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Nutroots Tag

We have not written a lot in recent years about Think Progress, the left-wing website owned by the Center for American Progress. But back in the day, in the earlier years of Legal Insurrection, we wrote a lot about Think Progress and its efforts to smear the Tea Party as racist and violent. Think Progress led an obsessive campaign to demonize the Koch brothers and Andrew Breitbart. The false claim that Sarah Palin's electoral map was connected to Jared Loughner's shooting of Gabby Giffords was spread with the early help of Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) fired up the Netroots crowd with one of her now-familiar red meat-tossing,  flame-throwing speeches.  The speech is being touted as the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign. Warren railed against moderate Democrats and insisted that "we are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party." Her goal appears to be to push her already-decimated party further away from mainstream Americans who find her repellent and her regressive, 1930's-era ideas idiotic. The New York Times reports:

Senator Elizabeth Warren used a speech to a grass-roots conference Saturday to take direct aim at Democrats’ diminished moderate wing, ridiculing Clinton-era policies and jubilantly proclaiming that liberals had taken control of the party.

Ever since the White House leaked Thursday night that Sen. Chuck Schumer would be coming out against the Iran deal, the progressive movement has foamed at the mouth with vitriol directed Schumer's way. Much of it is just the plain old progressive vitriol of the MoveOn.org, Daily Kos and netroots types. Schumer is a warmonger, wants war, loves war, and so on. https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/630051055687090176 Obama set up that argument when he claimed that Republicans were making common cause with hardline Iranians -- even though Obama clinched the deal with hardline Iranians who are laughing all the way to the bank and an internationally-authorized nuclear enrichment program. Obama set up the disloyalty argument, and it's no surprise that it's being used against Democrats who don't support the deal, particularly Jewish Democrats like Schumer. That dual loyalty charge -- often expressed in terms of being an "Israel firster" -- is an old anti-Semitic line of attack, as we explored in detail in a prior post, GreenStar boycott group trainer hurls “Israel-firster” slur at Schumer. The dual loyalty charge is almost exclusively made against Jewish supporters of Israel. You rarely hear it used against American Christians who support Israel. As The Tablet magazine reports, given the various dog whistles put out by the Obama administration, it's no wonder these type of accusations are resurfacing.

One of the big secrets of the Democratic Party is the deep racial tension between the mostly white elite progressive leaders and activists "of color." We examined this in detail in 2011, Dem Base Fractures Into Twitter War And Charges Of Racism Against Professional Left. In that post, we documented the Twitter war between black activists and Joan Walsh of Salon.com and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake:
What is clear is that there is a growing fissure in the Democratic “base” over criticism by the (mostly White) Professional Left, as reflected in this Twitter exchange:
Those tensions have simmered for the past several years, and grown in the past year as the #BlackLivesMatters movement insisted that its voice was not being heard even within progressive circles.

The vitriol from the political left didn't take too long to manifest following the 5-4 Supreme Court decision this morning in the Hobby Lobby case. Many eyes were on the reaction of Sandra Fluke -- free contraception's PR maven - following the SCOTUS ruling.

We have noted before the extreme eliminationist rhetoric directed at Republicans and the Tea Party by the most senior Democratic politicians, who portray the House's exercise of its constitutional power of the purse as terrorism. That rhetoric has also moved into mainstream liberal publications. What was once expected only of DailyKos or crazy fringe left-wing websites, now is mainstream liberal media. Here's a partial screenshot (full here) of a Google search this morning for "Republican extortion" -- note the mainstream liberal publication that show up on the first page parroting Obama's rhetoric: Google News Search Republican Extortion 10-10-2013 915 am - partial But The Atlantic outdid just about everyone with this image on its story by Philip Bump, How Obama Can Deal with the Irate Republican Army (via Ed Driscoll h/t Instapundit): Boehner Arrest The Atlantic Smitty had it right: https://twitter.com/smitty_one_each/status/388234299646181376 As startling as the image may seem coming from a mainstream publication, consider that the source of the image was a photo of an Irish Republican Army terrorist, Colin Duffy, who was charged with the killing of British soldiers (he later was acquitted): HuffPo AP Colin Duffy Arrest Notice the photo of Colin Duffy is the exact same photo The Atlantic used as the source for the photoshop. I'm sure the author and editors at The Atlantic knew exactly what they were doing, even if most of the readers didn't pick up on the Boehner being equated to a specific accused murderer.  Bump made sure to invoke the Irish Republican Army in the text of the post:

Maybe the David Sirota Award? "xaxnar" diarist at Daily Kos, April 16, 2013, The Right Wing Media Is Nervous: Charles P. Pierce noted today that the conservative media wing nuts are freaking out over anything or anyone that suggests what happened in Boston at the Marathon just...

Anthony Weiner is being rehabilitated in preparation for a run for Mayor of New York City. Seth Mandel at Commentary:
When a popular Democratic politician leaves office under the cloud of scandal and disgrace, the foremost question on his mind is when–not if–the media will begin reconstructing his career for him. There was the lionized Bill Clinton, who was impeached. Then there was former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, whose rehabilitation included a CNN show and a regular spot in Slate, where he proved to be an utterly conventional polemicist and shallow political thinker. And now we have the effort by the New York Times to resuscitate Anthony Weiner, whose congressional career was marked by erratic public temper tantrums and an inability to control himself or the volume of his voice. He left Congress after being caught in a sex scandal involving a college girl, and then falsely accused conservatives like Andrew Breitbart of making the story up. At every step in the scandal Weiner chose the least honorable path. Before the scandal ended his congressional term, Weiner was considered by some to be a favorite for the next New York City mayoral election. Now, two years after the scandal, he says he still wants to be mayor, and may in fact run for the Democratic nomination this year for the fall general election. Could he actually win?
The NY Times rehabilitation of Weiner comes at the expense of reality, which is that Andrew Breitbart was the one who held Weiner to account, and Weiner fessed up only after lying and accusing others, and only when there was no choice:

There's no Saturday Night Card Game tonight. I was going to write about some "Neo-Confederate" idiocy by a pretend lawyer who happens to be quite obsessed with me over at the liberal blog Glenn Greenwald calls " a cesspool of unprincipled partisan hackdom." When you are a liberal blog and Glenn...

Marco Rubio is on the short list of Republican presidential contenders for 2016.  Of course, that's a long way away, so who knows if he remains on the short list. So Rubio's a target even more so than in the past couple of years. Every question...

Just when you thought it could not get any worse. MoveOn.org and Michael Moore have produced a video which is beyond description. Can we just declare MoveOn a mental illness so it can be covered (under Obamacare, of course). Video (h/t NRO)  NSFW (language warning): Makes the creepy singing...

It truly is hard to overstate the joy on the left with Obama's horses and bayonets "zinger" last night. This summary at HuffPo reflected the joy: There were no binders full of women at the final presidential debate on Monday, but there were certainly horses and bayonets. President Barack...

I really sense that Obama supporters are losing it, completely.  I sense fear in their stupidity. After Big Bird and the contrived "binder" fauxtroversy, they have a new cause:  Tagg Romney threatened to take a swing at Obama when Obama called Tagg's father a liar. Of course,...