“The tea party has dispersed,” Gloria Borger proclaimed on CNN after the Romney victory in Nevada.

Huh? what does that mean?

She concludes, as many in the Activist Old Media have, that a Romney victory in Nevada is a defeat for the tea party.

My conclusion; the media is looking for any reason, any reason, to declare the tea party dead. Plus, a few recent polls show that Romney actually is getting tea party support.

The Super Bowl is a big game so that means the tea party is dead. There is snow in Denver, so the tea party is dead. As long as you say the tea party is dead, you have a spot on a panel with the Activist Old Media.

It just amazes the media that Mitt Romney can run away with a state like Nevada, with a prominent tea party contingent (albeit for the first time in the primaries; it’s too early to say it’s a trend), so they conclude the tea party must be dead.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the tea party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the tea partiers made by some lefty hater and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the tea party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the tea partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

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Marketplace, the daily business program produced by American Public Media (APM) and broadcast by public radio stations throughout the country, has been doing its best lately to support the decrepit Occupy Wall Street movement. While odd, perhaps, for a program ostensibly focused on financial news, the obsession with promoting Occupy has become a feature of public radio in general, and Marketplace is no exception to that rule.

Yesterday, for example, Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal hosted an organizer from Occupy and a leader of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt to explore “common ground” and connections between the two groups. The intent was clearly to flatter Occupy by association with the success and idealism of the Tahrir Square revolution–although the fact that Islamist parties swept the vote in Egypt’s recent elections was not mentioned in the segment.

Curiously, the political advice offered by the Tahrir Square activist at times spoke more to the concerns of the Tea Party about big government, and inadvertently punctured some of the socialist pretensions of Occupy: “[You should] engage those 1 percent and you tell them: ‘Take bureaucracy and take away corruption. We could do way much better.’”

Nonetheless, in a related story by Ryssdal and Mitchell Hartman from Jan. 24, Marketplace sought to find the inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street protests in the Arab Spring: “Young people feeling squeezed, demanding better opportunities and a fair deal. The issues sound similar — from Maged in Cairo, to Max and Brian in Portland.”

At one point, Hartman even compared the protests against former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to the protests against Wisconsin’s new Republican governor, Scott Walker, last spring–an inflammatory comparison favored by public sector unions in their attempt to demonize Walker and his collective bargaining reforms. Hartman suggests that the symbolism of the Wisconsin protests may have inspired the Occupy demonstrations–without noting the financial and institutional role played by public sector unions in both.

While casting the Occupy movement in a heroic mold, Marketplace often attempts to downplay and debunk the Tea Party and its concerns.

On Jan. 23, for example, the show featured a story entitled, “Why Saul Alinsky Matters in the 2012 Election.” Instead of shedding light on who Alinsky was, what he believed, and why he is important to understanding President Barack Obama and the organized left, Ryssdal and interviewee Bob Bruno from the University of Illinois attempted to obscure the true nature of Alinsky and his ideas: (more…)

When the South Carolina primary results revealed a blowout victory for Gingrich, Romney supporters and the Establishment Apology Brigade responded by borrowing progressives’s talking points against the tea party. That a sizable chunk of tea partiers, independents, and women voted for Newt Gingrich doesn’t make them “racists,” as I have heard suggested, or “bitter clingers,” or any other pejorative favored by progressives and suddenly subtly adopted by establishment types.

I know and respect many of these individuals and I don’t begrudge them their passionate support of the candidate in whom they believe; rather, I disagree with their chosen tactics in attempting to undermine their opposition’s support.

We spent three-and-a-half years protesting for limited government and were called nazis, racists, bigots, etc. by progressives, many of them sitting lawmakers. The above-mentioned apologists were right with us in denouncing such tactics. Now suddenly they’re echoing them simply because the majority of grassroots do not share their choice of primary candidate? Their strategy is to browbeat and verbally abuse grassroots into lining up behind an uncertain and not “inevitable” candidate? Isn’t that what progressives have been doing to grassroots for the past several years? We were called racists and “bitter clingers” for not supporting Obama. Are we now suggested racists and “bitter clingers” because we don’t support Romney? How does that work?

Let me put it another way: it wasn’t OK to call tea partiers “racists and hillbillies” when they opposed Obama’s big government, but it is OK to call tea partiers “racists and hillbillies” when they oppose the establishment’s pick for primary candidate?

What sort of bass-ackwards logic is this?

The South Carolina results have more to do with a repudiation of Romney than a widespread preference for Gingrich as a candidate. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any tea partiers who support Gingrich–to the contrary. There is simply a general, “damn the man” sentiment when it concerns the GOP establishment, and it’s of the establishment’s own doing.

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It seems the onetime political news website Politico is edging toward a Daily Kos-like experience. January 14th we see yet another step in Politico’s journey toward left-wing extremes with a fake poll that claims that no one in South Carolina likes the tea party movement. Did I mention it was a “Facebook poll?”

The headline ways it all, really: Facebook/POLITICO poll: South Carolina users cool to tea party. If the fact that this “poll” is just some posting on a Facebook page doesn’t make you laugh at its validity, the hilarity continues as Politico goes on to treat this silliness as real news.

“Almost two-thirds of adult Facebook users in South Carolina say they aren’t fans of the tea party, according to a Facebook poll conducted today with POLITICO,” the “news” website begins.

Come on. Does anyone imagine that Politico reached “almost two-thirds” of the Facebook uses in South Carolina? Does anyone even imagine that Politico reached even a representative number of Facebook users in South Carolina? Was there any scientific method at all to this or was it just some posting that a handful of South Carolinians saw on Facebook? Bet you can guess.

But let’s not let science get in the way of a good liberal meme, OK? Politico has decided that everyone in South Carolina hates the tea party movement and that is that, you see?

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they are “not at all supportive” of the tea party, compared with 20 percent who were “somewhat supportive” and 18 percent who were “very supportive.”

Of those surveyed, women were slightly less supportive of the tea party. Just 35 percent were either “somewhat” or “very” supportive of the movement, compared with 42 percent among men.

Politico does admit that this poll has some, er, limitations.

The results only represent the sentiment of South Carolina users on Facebook, not registered voters or likely GOP primary voters that tend to be more reliable barometers of primary elections. The Facebook poll, for instance, doesn’t exclude Democrats or independents.

How many Facebook respondents were Democrats? How many were white, black, or Asian? How many were actual voters? How many really lived in South Carolina? How do we quantify these results? Who needs scientific controls on a poll, anyway?

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I suppose we couldn’t get past the one-year anniversary of the crime against Democrat Representative Gabrielle Giffords without some Old Media outlet blaming the supposed “heated” political rhetoric of the day for her shooting. On Sunday we saw NPR doing just that. The fact is, no matter how many times they say it, politics and the “heated rhetoric” thereof had absolutely nothing at all to do with Giffords’ shooting. The linking of the crime to politics is just not legitimate.

On this one-year anniversary, NPR’s Linton Weeks was all about the improvement of our “civil discourse,” and full of lament that it just isn’t happening. Perhaps it is a noble sentiment, but he marred that nobility by beginning his piece with a false allusion once again tying the Giffords shooting to the “political atmosphere” of the day.

“When a gunman opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,” Linton wrote, “some people were quick to blame the episode on the overheated political climate.”

With that false allusion we also know what NPR meant to do. It meant to blame conservatives for Giffords’ shooting.

He went on to say:

At the time of the attack, there was a high tide of political rhetoric across America and a low ebb of social civility. The New York Times reported that the shootings “raised questions about potential political motives” and that the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff was blaming the tragedies on “the toxic political environment.”

According to The Times, national reaction was immediate. “Democrats denounced the fierce partisan atmosphere in Gifford’s district and top Republicans quickly condemned the violence.”

To the extent that “some people” did indeed immediately jump to the conclusion that the rhetoric of the Tea Party, conservatives and the Republican Party was at fault for the Giffords shooting, Linton is correct.

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Here’s a new way to try and hip-up the boring, ages-old, left-wing idea of tax hikes: link it to reality TV star Kim Kardashian. That is just what ABC News tried to do on the Wednesday, January 4th edition of ABC “World News Tonight” when the venerable news program helped advertise an effort by a small group headed by a former Democrat operative that wants to hike California’s income taxes. It is a two-pronged approach of hitching a big government, big spending, high tax agenda to the TV reality show star in order to drag younger people into the left’s class warfare game.

ABC highlighted a California Millionaires Tax policy recommendation from a group called Courage Campaign. The group is headed by Rick Jacobs who is the former head of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign in California, a Huffington Post writer, and leader of this admittedly “progressive” group.

ABC reported that the “liberal group” (and kudos to ABC for actually identifying them as a liberal group for a change) is upset that Kim Kardashian, who made some $12 million in 2011, only paid one percent more than the average middle class wage in the Golden State.

Here is what the extremist high-tax group says on it’s website about this:

Kim Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010, but she only paid 1% more in taxes than a middle-class Californian. That’s not OK, especially when budget cuts are decimating schools and critical programs for children, the elderly, and the disabled. It’s exactly why Courage Campaign and two dozen other organizations are putting the Millionaires Tax of 2012 on the ballot.

Wow, that tiny, little one percent suuuure seems small, right? But let’s look at the actual payment, shall we? Kardashian paid a tax rate of 10.3 percent and 10.3 percent of twelve million is $1,236,000! And those middle-class folks that paid one percent less at 9.3 percent? Well if the average income in California is $47.000, then they paid only $4,371. Why aren’t these middle-class louts paying their fair share? (That’s called sarcasm, by the way.)

Now, it’s not that I care at all for Kim and her brood — I never watch so-called reality TV and have never seen her show — but this is all really just class warfare. After all, let’s look at the tact here: Instead of actually talking about what Kardashian pays, this ABC flogged extremist group focuses on that “one percent” as if that makes her tax remittance tiny. They mislead the public by purposefully avoiding any mention of the amount she actually paid.

Seriously, the fact is we could out right confiscate the millions made by the Kardashinas of this country and it wouldn’t make a dent in the hole of trillions of dollars that Democrats have dug for us.

But there is one last thing to ask about this ABC report: I’m just wondering, but has ABC ever highlighted the tax policy idea of some small tea party group that made a video to sell its plan to the people? Why does this tiny, left-wing group in California rate any attention at all in a national news program?

Obviously the answer here is that ABC saw the possibility of exploiting Kardashian and enraging her young fan base in order to drive them to support a left-wing idea. It’s all about branding, you see. If the far left and ABC can leech off Kim Kardashian to sell their creaky old socialist policies, then that’s what they will do.

Larry O’Connor’s well-caught “sound bite for the day” yesterday deserves further elaboration.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, left-wing journalists Chris Hayes of The Nation and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post–no strangers to Democrat-media collusion–revealed that they had been part of an off-the-record White House briefing in which it was made clear that President Barack Obama planned all along to let the temporary payroll tax holiday expire, and then blame Republicans.

The meeting may have been the one first revealed on December 19, 2011 by ABC News’s senior White House correspondent, Jake Tapper, who tweeted that day that “a group of progressive media stars” had attended a private meeting at the White House with the President.

However, if Hayes is to be believed, the message of that meeting may have extended far beyond the “progressive” media niche at MSNBC, and reached a broader audience in Washington.

According to Hayes, “everyone in Washington” knew that Obama wanted the payroll tax extension to fail–and yet the same journalists eagerly covered the subsequent payroll tax debate as if Republicans were the only obstacle to an extension. The result of the media’s collusion was a year-end political victory for Obama and the Democrats at the expense of House leaders, the Tea Party, and Republicans in general.

Here is the exchange between Hayes and Klein (0:44 to 1:04), with MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry chiming in encouragingly (transcript follows):

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Howard Fineman pretends to know what’s best for the tea party and plays into the hands of the establishment by issuing back-pats for Mitt Romney.

Newsbusters notes:

The show did not delve into whether the GOP candidate had a legitimate complaint about Virginia’s ballot access laws which will only include the names of two Republican presidential candidates on the ballot for the state’s March 6 primary.

Yes, apparently it’s “megalomania” to be upset when ridiculously stringent rules for ballot legitimacy are changed mid-game (a must-read post on this). Basically, the rules for the Virginia’s primary ballot access are more complicated than those of Whack Bat:

Perry wasn’t called names for objecting to VA’s oddball rule change most likely because he isn’t nearest to Romney in the polls. Newt Gingrich is a larger-than-life beltway candidate, but he’s not the establishment’s choice for this race. They’re squarely behind Mitt Romney this time [my emphasis]:

“A lot of us who normally would have been in this presidential race a long time ago, have been waiting for Christie to make a decision,” said Georgette Mosbacher, a Republican uber-fund-raiser and former finance co-chair of the Republican National Committee who was among a group of Republican bundlers hoping to convince Christie to enter the race. “I think tomorrow, we’ll be contacting one another and probably put something together with Romney.”

That oldie-but-goodie afore-linked article, by the way, gets better the further down you read. Like here, when they tried justifying soul sales:

“The speech I gave to my conservative friends was, if you pick somebody who makes you 100 percent happy, you only get 47 percent against Obama,” said Catsimatidis. “We have to capture the middle in order to win and make a change in this country. Ninety percent of them stood up and said, ‘You’re right.’”

What good is principle if you sacrifice it to win? You’re not winning on your principle because you didn’t enter that horse in the race; you’re winning on a compromise of that principle. You can tell yourself that it’s a “strategy,” a strategy to inch us ever closer back to that place of simple government conservatism, if doing so makes you fall asleep easier at night. Compromising your principle to present less of a difference between yourself and your opponent isn’t a strategy, it’s forfeit. You’re not winning on your merits, you’re winning on theirs. It’s almost as if the establishment’s strategy was devised entirely by the Democrat opposition: be more like the other guy to win. Be Democrat-lite. That serves Democrats, not Republicans. The GOP establishment thinks that you won’t notice if they dress it up with a shiny red “R” by the name. It’s not like the Devil can quote Scripture or anything, right?

It’s frustrating to see so many Republicans simply throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel for Romney because they have such low political self-esteem. That’s what this is: it’s a self-esteem problem. We think we can’t do any better than what we have right now and we lack the self-confidence to try.

The right has an inferiority complex (or we’re sadists) and people like Howard Fineman and the MSM can’t get enough.

The battle for conservatives isn’t the general (have you seen Obama’s approval ratings?), it’s the primary. The first and best blow that The One can deliver to the GOP is by nudging the establishment to nominate a candidate that cancels out his own faults. Nominate a guy who drafted the blueprint for nationalized health care and you remove health care ammunition from your stores in the general. Nominate a guy weak on immigration and you remove that weapon from your arsenal. There isn’t a bogeyman against which the DNC can pit Obama; aside from congress–whose own approval rating is tanking so it’s useless–their second best choice is to make unnoticeable the difference between Obama and the GOP nominee.

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Confederate Yankee:

You would have thought that the three separate entries I dedicated to exposing the lies yesterday in this article and video by the progressive propagandists at Think Progress, I would have said all there is to say.

But there is more… and it is shocking.

Remember “Activist 2,” the Saint Louis Team Party infiltrator, that claimed “I’m a proud racist, I’m white?”

It seems that Think Progress used a clip from this video, a video entitled “Proof that the Tea Party is not racist.”

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

Glenn Beck suggests that Newt Gingrich is so “progressive” that only racism could explain why the tea party would support him over President Obama. He is alluding to Gingrich’s praise of Theodore Roosevelt. But the “progressive” outlook of Republican Theodore Roosevelt (TR) was much different than the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace, who served as Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president. TR opposed socialism and communism.

During an appearance on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Fox Business Channel program, Beck said about Gingrich:

“This man is a progressive. He knows he’s a progressive. He doesn’t have a problem with being a progressive. So if you’ve got a big government progressive [in Gingrich] or a big government progressive in Obama, one in Newt Gingrich, one in Obama, ask yourself this tea party. Is it about Obama’s race? Because that’s what it appears to be to me. If you’re against him but you’re for this guy, it must be about race.”

With this comment, Beck is claiming that the policies of Gingrich and Obama are the same or at least very similar. However, in his interview with Beck, Gingrich made the point that he believes government has a role in maintaining some “minimum regulatory standards of public health and safety.” He also said government programs have to be reformed to maximize individual choice and that some federal subsidies, such as those which bolster a domestic oil and gas industry, are defensible. None of this qualifies as Obama-style socialism.

Christopher Ruddy of Newsmax noted in his article, “Glenn Beck Should Revere Theodore Roosevelt,” that “The policies advocated by TR were not those of some social engineer who wanted to remake the United States based on a Saul Alinsky radical model.”

Beck notes that Theodore Roosevelt started the Progressive Party, but this is not the same Progressive Party, dominated by the Communists, that nominated Henry Wallace for president in 1948 and which continues to influence the Democratic Party today. (more…)

It’s that time of year again, time for newspapers and magazines to start floating their “top stories of the year” lists and Time Magazine has a whole “Top of Everything” list with which to thrill us. But it is Time’s Top U.S. News Stories list that deserves some closer scrutiny because on it Time has determined that the Occupy Wall Street tale is the number one story of the year. As if anyone ever doubted that this left-wing temper tantrum would pique Time’s interest most.

But, seriously, now. Is the Tucson massacre somehow a lesser story than the Occupiers? Is the long-drawn out GOP primary campaign a lesser story? How about the debt crisis? Is that somehow a less important story than Occupy Wall Street? Apparently Time thinks so.

Certainly these lists are always somewhat subjective. After all, what one considers important another may not. But some of these entries seem to point out Time’s ideology as opposed to a serious attempt to pick the top stories of 2011. And making the Occupy story number one is pure ideology.

Time puts this story above the bad economy, Iraq, the Penn State sex abuse case, and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. In fact, if it weren’t for the bad economy, the debt ceiling debate and the bank crisis this Occupy business would not have occurred at all.

Naturally, Time’s characterization of the “movement” is all sweetness and light. Not one mention is made of the now over 400 arrests made as a result of crimes perpetrated by the Occupiers. In fact, Time blames all the ills of the Occupiers on the beleaguered cities for their “heavy handed-policing” of the protests.

Time also disgorges the discreditable claim that the OWSers are the left’s tea partiers. This is a calumny against the tea party that really needs to be eliminated from the national discussion of the two movements.

Another aspect of the Occupy events went unmentioned in Time’s laudatory entry on the protests is the fact that taxpayers are being charged millions of dollars in tax money we don’t have to clean up after and police these protests. This somehow never makes an appearance in Time’s gladhanding of the Occupiers.

What is clear with this entry is that Time Magazine had an agenda with this pick. Sure the OWSers deserved a mention on a top ten list. But that it made number one and that the entry ignored all the negative aspects of the protests proves what the magazine is really attempting to do with this list.

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Now that they’ve officially been hung out to dry by both the elite media and the Left, Occupy Wall Street has apparently decided to die with a whimper instead of with dignity. Five lonely Occupiers in Chicago. Three in Indiana. And when that evil (not really) Rush Limbaugh makes an appearance in the very heart of Occupied territory, New York City, and only a dozen or so neo-hippie crybabies bother to show up, methinks that’s a death rattle I hear.

But you have to remember ’twas New Media that killed Obama’s astro-turfed, anti-American army of poopers, rapists, vandals, drug abusers and trespassers — and that without New Media the MSM would’ve gotten away with their evil (yes, really) master plan, which was to recreate the sixties’ anti-war movement. The whole of the MSM intended to give these Occupy degenerates the same oxygen they gave anti-war degenerates forty years ago. The worst people in the world would be spoon fed the encouragement and legitimacy required to spin them into something they are not. And all of this was going to be made possible through the covering up of a hundreds of sins both big and small.

The only problem for the MSM, though, is that this isn’t the sixties and, therefore, they no longer control every portal of mass communication. Thus, armed with our own cameras, the power to disseminate information without funneling through the media’s corrupt filter, and armed with THE TRUTH — video by photo by investigative report, Occupy collapsed under the exposed weight of their own hypocrisy, noxious beliefs, and craven misdeeds.

In the form of a victory lap, here are my top ten New Media moments:

10. The Copper-Pooper Photo That Went ‘Round the World

A moment captured on film frequently comes to define a movement. Just as the flag-raising at Iwo Jima defined WWII and one brave soul stopping a contingent of tanks defined Tienanmen Square, so will the Copper-Pooper Photo forever define Occupy Wall Street. Anarchy, depravity, incivility, and the utter pointlessness of it all captured forever.

The photo might have been snapped by the mainstream media, but it was New Media that wouldn’t and will never let it die.

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On November 30, CNN’s T. J. Holmes gave us a great example of how the Old Media is soft peddling the law-breaking going on at the Occupy events in order to make these events seem far less dangerous and illicit than they are. Like many in the Old Media, Holmes seems desperate to give lawbreaking Occupiers as much cover as possible — a benefit they never offered the tea partiers.

In an interview with an L.A. city police commander about the clearing of Occupy Los Angeles, Holmes did his best to minimize the number of arrests of members of the Occupy protest. The actual number of arrests was 200, but Holmes repeatedly characterized that numbers as “dozens.”

Now, I don’t know about you but when I hear “dozens” I think of the number twenty-four. Being generous I might even say three dozen (a healthy 36) could be thought of as “dozens.” On the other hand, when someone tells me “200″ the word “dozens” doesn’t at all come to mind. I just don’t think of 18 dozen as “dozens.” I think of them as hundreds!

Of course, Holmes was desperate to make hundreds seem less imposing. So, to him, two hundred arrests became minimized to “dozens.”

It must be pointed out here that even after two years of tea party protests featuring millions of Americans and often seeing many thousands appearing at any given event never saw 200 arrests during the whole time! In fact, there weren’t even 100 arrests in two years with millions of protesters. Not even 50 or 25 arrests, for that matter.

This soft peddling of the Occupy-Whatevers, though, is of a piece with the penchant of the entire Old Media to ignore the lawbreaking going on at the Occupy events. The truth is simply being ignored by the media. A recent tally by John Nolte shows 364 serious incidents to date of criminal actions — one short of one for every day of the year — at the various Occupy events across the country. And this list doesn’t count the many thousands of local laws, ordinances, and permitting rules that have been flouted by these Occupy protests.

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Tis the season for buying books for your loved ones and as always the The New York Times Sunday Book Review is here to help. And as always the Sunday Book Review is there to help us understand that anything from the right side of the aisle, especially the tea party, is to be put in the worst possible light at all times.

So, what is it this time? Book reviewer Kevin Boyle lets us all know that he thinks that the folks of the tea partymovement are somehow just like the Ku Klux Klan. Nice, huh? That’ll get the holiday season started right!

In his Sunday book review Boyle reviews a pair of books actually on the KKK — meaning that for the first time bringing up the KKK in a New York Times article isn’t wholly gratuitous. So he has that going for him, which is nice.

But what was totally gratuitous was the way in which Boyle opened his review, slamming by inference the entire tea party and analogizing it to a modern day KKK:

Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.

No, not that movement. The one from the 1920s, with the sheets and the flaming crosses and the ludicrous name meant to evoke a heroic past. The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they called it. And for a few years it burned across the nation, a fearsome thing to behold.

Yeah, because today’s era and the tea party are so dang similar to the KKK and the era of the 1920s, right? What is a more natural fit, anyway? What left-winger could doubt Boyle’s hatemongering?

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How weird is it to note such a thing? Weird but also necessary. Chris Matthews even acknowledges the left-leaning aesthetic of the media, so to get a fair report on a tea party protest is worth nothing. Watch and see how Colorado residents protested their very own bridge to nowhere:

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It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the fantasist’s art comparing JFK to Obama is a wonder to behold. It really is. One might think it satire if Rich had never been presented as a serious essayist by the New York intelligentsia. If this were to be his first public writing, one might think him the new Jonathan Swift for its central premise is simply amazing for its utter deviation from reality. Rich, it seems, thinks that Obama is just like John Kennedy because Kennedy was somehow killed by the “hate that ended his presidency,” or something.

The part that is so fantastic is that Rich devolves to a long ago discredited theory that Kennedy was killed that dark November day in 1963 somehow because of right-wing hate for him. What is so absurd about Rich’s fantastic claim is that he wholly discounts the fact that Kennedy’s killer was a communist. In fact, Rich never even mentions that Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist. He hints at it obliquely but does so in a way that dismisses the ideology as in any way important.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a piece on a public figure that is one part hero worship, one part discounting of that same figure, one part pure fantasy, and one part baseless comparison to the life of a whole other public figure that is also worshiped as a hero without a legitimate reason. But Frank Rich has done it here in a way that brings to mind make J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate and complicated plotting.

There’s so much wrong in this one piece that it’s hard to figure out where to start first, but Rich’s central premise is that JFK was killed because of a climate of “hate” engendered by the blindness of Kennedy’s detractors on the right. This, Rich seems to think, is somehow just like Obama. Well, except that Obama is still alive and no one has even made a single attempt to kill him, and all (God forbid).

Interestingly, Rich does seem to notice that John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency did not live up to its hype. Rich notes that historians have basically rated JFK’s short tenure in the White House as a wash, neither good nor horribly bad. But even with that admission, Rich writes glowingly of Kennedy. It is still all “Camelots” and “brief shinning moments” with little justification for any other reason than mere hero worship. With that, though, Rich succumbs to the worship like so many starry-eyed members of his deluded generation.

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Yesterday First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden appeared at the last NASCAR race of the season to serve as co-grand marshals and shout “Gentlemen, start your engines!” The appearance was part of the Joining Forces initiative and yesterday, according to the White House, FLOTUS was joined by “5,000 active duty and retired military personnel and families and thousands of NASCAR fans” and was loudly booed when her name was announced over the loud speakers.

Mediaite writes:

At an event with such an apparently unifying theme, the crowd’s reaction was an ugly reminder of how personally some have taken the political divisions in our country.

It’s not a recent occurrence, and to my memory, this is the first time that a Democrat has been publicly booed. I certainly don’t recall progressive media condemning how Sarah Palin was booed at a hockey game in Philadelphia:

For those who argue that “Palin wasn’t a First Lady,” what about when progressives booed George Bush at Obama’s inauguration?

Chris Matthews, who recently blasted Obama, seems to have made the only condemnation of the thousands booing.

I’ve always said that respect for public office is a two-way street, and the ultimate failure of this is when the individual holding said office doesn’t themselves demonstrate respect for it.

Is it really a surprise that after three-and-a-half years of being demonized by the party of the President and First Lady (when they aren’t doing the demonizing themselves) that Americans would issue a frosty reception? This is the same President that called Americans “bitter clingers” [their emphasis]:

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

If we’re to discuss manners, I’d say here are several instances where etiquette was breached. If we’re to discuss manners, I’d say etiquette was also breached with the White House’s sanctioning via a corrupt DOJ the murder of border agents with our own federally-funded guns program, Fast and Furious. If manners are sacred, then I’d say etiquette was defiled when the White House took half-a-billion dollars of public money and funneled it to a failing green energy company belonging to his biggest fundraising bundler. I see little in the way of headlines concerning these.

Frankly, I’ll not be lectured to about civility by people who endorse this:

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William “Bill” Randall is running for Congress out of the North Carolina 13th. Randall, an African American, experienced what must be called a hate crime in the left’s vernacular. His campaign sign had racist graffiti spray painted on it including the letters “KKK.”

Now, usually this is the sort of story that the Old Media goes wild over. It is prof that racism is alive in America, as far as they are concerned. It is proof that tea partiers, and conservative whites are eeeevil. This is usually the kind of story that would go national, yet the media has delivered a collective yawn to the defacement of Randall’s sign.

Why? Because Bill Randall is not the liberal candidate in his election. He is the conservative Republican!

The Old Media doesn’t care if so-called hate crimes are perpetrated against Republicans. They only care if they are committed against folks on their own, far left, Democrat side of the aisle.

Consider the nontroversy the media made from the story of the painted-over rock on the hunting parcel leased by Rick Perry’s family:

When Perry became a party to the hunting lease from 1997 to 2007, the property was described as northern pasture. His campaign told the press that the Governor hasn’t even been to the site since 2006. And Hugh Hewitt gets it right, “many, many people were interviewed for the story. Only seven recall seeing the rock, and not one of them connect Rick Perry to it, nor do any of the people …”

That’s not journalism.

Anonymous sources tell me that the Washington Post is dying and that race-baiting might accomplish its two objectives: 1) destroy the right-of-center movement, and 2) sell newspapers.

The Randall campaign even made a little parody video about the incident.

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In her exclusive interview with Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D, AZ), ABCs Diane Sawyer began with a retrospective of the terrible crime committed against the Congresswoman by a mentally disturbed, a-political gunman. But true to her left-wing agenda, Sawyer could not resist illicitly linking tea party activists, anti-Obamacare sentiment, and even Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to what was perpetrated against Rep. Giffords on that terrible day.

Yes, even though these calumnies against conservatives and Sarah Palin have been thoroughly discredited, Sawyer links them anyway to the shocking crime that took the lives of six people, injured others, and delivered a debilitating head wound to Representative Giffords.

It was only hours after the shooting occurred on January 8, 2011, that left-wing activists, purported journalists, and Democrat operatives alike began blaming the shooting of Rep. Giffords on “Tea Party hate” and the “violent rhetoric of the right.”

The false narrative was picked up by nearly every Old Media outlet and disgorged from their talking points sheets over and over again. It was days before everyone learned that the killer, one Jared Lee Loughner, had been stalking Giffords for several years before the tea party, Obamacare or Sarah Palin became national news.

In fact, killer Loughner was not interested in politics at all. He was just a sick-minded, lunatic that had a crazy infatuation with Rep. Giffords.

The media ultimately stopped bandying about its discredited theory that the shooting was spurred by conservatives, the tea party and Gov. Palin, but no apologies were ever uttered by the spinmeisters in the press.

At least we thought that the discredited theory that the Giffords shooting was the fault of conservatives had disappeared. Now, with Sawyer’s new interview, we are once again treated to scenes of tea partiers unhappy at townhall meetings in the days before the shooting. We also get a brief scene of Gov. Palin addressing a crowd. So, once more we are visited with the lie that conservatives are at fault for Giffords shooting. Sawyer didn’t say so directly, of course. She’s too slick for that. But by showing tea partiers, conservatives, and Palin and painting them as a hostile force against Giffords, Sawyer was obviously linking them to the crime. Sawyer slyly floated irate conservatives as the reason the “atmosphere” of the days before her shooting were so filled with portent of the dangers to come.

Only it’s all a lie. The tea party, the dislike the nation has for Obamacare (which is still extant, by the way), and the political activism of Governor Sarah Palin had precisely nothing to do with Giffords’ shooting. Giffords was in Jared Lee Loughner’s gunsights regardless of the political situation in the country in the days leading up to his crime.

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