“When did demonstrating at the private homes of politicians or corporate executives become an acceptable way to voice one’s political opinions?” the Blogfather asks.

The answer is, when Alinsky wrote the concept into Rules for Radicals. Check out this violent rhetoric and racialism found in this passage from the version at Google Books, and transcribed by Founding Bloggers:

In its early history the organized black ghetto in the Woodlawn neighborhood in Chicago engaged in conflict with the slum landlords. It never picketed the local slum tenements or the landlord’s office. It selected its blackest blacks and bussed them out to the lily-white suburb of the slum landlords residence. Their picket signs, which said, “Did you know that Jones, your neighbor, is a slum land-lord?” were completely irrelevant; the point was that the pickets knew Jones would be inundated with phone calls from his neighbors.

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JONES: Before you say a word let me tell you that those signs are a bunch of lies!

NEIGHBOR: Look, Jones, I don’t give a damn what you do for a living. All we know is that you get those goddam niggers out of here or you get out!

Jones came and signed.

The pressure that gave us our positive power was the negative of racism in a white society.

Glenn Reynolds responds, “Have fun folks. You are establishing precedents that will return on you threefold.”

In 2009, the left melted down over the hidden camera reporting on ACORN — using tactics pioneered by the liberals on CBS’s Sixty Minutes. Last year, they became unnerved (and come November, frequently removed from office) by the ubiquitous Flip cams on the campaign trail  — a strategy endorsed tacitly or explicitly by the Washington Post and Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos in 2006. But then, as Jonah once wrote:

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.

Of course, one reason why they’re invariably shocked is that when these moral frenzies do come back to bite them, an  MSM outlet such as the New York Times will almost never investigate the root causes of their origins, lest they violate the cocoon of their readers.