So much for all the talk of civility.
In one of the most deranged columns yet (and that’s saying a lot for NY Times columnists), Joe Nocera unleashed an unhinged attack on the Tea Party movement, calling Tea Partiers terrorists, jihadists and suicide bombers:
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took….
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
Reader Tom, who sent me the link, writes:
Terrorists? Jihad? Really? From the paper that won’t use those terms when they
actually apply? This column can incite violence against duly elected members of
Congress. What would Gabby Giffords think – she who voted with the so-called
terrorists?
Nocera replaced Frank Rich. I didn’t think it could get any worse. It did.
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Does this qualify as Islamophobia? Are Islamists insulted by this? To para phrase the “Princess Bride” I do not think those words mean what you think they mean. Why is it the Press and the left seem to just assign arbitrary meaning to words? Can we get a copy of the Ministry of Information’s current dictionary?
Progressives are engaging in oolongphobia. It’s so insensitive and hurtful.
Name the movie this line is from:
“This is information retrieval not information dispersal”
Don’t you know that the ministry of information just collects information? They don’t give it out!
About Ministry of Information.
Years ago a not so schooled co-worker of mine was trying to locate any estate monies left by his father who had deserted him and his mother, and he proudly showed me a letter he had written addressed to the “Bureau of Idle Statistics.”
Formal education be damned. He was more right than wrong, in my estimation.
One drawback of Rich’s departure was this: You could win bar bets by wagering that no matter what he wrote about, no matter how far the ostensible theme of the column was from politics, he’d always drag in George Bush. He was like Mr. Dick, Aunt Betsey’s friend in “David Copperfield,” who found that every time he tried to write on anything he always wound up writing about King Charles’s head.
Of course, Frank Rich was the one who once referred to John McCain as “unpatriotic” for opposing some Obama policy. Oh, yes, various forms of patriotism–Rich was writing for the Harvard Crimson, McCain was being tortured by America’s enemies…who’s to choose?
The other thing I liked about Rich was that I could easily enrage my liberal friends by responding to their glowing praise of his latest abominatination by pointing out that “Rich has been dead wrong about everything since he came out in favor of Cats!”
He was the Times’ theater critic before being handed a column to bloviate on politics.
“You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.”
Is that what they really say? I thought the official Progressive/Democrat mandate is to have “dialog” with terrorists “without preconditions.”
Nocera replaced Frank Rich. I didn’t think it could get any worse. It did.
Excellent point, professor!
Someone just emailed me this by Phyllis Chesler, on another aspect of the mainstream U.S. media’s approach to Islam, which I thought I’d pass on. She writes:
“…even I must concede that the American mainstream media really does print the bad news about Islamic gender apartheid—but it does so without drawing any ‘politically incorrect’ conclusions, not even on their op-ed pages…” http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/02/an-eye-for-an-eye-in-tehran/print/
So who’s gonna’ head on over to NYTimes.com, find the article and turn up the heat on Nocera?
In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.
much of the country has watched in horror
The New Yqwk Times dwindling subscribers.
Forty-one percent of the rest of the country applauded taxless spending cuts.
Stuff like this is music to my ears. People only carry on like this when they’re losing.
And I’m a-okay with it being printed and given large distribution. All but the devout recoil from it, so these work as sorta reverse campaigns. Hell, I wish somebody would give Pelosi, Biden, and Alan Grayson network shows. It never hurts when the other side puts its crazy-angry on display. I’ve personally always suspected that the sheer over-the-topness and nastiness of the anti-Bush crowd played no small role in his being reelected.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is just further evidence that the liberals are imploding. This is exactly how it happens. If they simply put forth their positions in a civil manner, their arguments would immediately fail because there is absolutely no factual basis anymore upon which their positions make sense to most people. They now have little credibility and they are thus left with nothing but extreme drama techniques to try to get their points across. They got the Senate, The House and the WH in 2010 and they squandered their political capital on absurd utopian ideas that flourish only in the liberal inner sanctum of the faculty lounge. They have undeniably made the economy, foreign policy, and our energy problems far worse then when they came into power – and they are so frustrated by now that they are collectively bustin’ their own nuts over it.
Let them go on like this because it only serves to undermine their credibility. Their ability to connect with the majority of the electorate is going to be inversely proportionate to the extent they go off the deep end like this no-name peon at the NYT. By the time the 2012 elections come around, the Democrats will be considered the party of unicorns and glitter and the Republicans will be the only adults left in the room. Don’t interfere with that which is bringing about their own demise. The sooner they go the better off we’ll all be – including even them!
(Reuters) – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the United States Monday of living beyond its means “like a parasite” on the global economy and said dollar dominance was a threat to the financial markets.
“They are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy,” Putin told the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi while touring its lakeside summer camp some five hours drive north of Moscow.
“They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar,” Putin said at the open-air meeting with admiring young Russians in what looked like early campaigning before parliamentary and presidential polls.
An obvious “Tea Party” fellow-traveller
LOL. Maybe Palin was sending morse code signals with her flashlight to Putin from her house. That’s how he got recruited into the Tea Party.
On a serious note– BO is doing serious damage to our international standing with all his obamadrama.
The Republicans control about 55% of the votes in the House. They were duly elected by a majority of the people in their districts. The NYT and MSM disparage the voters who elected them to Congress when they refer to them as extremists, terrorists, Hezbollah, hostage takers, etc.
And they don’t care that they are insulting a huge swath of the population. It just demonstrates how arrogant they are.
We’re terrorists? When do we get to start lopping heads off of liberals?
I would love to hear a montage or even a simple count of how many times those terms have been used by liberals/Dems/MSM types since this manufactured “crisis” came about!! Around the time Cut, Cap, and Balance was passed, the jihadi/terrorist talking point was churned out. Just like when the TEA Party patriots were “mobsters” and a “gang” of racist un-American neo-Nazis. Remember that?
Why – WHY?!?! – do we let these people dictate to us HOW we are to speak, WHAT we are allowed to say, and WHEN we are allowed to say it?! They define the terms, they lay down the rules, they are the only ones allowed to go on the offense. Bull!
So, freedom of speech only applies to leftists, eh? Unfortunately, we make that true whenever we accept their terms, their boundaries, their premises. It’s outright hypocrisy!!! STOP caving to their terms!!!!
****fuming mad****
That’s Alinsky.
Stop letting the left Alinsky-ize us!!!!
Boehner, McConnell: grow a pair, get a spine and go on OFFENSE!!! Stop falling for the MSM tripe – there was and IS no crisis!! It was all to get you to give in to their demands!! Again!!! Arrrgggghhhh!
Whew. Thanks for letting me rant.
Keeping perspective is hard. 😉
And it is the Dems who actually support negociating with real terrorists.
Aucturian – I read this idiot’s column but when I logged in to toss a verbal grenade at him I was told that “Comments are Closed”. I must say that he is a fitting and worthy replacement for Frank Rich – Frank must be proud.
Were the comments not closed I would have said that I enjoyed his rant because it simply meant that the Tea Party was effective in opposing Socialist agendas and that he should look forward to more of the same. We have not yet begun to fight!
“toss a verbal grenade” — see you are a terrorist!
…but the perfect metaphor. 😉
Since the 2010 campaign, when a main thrust of the memes the Left has been pushing was the violence and “incivility” of anyone who disagreed with them on any point; their own rhetoric has become routinely violent and threatening. This has included, during the battle in the Wisconsin legislature a few months ago, specific threats of death and harm to Republican legislators, the Republican governor, and their families for the “crimes” of having a different political point of view. One of the greater mistakes made was that after the specific perpetrators were caught, no one went to jail thus legitimizing the tactic.
Words do mean things. The Democrats try to redefine them on an ad hoc basis to their advantage, but they mean things on a far deeper level than even a column in the New York Times.
If I may give an example from history. British Lord MacCartney headed the first diplomatic mission from Britain to China in 1793. It was an unmitigated fiasco. The misunderstandings on both sides, each side perfectly reasonable from their own viewpoint, were horrendous. MacCartney left having done nothing but convince the most powerful Emperor China had had for centuries that the British [and all Europeans] were not worth the effort to deal with. Leaving aside the clashes over court etiquette, MacCartney’s letters from the British government were horribly insulting and threatening when translated into Chinese. Mind you, Emperor Qianlong’s relies were less than conciliatory when translated into English.
One key linguistic problem was that if a culture does not have a concept, the language will not have a word for it, and vice-versa. MacCartney’s letters had a number of references to “freedom” and “free” meant in the English sense of “liberty under the rule of law”. China under the Emperors had no such concepts in their culture, and the best that they could translate the meaning was what we would call “license” as in licentiousness. The Chinese court was horrified, and wanted nothing to do with those immoral, crazed barbarians. That was an ongoing problem in early contacts between Asia and the West, and there are a large number of Chinese compound characters trying to put words to alien western concepts. A lack of a common reference point in words, means that the actions and reactions to those words can and will be very different.
The American Left, including the Democrats and the New York Times [sorry for the redundancy], does not have the cultural concept of “legitimate disagreement” or “legitimate political opposition”. Their beliefs are built on an innate sense of self-righteousness that would be appropriate in a Knight Templar on Crusade. [and that particular comparison would make Leftist heads explode!] The closest thing that they have to the concepts are when Republicans capitulate. Any delay, any reduction in the scope of their victory, any effective opposition in objective terms is considered by them to be illegitimate, criminal, immoral, and deserving of correcting by any means necessary. 99%+ of Leftists and Democrats have never read or heard of Lenin’s 1901 work “What Is to Be Done?”; but its tenets are ingrained in their worldview.
Words and cultural mindsets define and guide actions. For everyone.
A little more history, if I may. I ran across this from a commenter at BELMONT CLUB, and found it striking.
For American Leftists, Democrats or their accomplices farther Left, to actually lose either by a vote of the people or in a legislative or judicial body is both shattering to their worldview and proof of justification of going outside the law to restore the rightness of the world.
Their increasing use of violent rhetoric and acts, and the rhetorical projection of claims of similar acts unjustified by facts on those who disagree with them, means that they are going to feel justified in moving further and further outside the law. Physical acts of terrorism, real ones, are inevitable as a byproduct of their redoubling their efforts to restore their world when they are opposed or actually lose. It is going to happen, and the fact that the columnists of the New York Times, or the Vice President of the United States are willing to dub their political opposition as terrorists while refusing to condemn or admit real physical acts of terrorism by name means that we have moved past the point mentioned in the exposition of Braddick’s History.
There are at least three Republican politicians who are being actively demonized by the Left, and deemed illegitimate to exist. I hope that they have their own tight security arrangements, because especially when dealing with the Department of Justice, Federal law enforcement is explicitly guided by political expediency and what the military calls “unlawful command influence”. Acts of violence by the Left against their opponents are going to occur. When they do, the reaction, both by the criminal justice system and the media [including the New York Times] and by the victims are going to determine where our country goes in short order.
Subotai Bahadur
“This column can incite violence against duly elected members of Congress.”
Not just Republican members either. Given that Democrats and their operatives, from the President on down, are routinely denouncing the Tea Party as terrorists, is there really much political downside to any of them actually resorting to violence? Fortunately, violence is still almost exclusively a tool of the Left, and the typical Tea Partier is someone that former President’s refered to as ‘My Fellow Americans’ (an expression the current occupant seems never to use).
The typical Tea Partier has a job and pays taxes, or is married to someone that does, and is a lifelong law-abiding citizen. These are people that used to be routinely refered to as “Patriots”. Now, they’re terrorists – because they don’t want to see the country bankrupted in a futile attempt to establish some socialist utopia.
The Left should count themselves very fortunate that the Right is not inclined to violence. But perhaps they already know – otherwise why would they be so openly provocative on such a regular basis?
Subotai, It was this sort of one-sided “revolutionary justice” that culminated in Spain’s Calvo Sotelo moment in Spain in Spring 1936, which convinced Primo de Rivera, Franco, Mola and a bunch of other Spanish officers there was no other option left than military revolt. We may be approaching our moment.
I will proudly accept their label of “Terrorist”, if it comes with the footnote that the Liberals have often proclaimed “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. “Compromise” has now become another euphemism for unconditional surrender.
“So much for all the talk of civility.”
Civility always was, and always will be, a cheap prop of convenience in the Liberal theatre of the absurd.
Remember, the Left (and their friends in the media) use 1984 as a guide, not a warning. The tea party is the Emmanuel Goldstein today, then whomever is the GOP Nominee next year.
I await the day that the Left defends OUR Free Speech rights. Never gonna happen.
TP Terrorist Apprehended
Ricochet