Tucson Cartoonist Indulges In Fantasy Of Having Obama Send in the SEALs to Kill Tea Party Terrorists

Sorry for this being the theme of the day. But it just keeps coming.

Bear in mind, the sainted-though-alive Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson. And represented Tucson.

Supposedly this was caused by Sarah Palin deploying the age-old visual metaphor of placing bullseyes on targeted districts. (See, when you're targeting a district, it's like a that's what you're aiming at, right...?)

And of course a general "climate of hate speech." War metaphors. Intemperate language.

Now with Gabby Giffords returning to Congress, a Tucson cartoonist decides to mark her comeback with a silly badly-drawn cartoon fantasy about killing his Tea Party opponents.

Richard Cohen, who was very very bothered by such hot talk when he saw some political advantage in being bothered, now pens this:

The odd thing about the Tea Party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version of Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy. (This is what Islamic radicals will do in Egypt.) [Note: Arendt is chiefly known as a historian of the Third Reich, too-- ace.] Note that the Tea Party is nowhere near a majority — not in the House and not in the Senate. Its followers have only 60 seats in the 435-member House, but in a textbook application of political power they were able to use parliamentary rules to drive the congressional agenda. As we have known since Lenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority.

So, let's see-- in that one paragraph, Tea Party Congressmen are compared to 1, Nazi totalitarians, 2, Islamist totalitarians, and 3, Communist totalitarians.

Incidentally, America has gone to war with all three groups.

Does anyone in the media notice this? Or are they having too much fun making the comparisons to realize how breathtakingly contradictory and self-serving they're being?

In a blog post, John Podhoretz notices.

Jonah Goldberg s a remarkable rant about press bias over at National Review Online you really have to read. [I linked it earlier-- ace] He takes on the fact that liberal commentators and liberal politicals now feel entirely free to refer to conservative Republicans, especially those aligned with the Tea Party, as terrorists, jihadists, thugs, dictators, and the like, without fearing the consequences of media blowback. But I’m struck by a quality shared by all those who engage in increasingly uncontrolled rhetoric about the role of the members of Congress who opposed a debt-ceiling increase and any deal: They sound impotent.They are hurling violent words at the people they dislike because they cannot believe their own arguments are not winning the day.

...

It isn’t, of course. These words are tossed about because the people who speak them are becoming aware of the fact that they have lost the national argument they believed they had won in 2008. They are revealing themselves as losers, sore losers, bad losers. And Joe Nocera, Paul Krugman, Fareed Zakaria, and others aren’t making arguments.

Again, it must be underlined that Gabby Giffords, the wounded woman said to have been shot due to such angry talk, just returned to Congress today, and even that poignant fact is not enough to cause a single liberal a moment of introspection and self-evaluation.

This is all impotent, as Podhoretz says, a bout of name-calling by ridiculous people behaving like children.

It may be something else, as well. It may indicate that these people are so detached from reality that it is only now that it has occurred to them that they lost the elections of November 2010.

Perhaps until now they just pretended this all away. Perhaps only now when the consequences of that election are being felt do they finally realize they've lost.

The media focused relentlessly on signs carried by political ingenues at Tea Party rallies. Boo, hiss, this particular everyday American had a Gadsden Flag which implies, you know.

That was unconscionable.

But here we have the paid professional writers of the professional left writing 700 word columns far worse than the amateurs they previously castigated.

Again: Does no one notice this at all?

posted by Ace at 03:37 PM

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