I finally got a chance to listen to KSTP-AM’s new mid-morning show, “Przebyl (sp) and Murphy”, this morning. These guys are putatively Bob Davis’ replacement on the mid-morning slot.

Not, I suspect, for long.

As we’ve noted in the past, once KSTP-AM lost Limbaugh, it drank the then-vogue-y consultant Kool-Aid that “conservative talk is dead”.  Over the past three years, it’s ditched all semblance of “out” political talk (Davis, Dave Thompson) as well as anything off-puttingly edgy (Tom Mischke).

I remember hearing the grumblings from some of KSTP’s staff even back in 2003 when the place was a cash cow (and heavily, overtly conservative, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis and Bob Davis, on top of Joe Soucheray’s not-so-much-conservative-as-curmudgeonly schtick); boss Ginny Morris would complain to all and sundry that “we have to live in this town”, and audibly pine for the station to edge more towards the middle of the road.  To be all things to all people.  To be more like…

I was going to say WCCO, but that’s only half true. I think she wants KSTP to be the station her grandfather built, back in the 1930’s; the station WCCO copied throughout the thirties and forties, and passed in the fifties and sixties.

Make no mistake; Morris’ grandfather Stanley Hubbard the First was a true pioneer, a genius, one of the great figures in American broadcasting.  While he ran KSTP-AM in the thirties and forties, he pioneered things like spot news (he had the a car outfitted with a short-wave transmitter, capable of reporting back to KSTP from anywhere in the country, the predecessor of the satellite trucks we see at news events today), entertainment radio (he broadcast adapted vaudeville shows from the Minneapolis Orpheum, where among many others Jack Benny got his start) and many other things we all take for granted.

This was back when the Twin Cities had maybe a dozen radio stations.  This was back when people were acclimated to town that had 3-4 newspapers, eventually three TV stations, and that was it.  This was back when media became community.

This was another era.  It’s gone forever – except in a very narrowcast sense.  Joe Sourcheray is to curmudgeons what Boone and Erickson were to Minnesota parents and lunchpails forty years ago.  Rush Limbaugh is to tax-paying working stiffs what Steve Cannon was to afternoon commuters thirty years back.

Listening to Przebyl and Murphy is just like listening to a time capsule of pre-1987 talk radio, maybe preserved on tape at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting; lots of chatter about local stories without any particular slant or bias or, truth be told, reason to stay tuned in.

And that’s just the overall theme.  I don’t know much about the two guys, but they can’t have a lot of radio background; it’s hard to say who stammers worse on the air.  They need to take a deep breath and relax and try to have fun with material that, I have to say, really isn’t very.  At least not at first listen.

Disclosure: I worked for KSTP-AM from 1985-87.  I also came in second place for the Program Director job there in 1991, behind…current PD and former KDWB colleague Steve Konrad.  I do a weekend show at a competing station. I declare that I’m utterly clinical about the radio business, but feel free to filter accordingly.

Yesterday President Obama released Bush administration memos on terrorist interrogation techniques in the interest of transparency and with a blatant disregard for national security.

Clearly, as unsavory as some of these techniques must be (I don’t want to know how sausage is made either) we have been kept safe here at home for some time since 9/11 and there have been several foiled attempts at savagery on the part of terrorists in Western nations – without a doubt in part due to our more aggressive attempts to gather, intercept intelligence and connect the dots to protect our interests – and save lives.

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.”

Whatever happened to when in doubt, keep your mouth shut – or in this case, keep the file cabinet locked. Whatta ya say Obammy that we err on the side of maintaining national security, not eroding it? Is that too much to ask?

What possible purpose could be served by advertising our most top-secret techniques for gleaning information that has probably saved lives?

A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”

“It’s damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama’s action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake.”

“I don’t believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either 1. the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against.”

This should come as no surprise to those of us who warned you that a man that “served” in public office for less than two years is not a suitable choice to lead this nation. But disregard the Incompetence Theory^™ for now. Is it possible that Barack Obama holds his liberal agenda above all else, without regard for the consequences to our nation or it’s people?

Preposterous you say? Case in point: an $800 Billion stimulus package that will only raise our nation’s already untenable debt, devalue our dollar, and with no hope or precedent to show that such a plan has any hope of stimulating anything – save half our nation’s Hopey Changey dreams of a world without pain – or gain.

Not to mention the fact that our economy is showing signs of stabilization – and without any assistance from the not-yet-implemented “stimulus.”

And why release this now – are all other issues solved? Does Obama know that we are now somehow immune from attack?

Obama did not act on an arbitrary timeline. There was a deadline in a court case with the ACLU on Thursday. It had been extended, but the ACLU was not going to agree to another.

Ah, the ACLU. Well at least now we know who’s in charge.

Or, is this Barack Obtumor’s way of relieving the non-existent guilt of a nation not-sorry for having the audacity to protect it’s law-abiding citizens from being deep-fried in jet fuel in his or her 88th-floor office?

No, it’s a sophomoric President force-feeding an ever-angering nation a far-far-left (we warned you) agenda that flies in the face of his promise of Change^®.

…and leaves us a little less safe than we were on Wednesday.

Ed and I will be interviewing Michael Yon tomorrow on the Northern Alliance Radio Network Volume 2, “The Headliners”.

Yon is currently America’s pre-eminent war corresondent.  He’s spent more time in Iraq and Afghanistan than most soldiers. He’s tackled everyone – the military, the Bush Administration, and even (in one notable incident in Mosul) the terrorists, at gunpoint.  Even Ernie Pyle never did that.

This is one of those interviews I’ve been looking forward to for years.

We’ll also be interviewing Eva Ng, candidate for mayor of Saint Paul.  She’s conservative,she’s a turnaround consultant (anyone know of a city that could use that?) and she’s been endorsed by the St. Paul City GOP Convention.  I’m looking forward to this.
I hope you can be there.

So let’s break it down:

1. Large group of Americans gather to protest taxes, spending and a rapacious government.
2. Leftymedia large, small and anonymous embarks on concerted effort to paint protesters as “extremists” and “radicals” (when not tittering like a bunch of seventh-graders), spending hours and pages of media time and space attacking protests that, let us not forget, don’t matter.
3. DHS releases a report that depicts pretty much every American to the right of Arne Carlson as a slavering Bircher.

Coincidence?

From Making Light, we have to wonder…:

…is ACORN getting really sick of all us uppity peasants?

(And it’s just as funny even if it is a spoof…)

To: Anderson Cooper

From: Mitch Berg

Re: Your 4/15 cablecast

Mr. Cooper,

Sitting back, I can think of many times, chatting away with my project-mates in the bullpen, where I’d unwrap a bag of Earl Grey or Rooibos and dunk it in hot water, without interrupting my verbal train of thought.

I’ve also wondered about the cognitive logistics of that more metaphorical, historical tea-related moment, the Boston Tea Party – and not only do I believe that hauling bales of tea leaves would not pose a cognitive obstacle to speech, but having worked a few heavy manual labor jobs, I’ll tell you that talking, even yelling, are perfectly normal while hauling heavy things.  One might reasonably suppose that dropping or throwing lighter amounts – say, individual bags through boxes – would present even less of an obstacle.

There is, of course, another definition of “teabagging”, well known to anyone who has been in fourth grade – utterly unrelated to the previous two examples, but which would, perforce, make talking difficult.

Now, on your April 15 broadcast, you quipped “it’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging“.

As I demonstrated above, that’s only true with one meaning of the term.

So Mr. Cooper, question one: it’d logically seem that you’re referring to the latter definition of the term; in addition, you said your quip with such an air of first-person authority; how indeed do you know it’s “hard to talk” while “teabagging?”

And on second thought, given the inevitable, if somewhat distateful and/or juvenile answer to the first question, the second question (“how did someone with no demonstrable talent or experience for the job other than perfect silver-gray politics and hair to match ever get a job as a CNN talk show host?”) is rendered, it seems, moot.

Thanks. Sorry for the imposition.

That is all.

NOTE: To be fair to Cooper, he’s better than Matt Taibbi, “policial correspondent” for bleeding-edge magazine Rolling Stone.

I was at a seance the other day, and we heard from – I kid you not – Joe McCarthy.

Here was the gyst of things:

MEDIUM: “OoooooooOOOOOOoooooh…”

McCARTHY: “Hello.  This is Joe McCarthy from the great beyond.  Keith Moon says “hi”. Anyway – please get word to Janet Napolitano; “Thanks”.  In five years, “Napolitanism” will have pushed “McCarthyism” out of the public perception.

Ms. Napolitano; I owe you my posterity.

MEDIUM: “OoooOOOOooooOOOOOooooh”.

It was kinda spooky.  He sounded happy, though.  Like his spirit was…

…getting cosmic payback?

Anyway.

Declare all dissent “crazy”.

Focus on the few protesters that confirm the thesis.

Do a hit piece, and run like hell.

Of course the CNN reporter did was she was told; depict Tea Party protesters as crazies,and then cut away.

But she got more than she bargained for.

It’ll be a great day when these hacks are chased from the streets for good.

After eight years of dubbing non-Klansman John Ashcroft “AshKKKroft”, comparing emphatic non-Nazis George Bush, Dick Cheney and Arnold Scharzenegger to Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich, and calling every economic downturn on a Republican’s watch “The Worst Since The Depression (TM)”, some lefties have found accuracy they can believe in.

“Comparing the Tea Parites to the Boston Tea Party is historically inaccurate”, I’ve heard more than a few lefties insist. “They were protesting against taxation without representation”.

Well, true, as far as it goes.  Of course, the “Tea Party” idiom has grown over the centuries to mean – in regular conversation – any kind of blow against arrogant, wastrel authority, but no matter.  The interesting bit for me is “what did the forefathers of these suddently-accurate lefties do when it was their turn to strike a blow for strict, pointillistic accuracy?”

So I dug through the archives.

May 8, 1945, New York (AP): Bob DeGrasse is having nothing to do with “VE Day”.

“We haven’t defeated Europe”, DeGrasse emphasizes, nervously twisting the ends of his stylized van dyk beard. “we defeated Germany, which in German is called Deutschland.  This observance should be called “VD Day” or, to be completely accurate, Sieg Trotz Deutschland, or “STD”, Day.

“There really is no honest alternative”.

———-

January 31, 1999, Seattle (UPI) – As the world awaits the historic, and possibly fraught, switchover to the new millenium, many worry about possible terrorist strikes expanding on the confusion.

Phoebe Napolitino disagrees.

“The new Millennium”, she enounces carefully, “doesn’t begin until January 1, 2001”.  She perches her horn-rimmed glasses on her nose.  “By which I mean, the first of January, 2001, or New Years day of 2001”.

“Terrorists wont’ strike ’til then”.

———-

June 9, 1933, Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine (Tass) – Dmitri Holodomoriuk has had it up to here with Soviet prosecutors.

“All these people being taking away for “right-wing activity”, Holodomoriuk muttered under his breath “are mostly just peasants who never had a political thought in their…”

Holodomoriuk’s sentence was intewrrupted by being grabbed and thrown into a Black Maria, never to be seen again.

Peoples’ Commissariat spokeswoman Zhanina Napolitanska has not returned comment.

History shows the importance of accuracy.

To: Janet Napolitano, DHS Secretary

From: Mitch Berg, Right Wing Extremist

Re: Assess This.

Secretary Napolitano,

I heard your response to American Legion president Rehbein’s criticism of your agency’s report.

Your line (as heard on NPR this morning): “It’s an assessment, not an accusation”.

With all due respect (emphasis on “due”), Secretary Napolitano, that’s a warehouse full of baked wind.

An “assessment”, well, assesses.  It quantifies, or at least qualifies, something; in the case of a “risk assessment”, it is supposed to give the “why” as well as the “who”.

But as John Hinderaker pointed out in skewering the report earlier this week, your report doesn’t “assess” anything; it runs down a shopping list of conservative groups, without explaining why any of them are a risk; no incidents, no people, no specifics, merely “watch out for pro-lifers, NRA members, tax protesters, and veterans; they’re all prone to being recruited by all those scary “militia” groups!”

That’s not an “assessment”; it’s a mass drive-by smear, no less so than “assessing” that black men are “prone” to being lazy, that Mexicans are “liable” to be illegals and that women are “likely” to be slaves to emotion to the point that they can’t be trusted with anything important.
If everyone’s a (potential) extremist, then nobody’s an extremist. Unless your only goal is to define “dissent” as “extreme”, “dangerous” or “mentally ill”.

Which, to be fair, seems to be not unthinkable with the Obama Administration; anyone who’d say “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and…it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” probably isn’t a stranger to the notion that “dissent is derangement”.

Which was more a Soviet thing than an American one, at least heretofore.

So, with all due (heh) respect, Secretary Napolitano, “assess” this:

Thanks, and do have a nice day.

That is all.

…and, in this case, the indisputable truth.

Yesterday and Tuesday, we noted that the left, locally and nationally, is engaging in class-action slander, based around getting people to believe that:

Conservative dissent equals murder.

It’s not an isolated trend.

It’s not new.

And it’s not an accident.

———-

“The dangerous right” is a well-worn trope in American political/media history.  It is also – to invoke Orwell’s aphorism about dictators needing enemies – entirely predictable.

Three weeks ago Philip Jenkins wrote an excellent history about the “Dangerous Right” media meme in American Conservative.  It’s an oldie, all right (emphasis added):

From 1938 through 1941, the media regularly presented stories suggesting that the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers. (Actual numbers of serious militants were in the low thousands at most.) Reportedly, the militant Right was armed to the teeth and plotting countless domestic terror attacks—bombings in New York and Washington, assassinations and pogroms, the wrecking of trains and munitions plants. Plotters were rumored to have high-placed allies in the military, raising the specter of a putsch. The ensuing panic was orchestrated by newspapers and radio and reinforced by films, newsreels, and comic books. Historians characterize these years as the Brown Scare.

In other words, standing in the way of FDR, the New Deal and the dawn of enlightened “liberalism” and Hope and Change itself was a shadowy, secret army – why, one might almost call it a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”!

And when liberals come to office with big, sweeping, “transformative” plans?  Well, the “enemy among us” needs to be trotted out as well:

After JFK’s election in 1960, the devoutly anti-Communist Minutemen took first place in liberals’ demonology. As in the 1930s, the far Right was supposed to be closely tied to out-of-control military officers. Remember fictional treatments of the time like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Seven Days in May”? Once more, too, the supposed threat from far-Right extremism surfaced in mainstream politics, especially during the 1964 elections…As in the 1930s, the extremists existed, and some hotheads contemplated violence. But once again, a yawning gulf separated the reality of the threat from the public perception.

In our lifetimes – so far – the worst fell during the Clinton years:

Between 1995 and 2001, America suffered the Great Militia Panic, when exposés of ultra-Right violence became a media staple. For liberal press outlets, America was facing a clear and present danger from the militias, from Nazis and skinheads, and even from dissident elements within U.S. Special Forces. Liberals accused the anti-Clinton Right of providing extremists with ideological aid and comfort. An impressive outpouring of books—peaking in 1996—warned of an imminent terrorist disaster. Typical titles raised the shadow of America’s Militia Threat, Terrorists Among Us, or The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland. One book warned of the Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning.

I always found it ironic how lefties accused conservatives of “wetting their pants in terror” about islamic terrorism after 9/11, after living through the waves of “mommy, there’s a militiaman under my bed!” that swept the nation during the Clinton years

The news media was open to the most improbable charges of right-wing atrocities. In 1996, television news shows discovered a (wholly spurious) wave of arson attacks in which white extremists were allegedly wiping out the nation’s black churches.

As recently as a decade ago, “terrorism” in the American public consciousness meant, almost entirely, domestic right-wing activism…by far the worst consequence of the Militia Panic was the massive underplaying of Islamic terrorism in U.S. public discourse and the disproportionate focus on the domestic far Right. Liberal columnists scoffed knowingly at terrorism experts who warned about foreign militants like al-Qaeda, when every informed observer knew that the real menace was internal.

I remember lefty pundits on about 9/13 furrowing their brows and warning us that right-wing domestic terror was still the “real danger”, as the Twin Towers still burned.  They were – it is hard to remember – that deluded.

By the way – does any of this sound familiar (emphasis again added)?  Elements of this phenomenon anticpate blogging itself by about sixty years:

If the more bizarre accusations sound like the common currency of the show trials in Stalin’s Russia in these very years, that is no coincidence. The main exposés of fascist conspiracy emanated from Communist Party journalists like Albert Kahn and John Spivak. (Spivak himself was an operative for the Soviet NKVD.) Charges circulated through Kahn’s newssheet The Hour before being picked up in the liberal press. The Red agenda was straightforward in that the Brown Scare allowed the Left to discredit any opponent of radical New Deal policies. Scratch the surface of any enemy of the Left, they claimed, and you would find a fascist spy, a lyncher, a storm trooper.

Or a member of a “vast, right-wing” and now “eliminationist” “conspiracy”.
The conclusion is near the beginning, and it is damning (emphasis added):

Based on the record of past Democratic administrations, in the near future terrorism will almost certainly be coming home. This does not necessarily mean more attacks on American soil. Rather, public perceptions of terrorism will shift away from external enemies like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and focus on domestic movements on the Right. We will hear a great deal about threats from racist groups and right-wing paramilitaries, and such a perceived wave of terrorism will have real and pernicious effects on mainstream politics. If history is any guide, the more loudly an administration denounces enemies on the far Right, the easier it is to stigmatize its respectable and nonviolent critics.

Like me.

Like Representative Bachmann.

Like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Bernie Goldberg.

Like you, you bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freak, you.

———-

When I’d heard that the DNC had hired linguist George Lakoff, I openly worried that the left was embarking on a campaign of violence – violence against the language. It would be a campaign to control how the language itself imparts perceptions about politics.  It’s a battle the Democrats have been winning for decades, if only because they’re the only ones that show up.

The parallels with Orwell’s 1984, where language was being systematically engineered to reflect first political orthodoxy and, eventually, nothing at all, are impossible to miss.

In Mike Judge’s overlooked classic movie Idiocracy, society falls because idiots outbreed smart people.  Despots and demigogues have long known that the best way to take over a society is to win over the thugs and the dolts; the pen is, at least in the short term, not mightier than the sword or, in this case, the truncheon. Noriega had his Dignity Battalions; Mugabe, the Gukurahundi; Hitler and Mao and Stalin, the Sturmabteilung and Hitlerjugend, the Red Guards, the Komsomol, the legions of dedicated true believers who didn’t have to think, just do; to smear the Jew, the Bourgeois, the Wreckers today, and to beat, imprison and kill them tomorrow.  For society’s own good.

And the Big Left today has, on a rhetorical plane, the same basic thing; the legions of the ingenuous, the dedicated but not-excessively-bright, the people who are willing to suspend the rules of civility and decency in service of…

…what?  The meme that “Some of your fellow citizens’ beliefs will lead to mass murder!”?

I’d like to think that continuing to take the high road is the right response to this class-action slander.  I’m less confident in this all the time. Indeed, as I noted yesterday, DHS Secretary Napolitano has tipped the left’s hand.

Let’s try to roll it all together tomorrow.

…who has trouble mixing up Janet Napolitano – former Arizona “governor”, current DHS secretary, and bureaucrat who sees a potential terrorist in every conservative – and Johnette Napolitano, singer for the ’80s garage-punk band Concrete Blond?

I mean, the names.  Not so much the resemblances:

Janet:

Johnette:

Wonder if the DHS secretary gets requests to sing “Joey” at the department’s Karaoke night?

Remember like 25 years ago,when Hollywood was portraying Vietnam Veterans as one of three things; homeless bums, psychos and dangerous psychos (with the sole exceptions of “The A Team” and “Rambo”)?

Vietnam vets’ groups complained; the vast majority of ‘nam vets were adjusted to civilian life just fine at that remove, and they were not especially more likely to have crippling psychological problems than the general population.

You’d think the left would learn from their mis…

…er, never mind:

The US Homeland Security Department, under fire for saying US forces returning from the Iraq and Afghan wars were potential right-wing extremist recruits, said Wednesday it honors US veterans.

Honor, slander – tomayto tomahto.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano sought to douse anger among conservatives and veterans groups like the American Legion over a report from her department warning of a rising threat of right-wing extremism.

“We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not — nor will we ever — monitor ideology or political beliefs,” Napolitano said in a statement amid charges that the department had done just that.

Well, to be fair to Napolitano’s critics, the anger is more about the report’s rolling slinky of casual defamation, covering virtually every conservative constituent in the United States, not about allegations of monitoring.

Yet.

American Legion chief David Rehbein on Tuesday blasted the report as “incomplete, and, I fear, politically-biased” and took special aim at its warning that returning veterans having difficulties reintegrating society could be recruited by right-wing groups for possible terrorist attacks.

In a letter to Napolitano, Rehbein underlined the document’s mention of Oklahoma City bombing author Timothy McVeigh’s US Army background and called it “as unfair as using Osama bin Laden as the sole example of Islam.”

And it’s not just veterans, of course; the DHS report slanders the gun, life, tax and property rights movements.

Indeed, it follows tacitly through on the campaign-era slur that voting against Obama was a sign of racism.

There is no way a responsible Administration would let Napolitano survive this.

Well, there’s your answer, I guess.

…The One was going to fix our image around the world; he was going to rescue the US’ reputation, especially with the world’s legitimate powers, Russia and Germany and France.

Do I remember that correctly?  It seems so long ago:

Mr Sarkozy is pouring cold water on President Obama’s efforts to recast American leadership on the world stage, depicting them as unoriginal, unsubstantial and overrated. Behind leaks and briefings from the Elysée Palace lies Mr Sarkozy’s irritation at the rock-star welcome that Europe gave Mr Obama on his Europan tour earlier this month.

The American President’s call “to free the world of the menace of a nuclear nightmare” was hot air, Mr Sarkozy’s diplomatic staff told him in a report. “It was rhetoric – not a speech on American security policy but an export model aimed at improving the image of the United States,” they said. Most of Mr Obama’s proposals had already been made by the Bush administration and Washington was dragging its feet on disarmament and treaties against nuclear proliferation, the leaked report said.

Of course, there’s a domestic French motivation, too:

On the personal side, the French President is needled by the adulation for an unproven US leader whose stardom has eclipsed what he sees as his established record as a world troubleshooter. “The President is annoyed by what he sees as the naivety and the herd mentality of the media,” said a journalist who is privy to Elysée thinking.

The other reason?  France craves a more prominent place on the world stage; it left empire rather grudgingly.  On those occasions where the US has left a vaccuum, the French have moved in.

And there’d seem to be a vaccuum.

The One appoints a ‘border czar’:

The former federal prosecutor will oversee Homeland Security’s efforts to end drug cartel violence along the U.S.-Mexico border and reduce the flow of illegal immigrants sneaking across the border from Mexico into the United States.

He could get the job done.

As long as his only job is to move in a desk for David Petraeus to sit in.

I’ll be heading out in about an hour and a half to go to the Minnesota Tea Party, at the Capitol Mall in Saint Paul.

There’ll be a Tweetup – if you have my Twitter ID, look it up; I’d love to see you there. All of us Domestic Terror Suspects gotta stick together.

Remember, when watching “coverage” of these events in the Mainstream Media or Paidoff Liberal Media; when reading turnout figures, multiply by at least five, if not a full order of magntitude.  I’ve been at Second Amendment rallies where I personally counted a thousand people that got credited with 200 attendees in the MSM and PLM; Jason Lewis’ annual tax rally, which packs the Mall solid from the steps down to Constitution (5-7,000) every year gets credited with maybe a thousand, to the point where reading MSM/PLM accounts of any conservative protest are like listening to Soviet Radio.

Also remember this: conservatives aren’t protesters.  We have jobs and families.  So if there are ten of us actually out somewhere, it means at least 1,000 feel that way almost strongly enough to come out.

The MSM/PLM are doing their best to try to trivialize this – the terminally vacuous Anderson Cooper (“the Nicky Hilton of News!”) has bought into the juvenile “teabag” slur, not that that’s a big surprise – because, at a high level, this sort of thing scares the piss out of them.

Think about it; to get a crowd of lefties – congenital protesters – out for an event in any legitimate numbers takes a massive Get Out The Protest effort involving MoveOn.Org or BarackObama.com; it’s big, it’s centralized, and it’s expensive.  Being liberal protesters, they need zealous kids with bullhorns to tell them where to stand and what to say, and entertainment to keep them from throwing rocks and getting into fights; that takes money and organization.

And yet these Tea Parties, lefty slurs notwithstanding (“Constitution Party?”  Puh-leeze.  I got more votes than them running as a Libertarian in 1998) are wholly organic; they were organized by a bunch of no-names on blogs and Twitter.  And it’ll end up being a bigger event than anything MoveOn has done in years, even with their millions of Soros Bux.

And remember – the left has seen this before.  The smart ones – and there are a few – know that when masses of conservatives gather, the grounds will be neat and clean and the police will be nice and bored, but politicians will get the message.  On Second Amendment issues, on taxes, on issue after issue, the workadaddy hugamommy conservative voter is the harried, benighted, put-upon giant of the American electorate.

And The One may have gone a tax too far.

Being self-employed has it’s trade-offs.

On one hand, 10 AM this morning, writing sizeable checks to “Minnesota Revenue” and the “US Treasury” – an oxymoron if ever there was one.

On the other: home early, by my own volition, to ride my bike for the first time this season. On a sunny, 70-degree day in April…in Minnesota no less.

It’s a fair trade.

Reading Minnesota Progressive Project is like going to a Joaquin Phoenix concert; you don’t really care for the stuff, and you don’t want to go for the event’s own sake, but you just know  you’re going to see a train wreck.  (Sort of like Al Franken’s first press conference, if heaven forfend he gets seated in the Senate).

And so I occasionally gulp down a glass of water (on an empty stomach only) and pop open their container in GoogleReader, and see what wonders the new day brings.

Ah.  Yesterday it was Grace “9/11 was an inside job!” Kelly, in a piece that started – mirabile dictu – fairly innocuously, discussing (very briefly) the large number of refugees who’ve come to the Twin Cities over the decades (discussing Somalis and Tibetans but missing the Vietnamese and H’mong, who fled the oppression of the far left to get here – but no matter. I wouldn’t expect Kelly to get  sense of history anytime soon; let it go).

But then:

I think we have to rethink our “terrorism” label. Certainly the American Revolution would have been considered a criminal violent insurgency against the established order of English rule of the colonies. Gasp – the American Revolution advocated violence! Gasp – a criminal violent insurgency today would be called “terrorism”.

I could feel my jaw dropping in dazed wonder. It’s the old “The founding fathers were terrorists” bit.  There are still lefties who use that old bit of self-pleasuring historical illiteracy.

Onward:

So when can people advocate violence and not be labeled terrorists?

For some of us, that’s fairly simple: when terror isn’t the primary, or only, means of achieving a social or political goal.  Saying “this land is ours, go away”, and taking up arms and fighting those who try to take the land back, is not terrorism.  Kidnapping your occupiers and sending body parts back to their families with notes demanding independence is terrorism.

Publishing a declaration of independence,and defending that independence, is not terrorism.  Setting off nail bombs in Boston or New York [*] to indiscriminately kill soldiers, Tories and innocent bystandards and cow the British into leaving – that would have been terrorism.

Is it just a case of my violence is good, your violence is bad? Is the US making the moral violence judgments for whole rest of the world? I would say “yes”. My, how imperialistic of us, particularly in light of principles of American revolution.

One wonders if Grace “9/11 was an inside job” Kelly knows what the “principles of the American Revolution” were.

Defining what liberty was, and how the individual related to government in a free society?  Recognizing inalienable rights?  Establishing a democratic republic? Enshrining free press, worship, assembly, speech, jury trials, due process and enumerated powers?
I’m guessing that’s not what she has ever thought was thinking of.

…that this came from any American gun show:

The M1919 or the girl.
Or much of this, for that matter:

Oh, yeah – and that machine gun at the top?  It’s not an “anti-aircraft gun”.  It’s a Browning M1919A1 on a tripod, for shooting at ground targets – like other drug dealers, in this case.  It’s WWII-vintage, made in the USA, probably sold to Mexico or another Latin American nation’s military…

…and not, mind you, via a gun show.

That, or I’ve been shopping at the wrong gun shows.

PRE-POST NOTE: I actually wrote this series last week, when the “annoying trickle” of pointless,mindless, baseless slander of conservatives was pretty much background noise.

Of course, since I wrote the first three parts of the series, Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security – which would seem to have become completely politicized in the past three months – has essentially declared all conservative thought and dissent (not to mention military service) as probable cause for government suspicion.

My friend and radio colleague John Hinderaker at Power Line, shreds this report in one of the essential fiskings in recent blog history; I’m sure it’s just the beginning.

But the extent of the defamation of all conservative thought in this country goes way beyond a witless bureaucrat and her minions, and won’t end in the unlikely event Napolitano is fired in the disgrace she deserves.

My timing, sadly, could not be better.  Or worse, depending on your point of view.

———-
As I noted yesterday – the usual annoying trickle of leftybloggers and “alternative” media types grasping onto examples of bad behavior by conservatives or (more usually) inflating off-handed remarks into “evidence” and outright mangling of context has turned into a babbling runoff-swollen brook of cultural defamation.

Few brooks babble more than local leftyblog icon Mark Gisleson, who wrote last week:

On Sunday’s The UpTake live news show [no archive available], host Tom Elko’s conservative blogger guest Mitch Berg turned to the camera and implored his 2nd Amendment buddies to not get crazy. No clue if JammieWearingFool listens to Mitch’s radio show or reads his blog.

Now, haven’t seen the video of the Uptake appearance – if there’s anything I hate more than listening to my voice, it’s seeing myself on TV – but I’m pretty sure the subject was the nutcase in Pittsburgh who shot the three cops, due to (he and the media claimed) his fear of Obama’s anti-gun proposals.  Now, despite that fact that most of us Second Amendment/Human Rights activists deal with this by joining the NRA (and  you’ll note that there have not been four million of these incidents), I was urging fellow human rights activists to not panic; we’ve beaten back worse than this, and done it not only by civil means, but means we can be proud of a civil Americans.

It’s hilarious, of course – this is the same Mark Gisleson who five years ago earned undying infamy for pining for armed revolution, in the Twin Cities’ Reader’s late, unlamented “Babelogue” (whose archives have perhaps mercifully gurgled down the memory hole):

In my heart, I still believe in revolution. In my heart, I still think I have the ‘nads to put my life on the line for a cause. In my gut I think this is the only way we’ll ever achieve our goals of economic and social justice. But in my head, I want to win the next election so we don’t have to have a revolution.

…and who’s boasted about a purported past as a “labor goon”, has suddenly gotten the vapors over the odd bit of (let’s take him at his word, by which I mean “humor the delusion”) borderline-militant rhetoric.

Vapor-y enough to refer us to…:

And TBogg has more on the eliminationist Right.

Ah. TBogg.  Well, if TBogg says it, it’s…

…well, it’s someone else’s talking point, only lobotomized.  TBogg is the ultimate metastasization of the anonymous leftyblogger; intellectually vacuous, given to broad sweeps of cultural group slander (while shielded from accountability by his precious anonymity) and waves of nasty, petulant, juvenile snarkiness, and…

…well, pretty much everything that the local anonymous leftyblog community aspires to.

But is the right “eliminationist?” Wow.  That’s a word you don’t see every day; Daniel Goldhagen used the term “eliminationist anti-semitism” to describe the German people before and during WWII – but he took a whole book to do it, in which me laid out a case that German society had in it a long tradition of a desire to, y’know, kill Jews.

So since it’s such a big word, curiousity triumphed over experience. I read “TBogg”, wondering as to the “evidence” of the “eliminationist right” that apparently lurks outside the gates of our civilization.

Read it if you feel compelled to do so; it tries to link the story of James Adkisson, the deranged Knoxville man who, let it be known, really really did hate liberals (WARNING! PDF FILE! GIVE UP ALL HOPE OF USABILITY OR PERFORMANCE!), and followed up on that hatred by killing two people at a Unitarian Universalist church.

Mr. Bogg (and the various leftybloggers who are his only real sources) ties Adkisson to Timothy McVeigh, which is trite and facile but not uttelry inaccurate, and thence to “Right-wing hate radio”, the diabolical cabal of Limbaugh/Hannity/Bernard Goldberg (?), who we are assured are really behind it all.

And there, in the bleatings of a gutless anonymous blogger and his dotzy fanboy in Saint Paul and of a thousand similar intellectual copulations, is the nucleus of the real story; the left wants you, and the population at large, to make the following leap:

Conservative dissent leads to murder.

More tomorrow.

EPILOGUE:  Again – I wrote the above late last Friday.  I’ll write more about Secretary Napolitano’s slander on Friday.

Don’t forget – the Minnesota Tea Party is tonight, from 5-8, at the Minnesota State Capitol.

There’ll be a bunch of speakers – just go, you’ll find out – but the best thing about these events is that you get to meet a slew of other people of all parties who are excited about the same thing you are.  Which doesn’t happen often when you’re a conservative; ours is usually a solitary road.

Anyway – hope to see you there!

…production that Lindsay Lohan has been in in quite a while.

When the word got out that President Obama was being fairly hands-off on the Captain Phillips crisis, some conservatives complained.

Not I.  I figured if there is a situation a President needs to delegate, this one – a fast-breaking crisis on the razor’s edge of life and death – is the one.  It should be the kind of situation where a President – and the next several echelons below him – say “we’ll seek a diplomatic solution, but you, the commander on the scene, need to use your discretion; you’ve trained for this sort of thing your whole career.  If there’s a threat to the hostage, you use your discretion, and I’ll back you on it”.

And if that’s how Obama would have handled things, I’d have nodded and said “Good job, Mr. President”, not that anyone cares.

But that’s apparently not how it happened:

Late last week, when it did not want it to appear that the president was acting like a cowboy, the Administration was content to say that Obama was taking a low key approach to the pirate hostage drama, leaving the decision making to others and perhaps hedging against a bad result.

So far, so good.

But once news of Phillips’ rescue reached the United States, the Administration was quick to try and claim at least a share of the credit for the president.

Was it the President’s handlers who did this?  Likely enough.  It’s Obama’s staff and minions and Congressional support that are the bulk of the problems with this Administration in the first place.

It is not quite shameless exploitation – presidents always get more credit, and blame, than they likely deserve for events that happen under their watch – but it is playing politics.

As a legislator, President Obama had the luxury of taking both sides of an issue to position himself politically. But as president, especially in matters of national security, the president does not have that luxury, and he cannot seek it. Perhaps with more experience, President Obama will be able to chart a course and be willing to accept the consequences of his decisions, good and bad. But in the events of the last week off the coast of Africa, President Obama showed himself to be not yet ready to act decisively before knowing how the political winds will blow.

Bill Clinton was accused of the same thing – but then, the “threats” he faced (the ones that weren’t bomb attacks that resolved themselves instantly, anyway) were all to his political power, not the nation.

Search me.

No, really.  Search me.

Thanks.