One of the most amusing pass times I've engaged in recently has been to observe as the Democrat Party and its press agents in the old, tired, dying, Dinosaur national news media demonize those who participate in the loosely-organized Tea Parties around the country. The Democrats are in fact so frightened by the Tea Partiers that they have resorted the tactics preached by their apparent guiding philosopher, the late radical Saul Alinsky, attempting to brand all Tea Party participants as racist rednecks.
In the runup to their vote on the healthcare nationalization atrocity a few weeks back, several African American Democrats leveled accusations that some of the participants in the Tea Party rally that took place on the day of the vote had shouted racial epithets at them as they filed into the Capitol building. Barney Frank, the gay pathological liar from Massachusetts, similarly alleged that at least one of the tens of thousands of Tea Partiers there that day hurled a gay slur at him.
The leftist news media, as always utterly incurious about why these specific members of congress would choose to enter the capitol building at ground level, rather than use the tunnels they use about 99% of the time, breathlessly reported the accusations from these members of congress as fact (after all, they're all liberals, they wouldn't lie, would they?), and have spent the last three weeks tarring and feathering everyone who has ever participated in a Tea Party rally.
On the day of the vote, I told some friends that I suspected these accusations were fake, and after a few days of the demonization of the Tea Partiers, others began to wonder the same thing. After all, dozens of members of the media recorded every step those members of congress took that day, and yet none of them managed to catch audio or video of a single racist or homophobic remark coming from the crowd. Yet no one in the dinosaur media found this to be curious.
Andrew Breitbart, a journalist who runs the very successful website, Breitbart.com, realizing that there had to be hundreds of individuals in the area using either video cameras or cell phone capable of recording audio, decided to offer a $10,000 reward for anyone who could produce any evidence at all that any racist or homophobic remarks had come from the crowd. After a week of getting no response, he upped the reward to $100,000. To this day, there has been no response.
Why? Because the accusations were clearly fake, staged by these Alinsky Democrats as a means of marginalizing a movement they perceive as a threat to their political future. These fake accusations are based on these rules from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:
RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
So, the Tea Party participants now become demonized as a bunch of lower-class, uneducated, racist rednecks. Nevermind recent polling data that show a) more than 40% of Tea Partiers are political independents or Democrats, b) the average education level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large, and c) the average income level of Tea Partiers is virtually identical to that of the population at large. In the Alinsky Democrat view, Tea Partiers cannot be perceived to be a cross-section of the population at large because that lends them legitimacy in the eyes of others.
I think this Alinsky Democrat tactic will fail – and already has failed, in fact – with everyone who is not already a hopelessly smug, leftist ideologue. Because most Americans are going to understand that an attack on the Tea Partiers is really an attack on middle America, that vast swath of the country that lies outside of the leftist media centers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Alinsky Democrats used the same tactics against Sarah Palin, and were largely successful in marginalizing her. But Sarah Palin is one person – the Tea Partiers are millions of ordinary Americans, whose views are supported by millions more.
The Tea Party movement is the single most important political development of the last 20 years, and the Alinsky Democrats know it. When 48% of those surveyed in a recent poll say their political views are closer to the Tea Partiers than to the President's, the Alinsky Democrats know they have a very real problem.
Lashing out and demonizing millions of registered voters, at a time when your party is already lagging behind in the polls, does not appear to be a recipe for success, regardless of what Saul Alinsky taught.
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