed to the innuendo-via-press-release that Steny Hoyer got splashed in front of the media last week, the balance of idiocy is pretty clear.

…what can be better attributed to watching the bottom line.

“The Rage Is Not About Healthcare”, Frank Rich of the NYTimes assures us, and in so doing shows why his first gig was as drama critic:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

Attention, Frank Rich.  If the President, the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader were all gun-toting Presbyterian Wal-mart-shoppers who could trace their anscestry back to the Mayflower, and they were proposing to nationalize much of the economy, sap the nation’s economic vitality, gut our healthcare system and put our great-grandchildren into debt, I’d be out there protesting, too.

And I’m pretty sure I speak for more Tea Partiers than you have, say, readers, when I say that.

The rest of Rich’s column is full of the kind of historical illiteracy and disingenuous dependence on Democrat talking points, it’s worth a separate fisking all on its own.

Maybe tomorrow.

What happens when John Hinderaker meets Paul Krugman?

Lots of pieces of Krugman flying about the place.

Er, wait.  Krugman will probably call that an incitement to violence, too.

Hinderaker eviscerates Paul Krugman’s “Violent Republicans” column. You need to read it, if you’re a Republican who’s shaking his/her head at the constant slander, and especially if you’re a Democrat who still believes Krugman is anything but a Lori Sturdevant-style shill for the Democrats.

Once upon a time, as I eviscerated Krugman’s idiotic “Red States Are Welfare Queens” column (wherein he noted, devoid of context, that “red” states take in more “federal money” than “blue” states), I said that I’d love to debate Krugman on the subject.  Leftyblogger Charlie Quimby sniffed – partaking, I suspect, in the liberal delusion that credentials equal merit – that he’d “pay money” to watch a debate between Krugman and I.

On that topic?  I’d do it.  And mop the floor with him.

In 1987, when I was a 24 year old rookie talk show host working the graveyard shift at around 3AM one Sunday night/Monday morning, I took a call.  We’d spent the first hour talknig with – and beating on – a noted Holocaust denier. 

It’s  pretty much axiomatic in talk radio that the callers turn out in droves for gun control and abortion; babies and crime/self-defense are topics pretty much everyone can relate to.   Holocaust Denial is another one – or so I found out that night.  It’d been a very busy hour; while I never had to beg for callers on my old graveyard-shift show – there were always lots of drunks, third-shifters, aspiring novelists, crazies and (oddly) handicappers tuned in and dying to sound off – that night was particularly heavy – it was a red-letter night.  The phone lines crackled with revulsion; a guy claiming to be a Jewish Defense League member said that if the guest had been in the Twin Cities rather than on the phone, he’d have come out to the studio and shot him. 

Now, that’s brisk, baby.

And it carried on into the second hour.  Full banks of callers, mostly angry; some wondering why I’d given the guy any play at all, most tearing his positions apart, many with stories of relatives who’d served in the war and fought their way into camps, and the stories they’d told.

And then, late in the final half-hour, someone called; in my mind’s eye at 23 years’ remove, he sounded a little like Dennis Hopper.  And he said “We’re coming for you, Jew -boy.  You can run but you can’t hide”.

I mentioned that I was about as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger, and that he needed to take his meds as I hung up.

The lesson for the evening?

It’s obvious:  Jews and Democrats are violence-prone!

———-

Well, no.  It means that when people get angry (and maybe just a tad demented) and find a way to lash out at the targets of their anger from behind the cover of anonymity, they say things they’d never dare say in person.  It happens on the phone (ask any talk show screener), and in blog comments, with anonymous leftybloggers – anyone, really, any time that anger isn’t tempered by accountability.

If you’re ap public figure at any level, you’ve tun into this – and you know it’s one of the little stressors that happens.

Congresspeople?  Sure, they know it.

———-

It’s tiresome – and more than a little insulting – to have to iterate every time the topic of threats and violence comes up “…now, I don’t advocate threats or violence…”.

Doyy. No kidding? 

Tiresome and insulting. 

And that’s exactly what the Democrat leadership intended with the stories they’ve run since last weekend in re the Tea Party’s purported response to Obamacare. 

It’s several stories, really. +

It’s A Loogie World:  “Tea Partiers” ostensibly “spit” on Democrat congresspeople as they walked across the Mall. 

Except it’s looking pretty doubtful that it actually happened (around 1:20 of the video in the link):

Jim Treacher:

I can’t get it to link to the specific time code, but fast-forward to the 1:20 mark. Looks to me like that dude was yelling at him and maybe a drop of spittle flew at him. Which still sucks. Nobody likes to be yelled at, especially by some redneck who won’t just shut up and pay his taxes. But it’s not like somebody hocked a loogie in Cleaver’s face.

I know, I know. It doesn’t matter anyway because the Tea Parties are racist. I’m just providing… what’s it called? Oh yeah: Evidence.

Cleaver declined to press charges over this, which is a good thing because no arrests were made that day.

No arrests?  Why, spitting is both assault and, most  likely, a hate crime.  If it happened.

The “T” Word: “Tea Partiers” – plural – purportedly screamed the “N”-word at civil rights movement veteran, Rep. John Lewis.  Except, again, there’s no evidence that it actually happened:

According to the article, Lewis was walking from the Cannon Office Building to the Capitol when protesters started shouting. According to Lewis, however, what they shouted was not a racial slur, but “Kill the bill, kill the bill.” If he heard anything more derogatory, he does not seem to have told Douglas about it.
 
Lewis, it should be noted, is no slouch when it comes to race-baiting. During the 2008 campaign, he compared the McCain-Palin campaign to that of “presidential candidate George Wallace,” whose comparable “atmosphere of hate” led to the fatal church bombing in Birmingham. So egregious were Lewis’s comments that McCain called on Obama to “condemn” them.

As Douglas reports, it was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), a Lewis colleague walking a few steps behind him, who actually claimed to have heard the slur. Note the way that Douglas runs these sentences together.

Do you hear a “Chorus” of “N”-bombs?  “Kill the Bill”, sure.  But there’s a difference, isn’t there?

So far, at least?

Well, all you leftybloggers out there who want to cling to the idea of Republican/Tea Party thuggishness; Andrew Breitbart is putting his money where his blog’s mouth is:

It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

I’d almost bet that same amount that he never, ever gets a taker.

Anger and Pique and Threats, Oh My: Steny Hoyer got front page coverage yesterday when he claimed that…:

more than 10 House Democrats have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment about their support of the highly divisive health insurance overhaul vote. Hoyer emphasized that he didn’t have a specific number of threats and that was just an estimate.

Michael Walsh wonders:

Naturally, the media accepts this allegation at face value, and never once stops to question whether the Alinsky Party is, you know, exaggerating or even lying — as the spiritual mentor of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton taught it to do.

The end is what you want, the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.

The horse-race-obsessed Mainstream Media might want to look up the term, agents provocateurs…

While I suspect there’s more than a little chance that some of the “estimated” “threats” were phoned in or are complete fabrications, it doesn’t matter; people get angry, regardless of their politics, and some of them say dumb, hateful, even illegal things.

Erick Erickson at RedState has heard the threats, and isn’t impressed:

Here comes the controversial part that still must be said: I have heard the audio of some of the threats. I get worse stuff routinely. Rush Limbaugh gets worse stuff on a daily basis. Republican members of Congress have gotten similar and worse stuff. Thank God this wasn’t a free trade vote or a variety of left wing groups would have half the country in flames right now. I do believe the 24 hours of threats, many of which were pretty weak, has gotten more national coverage than the leftist anarchists in Texas who molotov cocktailed the Texas Governor’s Mansion — for which arrests have never been made.

Certainly more than the houseful of bomb-making goodies, vandalism supplies and buckets of urine that police found when they raided a Saint Paul house being used as a staging ground for “anarchists” at the Saint Paul RNC in 2008.

The Dems’ “concerns” are long on feelings, short on actual actions.  To date, there are only two actual physical actions that have been reported to law enforcement (if you leave out the real shooting at Eric Cantor’s office, which much of the media has done).

Gas Attack: A gas line to an outdoor grill was allegedly cut at the house of Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello’s brother, after a “Tea Partier” ostensibly posted the address online.

Althouse:

I really want to know the details about this one. Who did it and why? Let me see the photographs. I want to know all about it. I don’t like the home addresses being posted on line, and I don’t like even peaceful protests at any individual’s house. I can see why you’d be upset that your address is known. But anyone could commit an act of vandalism (including dirty tricksters on the Democrat’s side). Is the press following up about what, exactly, happened? Or are they complacently passing this story on to be used to propagate the violence meme?

After the Sparkman, Bedell and the Texas IRS-plane-crasher, I’ll take “B”.

Like A Brick: There was an alleged brick attack at a Democrat office in Cincinnati.  Again – we have no idea who did it, or why; no note was attached, no threats received, no nothing.

So while it could be an angry tea partier, it could just as easily be a punk kid, a drunk or, for that matter, a Democrat activist.  There is no evidence at all, either way. 

———-

But this isn’t about individuals breaking laws; this is about the Democrat party using those acts, real, imagined,  fabricated or instigated, to try to not only defame dissenters, but to give their own, increasingly embattled supporters the sort of “us against them” siege mentality that they’ll need to survive and keep the fire going during what promises to be an ugly electoral season.

Back to Erick Erickson, who is onto the real reason for the flap:

I am forced to largely conclude that the Democrats are running to the nearest microphone in an effort to play the victim and generate sympathy as they try to steer poll numbers back in their direction.

I never bet m0ney; I don’t much believe in gambling.  But I’ll bet bragging rights that nothing ever comes of any of these complaints.

Because they’re not intended to be “real”.  They’re intended to set the majority party (for now) up as “victims” of a huge, benighted, ugly conspiracy that just happens to hate black people, doncha know.

And I’d have to hope this is wearing thin with the American people. 

In fact, I’ll do my best to make sure it does.

Like we couldn’t see this coming:

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is warning that some of his Democratic colleagues are being threatened with violence when they go back to their districts — and he wants Republicans to stand up and condemn the threats.

Hey, everyone; don’t threaten Congresspeople.

The Maryland Democrat said more than 10 House Democrats have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment about their support of the highly divisive health insurance overhaul vote.

Wow.  If true, this sounds like a real huge wave of lunacy…

…oh, wait:

Hoyer emphasized that he didn’t have a specific number of threats and that was just an estimate.

Yeah, I’ll bet it is.

I’ll bet three more things:

1. That this announcement was planned at least a week ago.
2. That the number of “threats of violence” varies no more than 10-15% from normal.
3. That Mr. Hoyer will never release any details of any of these threats for public examination.  Indeed, he can’t – because he doesn’t have any specifics.  He’s passing off gossip to defame dissenters.  Five’ll get you ten that there are no more serious, significant threats than normal during any contentious debate.

Expect much, much more of this between now an November.

And every time  you see this, ask to see the specifics.  When you’re at a Tea Party and see someone with a threatening or racist sign, snap a picture and post it on a blog.

This is how smear machines work.

I’m an extremist.

No, really.  Janet Napolitano, Nick Coleman, scads of intellectually-incontinent leftybloggers and the Coffee Parties all say so.

Calling anyone to the right of Larry Pogemiller an “extremist” was a standard practice in Minnesota politics long before any non-poli-sci wonk ever heard of Saul Alinski.  For generations, anyone in Minnesota who stood outside the great DFL-and-“moderate”-GOP, “marching-boldly-toward-the-future-hand-in-hand toward the collective vision of our betters” ideal was called an extremist (provided they were on the right. And of course, bits and pieces of it have leaked out in the national culture; the idea that Rush Limbaugh listeners were a “vast right-wing conspiracy” responsible for the bombing of the Murragh building was the moment it all got really serious – the first time the (wife of a) sitting president had ever tied a perfectly legitimate free speech activity to mass-murder and terrorism.

Since then, trying to link anything – Second Amendment ctivistm, critizing free trade agreements, being a hardliner on immigration, being a pro-lifer or an uppity Libertarian or a tax protester, whatever – gets one called an “extremist” first, with questions not asked later.  Several non-profits – including the inexplicably-well-regarded Southern Poverty Law Center – make a cottage industry out of McCarthyizing all non-“progressive” thought by linking all of it to some form of fringe extremism or another.

It’s rubbish, of course.

But I figured – maybe it’s worth a look.

Maybe I am an extremist!

This is the first part of a seven-part series, coming out on alternate blogging days ’til it’s done.

There is evidence that John Bedell, yesterday’s Pentagon shooter, was there to P get the “truth” about 9/11:

Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces, and had questioned the circumstances behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up…The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dusty Trice, the City Pages and the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s that even the most tenuous intellectual synchronicity is evidence of a shadowy undercurrent of hatred.

So – I believe the inflammatory remarks of Jesse Ventura and Minnesota “Progressive” Project’s Grace Kelly led to this shooting, and wonder when they’ll accept responsibility.

(Ever since I learned the technique of holding people responsible for things people who seem tangentially like them also happen to say, I find that I’m relieved of the usual burden of being responsible and accountable).

UPDATE:  Of course the leftyblog hamsters tried to tie Bedell to the Tea Parties. 

But no, he isn’t.  Or wasn’t:

It has become pretty clear pretty quickly that Bedell sufferred from Bush Derangement Syndrome, and was a 9/11 Truther, just like 35% of Democrats as of May 2007.

So we’ve got Bill Sparkmann, Major Hasan, John Bedell, the guy who crashed his plane into the IRS office – all of them who were seemingly driven to horrendous (and/or self-immolating) acts by the rhetoric of the left…

Why, if I were a leftyblogger and the parties were reversed, I might be tempted to call it a “climate of hatred…”

Today’s “Worst Olberman In The World” award goes to Keith Olberman.

I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid…

Olberman alone makes Berg’s Seventh Law settled science.

Freedom can be confusing.

We’ll come back to that.

I’ve told this story many, many times.  I think it’s still illustrative.  Back in the nineties and early naughties, you could predict a few things about GOP gatherings.

• At precinct caucuses, you could be assured that there would be an avalanche of pro-life/anti-stem cell/anti-gay-marriage resolutions.  In the former two cases, they would be largely redundant with what was already in the platform.  No matter; they had to be debated and voted up or down, one at a time.
• At legislative district (“BPOU”, in the MNGOP’s curious parlance) conventions, there’d be two big clusters of people in the room.  To stage right, there’d be a group of pro-lifers.  To stage left, there’d be everyone else.  And if one was running for a district office, one could expect a series of questions about one’s commitment to life.  “Are you pro-life?”  “How pro-life are you?”  “Please describe exactly how pro-life you are?”  “If your pro-life-ness were a mountain, which mountain would it be – Denali, K-2 or the Matterhorn?”

And pro-lifers weren’t the only single-issue voters.  During the nineties, after the nadir of the Clinton crime bill and Alan Spears’ various attempts to ratchet up gun control in Minnesota, the shooters came out.  And it could lead to comical results; pro-lifers would occasionally express revulsion at rolling back gun controls, while some of the shooters were visibly bored at the pro-life talk.  They came for their issues, and their issues alone.

That was then.

Now, we have the Tea Parties.  And while the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) likes to try to portray the Tea Parties like Nick Coleman once referred to “peasants beating on the observatory door” with pitchforks and torches, they are actually a whole lot more complex – John Kerry’s word was “nuanced” than that.  You see a lot of people at these rallies who, two years ago, didn’t care about politics, who a year into the Obama administration have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves.

And there are many roads to education; there are as many stories at the Tea Parties are there are participants.  Some reacquainted themselves with Reagan.  Many others in Minnesota arrived via (Minnesota-based syndicated talk show host) Jason Lewis’ long-running Tax Rallies, and Lewis’ heady introduction to the Federalists and Limited Government; Lewis, with his MA in Political Science, gives a pretty compete education in Federalist history.  Others come via other media figures – Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – to a new appreciation iof what limited government means, and how far off from that ideal we currently are.  Another contingent were brought to politics by the Ron Paul campaign.  And you can find others who filtered into the movement from immigration reform, pro-life and other groups, including a few from groups that we can tactfully call “the fringe”.

All of them – the good, the weird and the rhetorically ugly – come together for one reason; they want to put government back in its place.

Which, compared with the anything-goes, single-issue-bound GOP of 2000 and 2004, is pretty exciting stuff.

And as with anything that excites conservatives, the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) must spin it as some sort of potential depravity or another.

Commenter “Master Of None” drew my attention to NYTimes piece on the Tea Party movement yesterday.   I read it.

At first read, it was almost encouraging; it seemed at first blush to pay some service to the most important facet of the Tea Parties; that represents a wave of self-education, an “awakening” if you will, on the part of an awful lot of people.   It almost seemed like the NYTimes might start portraying Tea Partiers as people; actual individuals with their own motivations, each as unique as they are.

I said almost.

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

I chewed on that last clause for a bit.  A phrase like “bracing for tyranny” has two different meanings in our society.  To a big chunk of “Red” America, it means “being aware that unlimited government can not end well”, with a twist of “so let’s not let it get out of control” on top.

But to an NPR-listening, Times-reading, down-the-nose-at-the-hoi-polloi-looking putative “elite”, it’s a code phrase, for something the “fearful, Jebus-clinging, John Birch-reading gun freaks” do.

In other words, it’s something foreign.  Un-American.  Worthy of fear and, inevitably, fear’s eldest child, hatred.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

“Militia groups”.  It’s another media code word; the unwashed, insane, depraved, usually racist undercurrent that Blue America sees hiding under every rock between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

“Shadowy international networks”.

You see some of that at the Tea Parties.  Again, it’s the fringe; the people with the beards and camouflage and the huge potbellies and the pamphlets that gather around the fringe of  the Tea Party rallies, mixing uneasily with the vast majority; the people in dockers and polos, or work boots and embroidered shop jackets, who make up the vast majority of people at the Parties.  People like you and me and, someone tell the Times, your typical Times reader as well.

Oh, the Times gets parts right – enough to make the whole thing worth a read:

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

Defiance of easy definition notwithstanding, the Times wants you to accept their facile definition anyway.

And those facile definitions are always based on fear of the great unwashed unknown:

At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.

“Ah”, I thought.  “This could be good!”.   The rural west is a fascinating sociological hodgepodge; my own hometown in North Dakota jumbled college professors with their urbane, sometimes far-left beliefs, together with engineers (from a few local manufacturers) and business people (mostly fiscal conservatives) and agribusiness types (conservatives who loved farm subsidies)  to a few drastically-misplaced hippies, and always, always the farmers – including a few who’d been driven to radical populism by the hard times.

Who do you suppose the Times would be focusing on today?

In the inland Northwest, the Tea Party movement has been shaped by the growing popularity in eastern Washington of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, and by a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992, resulting in the deaths of a marshal and Mr. Weaver’s wife and son. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d’Alene until he was shut down.

Of all the “local peculiarities” to pick, what do you suppose the odds were?

The piece focuses, throughout, on the Tea Parties’ most paranoid lunatic fringe – almost as if to say “pay no attention to the populist awakening behind the curtain, Boston and New York and San Francisco!  They are unclean!  These are the bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freaks we warned you about!”

If they can’t beat the Tea Party on the facts, it’s logical that the next step will be fearmongering.

In my comment section, Jeff Kouba pointed me to a recent “book review” by the Strib’s Kristin Tillotson.

At least, it became a book review, of sorts.  But in the first graf, it was hard to tell (emphasis added):

Wells Tower is a serious wiseacre, the kind who gets away with it not because of his cleverness, but because he cuts to hard truths.

As a clever wiseacre with a thing for hard truths, I sat up and took notice!

 Written with startlingly original voice, careening imagination and an abiding fondness for what Teabaggers would call “the non-elites,” his stories are set in a surreal America we know, but aren’t sure we want to.

I’m trying to wrap my brain around a thought process that prods Ms. Tillotson to swerve that far outside any rational connection to her theme to take a passive-aggressive, blovious swipe at what may have once been half of her newspaper’s audience.

And I’m still trying.

So I sent this email to Ms. Tillotson:

Ms. Tillotson,

I’m trying to figure out the point of the “Teabagger” slur in your review of Wells Tower’s short story collection.  It seems – labored? 

I’d suggest a couple of possibilities, but I’d hate to get written off as one of those with “pursed lips, bloviating and passive-aggression“, so I figured I’d let you put it all in your own words.

Mitch Berg

I don’t expect anyone from the Strib to respond to mere peasants, of course.  And if they do, it’ll be something…well, pursed, blovious and passive-aggressive, usually. 

But I’ll keep you posted.

Remember Berg’s Seventh Law?  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.”

Or is the word I’m looking for “transference”?

At any rate – remember when the left insisted the Tea Parties were “astroturf”, or fake grass-roots? 

Oh, what do you think?

A Web site popped up in January dedicated to preventing the tea party’s “radical” and “dangerous” ideas from “gaining legislative traction,” targeting GOP candidates in Illinois for the firing squad.

“This movement is a fad,” proclaims TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, which was established by the American Public Policy Center (APPC), a D.C.-based campaign shop that few people have ever heard of.

But a close look reveals the APPC’s place in a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.

Here’s how it works: What appears like a local groundswell is in fact the creation of two men — Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups, the non-profit election organizations that hammer on contentious issues (think Swift Boats, for example).

Lefties would insist that the Tea Parties themselves would be the same.  Notwithstanding the fact that other than Dick Armey’s think tank’s high-level message-mongering and a few approving pieces on Fox news, nobody’s come up with the faintest

Varoga and Rakis keep a central mailing address in Washington, pulling in soft money contributions from unions and other well-padded sources to engage in what amounts to a legal laundering system. The money — tens of millions of dollars — gets circulated around to different states by the 527s, which pay for TV ads, Internet campaigns and lobbyist salaries, all while keeping the hands of the unions clean — for the most part.

The system helps hide the true sources of funding, giving the appearance of locally bred opposition in states from Oklahoma to New Jersey, or in the case of the Tea Party Web site, in Illinois.

And this whitewash is entirely legal, say election law experts, who told FoxNews.com that this arrangement more or less the norm in Washington.

Such a shame that the Supreme Court opened poltics up to big money, huh?