Got hypocrisy?

A nice big juicy post to start your work week...

It’s all starting to make sense. And it all adds up when one thinks about it. The reason why Obama’s political agenda just hasn’t gained any broad-based popularity with the American electorate is because backers of Obama’s agenda haven’t become sufficiently extreme and radicalized so says Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post:

But if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement. The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers' groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression.(H/T: B-Daddy)

(italics, ours)

Because nothing says vibrant like “gunpoint”, “militant”, “seized factories”, and “communists”. (If Meyerson were an ad-man would he pitch laundry detergent as having a formula that will give your clothing colors a militant and totalitarian look while still retaining that feel of thuggishness?)

The irony of people like Meyerson criticizing the Tea Party movement for creating a threatening environment is not lost on us. Because when describing the mood and energy of the liberal-Left, it’s passion but with the conservative-Right, it’s always anger.

Here’s Charles Blow of the New York Times on the Tea Party movement and recent Gallup poll results that show twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives as they do liberals:

This is a limited, emotional reaction. It’s a response to the trauma that is the Great Recession, the uncertainty and creeping suspicion about the risks being taken in Washington, a visceral reaction to Obama and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and loss.

Simply put, it’s about fear-fueled anger. But anger is not an idea. It’s not a plan. And it’s not a vision for the future. It is, however, the second stage of grief, right after denial and before bargaining.

What baffles us about many on the Left is not that they aren’t down with the Tea Party movement, we’ve no problem with that, it’s that they evidently remain blind to what is driving the movement.

The record-breaking debts and deficits under which we are operating don’t even warrant a raised eyebrow. An atrocious piece of legislation that has been fashioned in the most cynical, opaque and outright corrupt of manners doesn’t elicit the slightest blanch. A stimulus bill that has done nothing for and in reality has probably hindered job recovery gets a shrug and the federal government’s brazen intervention into the private sector from financial institutions to auto manufacturing is cause for… slamming people who have never participated in a rally or protest in their lives but have so in the last calendar year because they possess an innate and principled belief that perhaps the government should not be operating in this manner.

Again, let’s look at what a liberal Thom Hartmann wrote back in 2004 in his book, "What Would Jefferson Do: A return to democracy" and which was a implicit critique of the Bush administration:

Beware: Tight control can look very good, at first…

When Germany faced the last depression, its government turned to a hand-in-glove partnership with corporations, (including some American corporations, as has been shown in recent years) to solidify its power over its own people and to wage wars on others.

Yes, the Bush administration fathered Bailout Nation and was criticized on these very pages for it, but Obama has, since Bush secured the beachhead, broke out of hedgerow country and done himself some Patton-like open field running, exploding the growth and influence of government in the private sector while radicalizing it as well.

But where are people like Meyerson, Blow and Hartmann now? Are they sticking to their liberal principles that warned of the economic fascism of public-private crony capitalism? Far from it. Not only are they not criticizing it, they are its fully-accepting and unquestioning cheerleaders who have the gall to ridicule those who oppose this naked Americanized fascism.

Given all that, one begins to wonder just who is being teabagged, here.