I kind of like what our friends at RSU call the health care town yells. They're speaking truth to power, while--unlike left-liberal protests--not blocking traffic.
So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news.
The classic liberal lie: "we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We've got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me."
- The Weathermen: "With a charismatic[3] and articulate[4] leadership whose revolutionary positions were characterized by anti-imperialist, feminist, and Black liberationist rhetoric,[2] the group conducted a campaign of bombings through the mid-1970s, including aiding the jailbreak and escape of Timothy Leary. The "Days of Rage," their first public demonstration on October 8, 1969, was a riot in Chicago timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago Seven. In 1970 the group issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government, under the name "Weather Underground Organization" (WUO)."
- Act Up: "In December 1989, approximately 4,500 protestors arrived at St. Patrick's Cathedral during Mass in a demonstration directed toward the Roman Catholic Archdiocese's public stand against AIDS education and condom distribution, as well as its opposition to abortion.[12] One-hundred and eleven protesters were arrested. Camille Paglia wrote in a December 2008 Salon column that a consecrated Host was desecrated by a protester, an act considered by Catholics to be blasphemous and an outrage."
- The SEIU: ""The violence in Michigan and the specific targeting of women labor leaders is reprehensible and should have no place in our labor movement or our country," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of CNA/NNOC. "For Andy Stern to direct this attack and its cover up is abusive, immoral, and unacceptable behavior. He demonstrates why RNs across the country want no part of an organization like seiu."
- Code Pink: Blocking Marine recruiting stations, tying up traffic, disrupting Congressional hearings, and, worst of all, protesting outside Walter Reed Army Hospital.
- ALF and ELF: Eco-terrorism, with numerous attacks on property, including those of many of my colleagues at UCLA
- Unions: "The National Institute for Labor Relations Research has compiled a list of incidents of union violence that average nearly 300 per year for the last 30 years."
- The people who forged Bush's supposed National Guard records.
- And that's just what I came up with off the top of my head...
While President Obama has focused attention on "special interests" that are mobilizing to try to defeat his health-care plan, the liberal group MoveOn.org is trying to mobilize people to attend congressional town hall meetings to push for the plan, and especially to push for a government-run “public option” insurance program.
MoveOn.org is even suggesting brief statements people can make in favor of a “public option” health care plan if they attend a town hall, and gives people the opportunity to download signs indicating their approval of the "public option" that they can print and carry into the meetings.
And so I have a word of advice for Perlstein:
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
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