By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Why is the left so angry? It's a question posed by columnist Byron York today, and he's got a great point. With control of House, Senate, and White House, you'd think they'd be sitting on top of the world. Instead, they lash out in anger. York writes:
If you doubt it, just watch a few minutes of MSNBC, where the recent nationwide series of "tea parties" to protest federal spending and taxes set off an angry, almost manic response. The most telling came on Keith Olbermann's program, during which the actress Janeane Garofalo, who plays an FBI computer geek on "24," denounced the tea parties as "racism straight up."
"Let's be very honest about what this is about," Garofalo said. "It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes...This is about hating a black man in the White House."
Was she watching the same tea parties the rest of us were?
Similarly, longtime Democratic adviser Robert Shrum wrote in The Week about the tea parties, in a diatribe that seems to border on hysteria. Calling the tea parties "insubstantial," "incoherent," "hate-filled," and "paranoia on parade," Shrum compares those protesting Obama's tax-and-spend policies to those who supported McCarthyism, anti-Catholicism, and even those who distributed leaflets on the day of Kennedy's assassination accusing him of being a communist. He also throws in references to anti-Muslim rhetoric, swastikas, and rising gun sales as well. Clearly he doesn't think these protests were "insubstantial," or he wouldn't feel so threatened by them.
Isn't that what's going on here—that those who have a stake in a bigger government, higher taxes, and higher spending might feel threatened by what they saw last week? The fact that the RNC had nothing to do with the tea parties makes them even scarier to some. These were citizens upset at the size and scope of our government, and there's nothing wrong with them saying so—even if some of them were a little on the fringes. That happens at every protest. The bottom line is that the vast majority of protesters were not "hate-filled," but expressing a legitimate concern. They don't deserve to be belittled and insulted.
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Colleen O'Donnell Pierce of AZ 3:06AM April 24, 2009
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