“I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”

– Then senator (D-NY), nee-First Lady, now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2003

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg wrote a couple of years later:

Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.

Ace says he’s “literally stunned”, but I can’t say I am.

Update: At the risk of going all Marshall McLuhan on you discussing the semiotics of language, here’s a classic moment: “Rep. John Dingell Says Forum Was ‘Infiltrated.’”

So a representative of the party that pioneered The Moral Equivalent of War cheerfully uses military lingo to describe citizens dissenting from a congressman, as Von Clausewitz continues to roll over. And definitely roll over to the embedded video to see the tough battle-hardened counterinsurgents subversively infiltrating Rep. Dingell’s forum.