Last week, Oklahoma state senator Randy Brogdon (R), who is also a serious candidate for governor, inadvertently set off a national firestorm, courtesy of the Associated Press’s egregiously distorting his words.

An article by Sean Murphy and Tim Talley, about tea parties and militias (funny, how those two entities are conveniently linked together), implied that Sen. Brogdon, who was elected to office in 2002, is eager to help launch a kinder-and-gentler version of the Hutaree milita chapter. Or, something to that effect.

The AP story noted that state miltia supporters have chatted up the Senator, and that he acknowledged (correctly), that the Second Amendment allows for a “citizen unit.” Now here’s the colorful quote that got tongues a-wagging and keyboards a-clicking:

The founding fathers ‘were not referring to a turkey shoot or a quail hunt. They really weren’t even talking about us having the ability to protect ourselves against each other,’ Brogdon said. ‘The second Amendment deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government.’

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This piece, by Andrew Ferguson in Commentary, is almost too easy, but it sure is fun.  Did the little furry mammals tuck into the dinosaur eggs with so much gusto?

The tiny corner of the New York Times empire where David Barstow works is called the investigative unit. The name has an impressive urgency to it, like the title of a TV spin-off—CSI: Times Investigative Unit. You can imagine guys in Weejuns and khakis getting a hot tip and springing into action, yanking their tweed coats off the backs of chairs and shouting something irreverent and ironical over their shoulders as they bolt for the newsroom door.

Perhaps a new “torture memo” has been leaked; maybe a politician has committed an act of creative accounting on Supplement B (3) subpart vii of his financial-disclosure form. Or maybe a large number of Americans way out there in the land beyond the Bronx have been caught holding political opinions that are dangerously bizarre. TIU is on the case.

These strange-thinking Americans, loosely roped together as the Tea Party movement, sent David Barstow on his most recent investigation. His assignment lasted for five uninterrupted months and bore literary fruit, with a 4,500-word front-page story on February 16. “Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right,” the headline read—aptly enough, for a premonitory suggestion of bombs going off just over the horizon rumbled through Barstow’s story. To the astute Times reader lingering with the paper over breakfast, the hints were unmistakable.

There was the dateline, for one thing: Sandpoint, Idaho. The reader might rub his chin?.?.?.?-Sandpoint? Vaguely familiar…rings a bell…let’s see…Wait! God Almighty! Yes, that Sandpoint, notorious 15 years ago as the home of gun-slinging Randy Weaver and his Ruby Ridge survivalist compound, the headquarters of the Aryan Nation group of gun owners, a hothouse of gun-owning militias and paramilitary groups with their guns?.?.?.

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The AP story announcing the shift in Administration policy is incorrect.  The Obama Administration has, in fact, redoubled its efforts to rid the world of extremist jihadists and terrorists — as long as they are connected with the Tea Party movement.

Even as it continues to do its Orwellian best to redefine our enemies from U.S. Hating Religious Fundamentalists to “disgruntled foreign nationals,” (as if they were a particularly impatient man on line at the Post Office), it has, using the full force of the government and mass media, begun scouring the country for genuinely disenfranchised Americans it can re-brand as dangerous — excuse me, “potentially” dangerous domestic terrorists.

Only in America in 2010 could groups defending the constitution be transformed by the press corps in villains who by their very beliefs may possibly, someday, inspire a demented individual to commit an act of violence be presented as a greater threat than groups and even countries who have actually made part of their charters the destruction of America and her allies. (more…)

The liberal media’s newest meme is to claim that the tea party movement is made up exclusively of John Birchers, militia types, racists, and “birthers.” Politico, for instance, had an extensive story about how legitimate conservatives are coming to realize that they’ll have to conduct a Buckley-style purge of the extremists if they expect the tea party groups to be taken seriously. Of course, the left has had its extremists for decades, unlike the right has never conducted any such purges, and has also benefited from a news media that has never highlighted the left’s worst nuts.

The whole idea that conservatives have to purge their wackier, more fringe members is something that at one level is obvious but at another is proof that the left and the Old Media are nothing but hypocrites. At still a third level there is part of the attitude exhibited by some of these far right elements that is a root motivation of the tea party movement, fringe or no.

As clownish left-wing commentators such as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, John Stewart or Stephen Colbert point fingers and guffaw at the fringes of the right and as the New York Times and Politico stroke their chins and look down their noses at the unruly tea party movement, it must be noted that none of these folks ever uttered a cross word against the Code Pink wackos, the communist infiltrators, anti-war hippies, Stalinist apologists, pro-abortion extremists, Euro-trash half-wits, eco-terrorists, and outright anarchists that have filled the left’s ranks since the birth of the new left after WWII. (more…)

For intellectual laziness, lackluster writing and sheer historical dishonesty, it’s hard to beat Frank Rich of the New York Times.  Week after week, and at tiresome length, Rich dishes out his regurgitated pensées regarding his pet hobby-horses, including the evil Bush Administration, gay rights, and the fact that, sooner or later, the Christian Right is going to get your mama.  In every way except the physical courage to actually be on the scene, Rich is a worthy successor to the Times’s disgraceful Stalinist apparatchik, Walter Duranty, whose tainted Pulitzer the Times has yet to return.

On Saturday, the undistinguished former drama critic, show-business wannabe and non-bestselling author — who unnaccountably occupies some of the most prime editorial real estate in the world — outdid himself with this eminently predictable yet nonetheless embarrassing and ludicrous piece of revisionism/wishful thinking: “The Axis of the Obsessed and the Deranged.” Lest you jump to a perfectly rational conclusion and think this is about the editorial board of the Times, think again:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen. (more…)