Tea Party Patriots, rejoice! With enemies like Michael Kinsley, who needs friends?

Read between the sneering lines of Kinsley’s May 18th column in The Atlantic and you may just find an unintended love-letter to the very Tea Party Patriots he so desperately would like to torpedo. In fact, Kinsley’s blindness to the movement’s power is a proxy for the entire Democratic party’s colossal blindness to the tsunami about to drown it out of office this November.

Kinsley’s sneer begins with the headline: “My Country, Tis of Me.” (Because no party ever acts in its own self-interest.)

The overarching purpose of Kinsley’s Tea Party obituary is the left’s standard 3M approach: moralize, marginalize, minimize. It’s done through a series of disinformation volleys. Here are Kinsley’s primary distortions.

The Tea Party Is Right-Wing.

Kinsley launches his first Scud: “The right-wing populist Tea Party movement has politicians of both parties spooked.” The most important word in this sentence is “right-wing.” The Winston Group’s three surveys conducted from December to February showed that while 57% of the Tea Party are Republicans, four in ten are Democrats and independents. The majority of the Tea Party is right-wing, but it is far from monolithic and hence representational of more than a fringe right segment of the country. (more…)

Each snowflake that fell on Washington, D.C. this past week sounds the death knell of what future historians may call the Great Manmade Global Warming Hoax of the early 21^st Century.  A Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Globe And Mail, ran the obit.

Tomorrow’s researchers, examining the archives of the U.S. print media, will marvel at the willful negligence displayed by the MSM outlets, how they failed to apply critical thinking to the “scientific” claims of man-made global warming even as, one by one, those claims were discredited and peeled away like layers of an onion, until there was no onion left.

Impartial analysts will note how the British press most clearly exhibit to their former colonists what Freedom of the Press looks like while the American MSM, like migrating lemmings, silently trudged hip deep through the mounting pile of invalidated claims that screamed of the earth’s imminent death at the hands of man. (more…)

It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner.

And yet, the End has never been so much fun.  Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel.

What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes, professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.

Recently I phoned him from my base in Texas, to chat about mankind’s enduring love affair with the apocalypse. I caught him in Tel Aviv airport at 2 a.m, and it was then, against a backdrop of deepest night, that we spent two hours discussing the end of the world: (more…)