Like it or not,
the Tea Parties are Peaceful
When Former president Clinton lectured us, on the 15th anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma City, to watch what we say so as not to incite the “delirious” and “unhinged," he was reaching into the same seedy bag of tricks he did in 1995 when he attempted to blame right-wing talk radio for the atrocities of Timothy McVeigh.
By claiming “the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government” is the main motivation for violent anti-government extremists, Clinton, like many other liberal commentators, is attempting to discredit and delegitimize any serious, substantive criticism of big government.
But the fact remains that it is perfectly true that government often is a threat to liberty. We need not even look to today's headlines for confirmation of this. Instead we can look to history, to things like the Alien and Sedition Acts, and to the internment of Japanese Americans.
And where was Mr. Clinton's concern during the Bush years, when liberal protesters unleashed streams of invective the likes of which this country had never seen before? Did Mr. Clinton lecture them about the dangers of fringe incitement?
Which brings us to the tea-party movement, a spontaneous, widespread expression of grassroots opposition to government policy. The Tea Partiers have been falsely and brutally maligned as racist, violent, and cro-magnon. (The best poster spotted at a tea-party rally: “It doesn’t matter what I put on my sign because you will accuse me of racism anyway.”)
Yet for all their dire warnings about "hate speech" and incitement, Democrats can't point to any concrete examples of tea-party violence, because there hasn’t been any actual violence at tea-party rallies. In fact they have been remarkable for how orderly and even friendly they are. You can almost feel the Democrats’ frustration at this.
On the other hand, a great many, left-wing protests and demonstrations have sparked violence over the years. Last year at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, for instance, rampaging protesters broke shop windows and scuffled with police, who had to use batons and tear gas to control them. And at a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, anti-globalization fanatics smashed windows and shut down the city. Interestingly, President Clinton failed to criticize the protesters.
In 2007, several hundred protesters who descended on Washington, D.C., during the International Monetary Fund meeting turned over trash cans, smashed windows, threw bricks, and pushed a police officer off her motorcycle.
In 2008, anti-Republican protesters at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul “threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below.” The violence was only barely covered by the press and went uncommented on by Democrat spokesmen.
Republicans, by contrast, have been very quick to condemn violent acts and even heated rhetoric words by right-wing individuals or groups. They’ve even condemned some that didn’t happen — like the false account of racial slurs that were supposedly shouted at members of the Congressional Black Caucus when health reform was signed.
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