Imagine If Liberals Were Capable Of Reasoned Debate

This post was occasioned by the Beast’s comment to a link put up by Drowning Creek in Dave’s Sabotaging the Tea Party post. DC speaks admiringly of a certain blogger’s effort to cast the Tea party issue in racial terms (like we haven’t seen that done before). The Beast’s response began small but grew and grew until he decided to give it its own post.  To wit:

It’s amazing how much effort is spent on flabby reasoning. Case in point, Blogger Tim Wise (self-billed as “… among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S.”) labors mightily to make the Tea Party racist, violent and probably hostile to weatherizing, while at the same time complaining of a double standard in its coverage. The title of his post is “Imagine If The Tea Party Was Black”:

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure – the ones who are driving the action – we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

This is actually not such a bad idea, but to make it work you have to approach the topic fairly. See if you think he succeeds:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Guess we know where this is going, don’t we? Now, the Beast read the whole thing but in the interest of full disclosure, his mind bailed after that paragraph. It was obvious to him that this is the vision of the Tea Party movement filtered through the lefty ideological prism which tars an entire movement for the actions of a tiny fringe element and bears no resemblance to reality. It’s just another “Racist Right Wing Militia” smear job. Call me back when you manage to come up with an example of white people dressed in paramilitary garb standing outside polling places wielding batons.

Since you’ll probably be gone a long time waiting for the above to happen, check out Jack Kelly’s piece today explaining why liberals are smearing this movement so desperately: Thin-skinned Liberals Smear Critics.
Money quote:

What really terrifies Democrats is not just the number or size of tea party rallies, but that they are occurring at all. For more than a century, the protest demonstration has been almost exclusively a left-wing thing. Conservatives just don’t demonstrate. The tea party indicates a level of street activism on the right unprecedented in our history.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Dec. 16 indicated the tea party was more popular than either Democrats or Republicans. Respondents approved of the tea party, 41 percent to 23 percent. More disapproved of both the Republican Party (28-43) and the Democratic Party (35-45) than approved of them.

Libs are praying fervidly to Gaia, Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei for something violent to happen. Efforts to manufacture this (anybody remember the Hanged Census Taker fizzle?) have failed repeatedly. So the left hyperventilate over what “might” happen, forced to denounce future fantasies because reality stubbornly refuses to provide them what they want in the here-and-now. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, has been predicting a “rise in right wing militia groups” since 1990. These hate groups are like Ellie Mae Clampett’s biscuits – they’re always on the rise but never manage to actually do it.

As one wag put it: “The specter of Fascism is always descending on the United States but it always manages to land somewhere else.” Libs ought to check their own back yard.