Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is none too happy with the Tea Party, and he’s not afraid to let the world know it:
The odd thing about the Tea Party is that it uses Washington to attack Washington. This is a version of Hannah Arendt’s observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy. (This is what Islamic radicals will do in Egypt.) Note that the Tea Party is nowhere near a majority — not in the House and not in the Senate. Its followers have only 60 seats in the 435-member House, but in a textbook application of political power they were able to use parliamentary rules to drive the congressional agenda. As we have known since Lenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority.
The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States. It has shrunk the government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue. The domestic economy will suffer and the gap between rich and poor, the educated and the indolently schooled, will continue to widen. International relations will lack a dominant power able to enforce the rule of law, and the bad guys will be freer to be as bad as they want. Maybe the deficit will be brought under control, but nothing else will. I worry — and I envy (but will not forgive) those who don’t.
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Why? None of that sounds too far removed from Barack Obama’s early stated goals as a presidential candidate:
First, I’ll stop spending $9 billion a month in Iraq. I’m the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning. And as president I will end it.
Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending.
I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.
I will not weaponize space.
I will slow our development of future combat systems.
As Deborah Howell, the Post’s late ombudswoman wrote immediately after the election, perhaps anticipating her paper’s role in the JournoList scandal to come, “I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”
So why is Cohen against bipartisan support of the president’s agenda?
(Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party “Totalitarian.” This has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone. Cohen’s freakout over this notion reminds me of another Hannah Arendt paraphrase.)
Richard Cohen shows himself to be a partisen totalitarian hack who only knows how to use a hammer…
WaPo
Pffff…
And it huffs and he puffs.
US newspaper circulation falls 8.7 percent
At The Washington Post, average weekday circulation fell 13.1 percent to 578,482 and dropped 8.2 percent to 797,679 on Sundays.
(April 26, 2010)
They’ll “leave you the Hell alone” — unless you’re pregnant or want to get high. Then it’s break out the SWAT teams.
There are some early indications that a different attitude may be taking hold, but for the most part they’re just as enamored of big, expensive, intrusive Government as any Alinskyite. They’re just pissed because somebody else has a hand on the controls.
Regards,
Ric
Bingo. This phenomenon is otherwise known as “conservatives who aren’t really conservative.”
Personally, I think the term “copperhead” is more descriptive. Lie in ambush, claim to love freedom… then, attack!
To hell with socialism – both economic and moral. If you’re not visiting aggression on non-aggressors, government has no business visiting aggression on you.
Simple? Yes. Easy? No.
My God, unhinged or what? Man, the Tea Party must be the most powerful force on Earth! Liberal morons like Cohen are literally being driven insane by it. Does the Post really want to keep someone this ill on staff?
US newspaper circulation falls 8.7 percent
At The Washington Post, average weekday circulation fell 13.1 percent to 578,482
and dropped 8.2 percent to 797,679 on Sundays.
The dinosaurs will trample as much of the forest as they can, as they die…
“[The Tea Party] has shrunk the government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue.”
If only….
I don’t know where Cohen is seeing the shrinkage, or what hallucinogens have caused him to see it, but nothing will shrink the US government like the profligacy that will inevitably bankrupt the treasury.
Heaven forbid! The Tea Party “recklessly…..shrunk the government”!!!! Yep, that sounds like most other totalitarian movements through history.
Notice also the implicit – hell, actually EXPLICIT – assumption that when you say “the United States,” you mean “the Federal Government.” The humans that live here, not so much…
Because the size of the Central State growing 40% in four years is nothing to be concerned about, but shaving a few percentage points off its future expansion means you’re on the road to Somali-like anarchy…if there are any roads at all.
The Left is clinically insane.
“totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy.”
You mean, like using the judicial system to overturn the will of the people as expressed by the elected officials, ballot initiatives, ect?
Last year Cohen attacked the Tea Party by equating them with the shooting of four students at Kent State in 1970. He’s been phoning in this drivel for years, now.
Cohen just has totalitarian movements on the brain since the policies he supports inevitably lead to them. It’s projection. If only we would all get with the program or just disappear, the glorious Lefty Super State would usher in the best of times. How dare we interfere.
Someone needs to publicly ask President Zero to explain his opinion of Cloward-Piven, and what he would say to those of us who believe this is his administration’s ultimate goal. Of course he would stammer and deny, of course the usual hacks would be “appalled” by this line of questioning, it doesn’t matter — it must be exposed to the wider public prior to the election. So who has the stones? Tapper? A staged “Town Hall” infiltrator? A local TV/Radio reporter during his campaign blitz? Anyone? Bueller???
If we’re all “terrorists” now, then let the truth be what we use to strike fear. It cetainly scares the #%*! out of me that no one will broach the subject with him even though they would have to be blind not to see it.
Palin/Rubio 2012
The “observation that totalitarian movements use democratic institutions to destroy democracy” is sound. The mechanism was well described a century before Arendt, by Alexis de Tocqueville:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”
The Tea Party, with its “only” 60 seats and growing, is trying to stop that process. Cohen is trying to accelerate it.
I keep thinking I’m too hard on liberals and ready to insult them unfairly when it’s only a few that are so tribal. Then an essay like Cohen’s comes along to remind me that those few seem to have enough credibility with enough other liberals to be given an important form and read seriously.
There is no intellectual content behind Cohen’s fears – it is pure tribalism. Another tribe is gaining political power, so he fancies them to be violent, totalitarian, and destructive to America. What is happening is that his tribe’s power is threatened, and he experiences that as a generalised problem for the country. He can’t make the distinction between what is good for his status, job prospects, and influence over others versus what is good for the country.
It is dramatically primitive and quite frightening to behold, whatever veneer of reasonableness is put on it. Liberals are a tribe of about 15-20% of the country. They are good at forming coalitions and providing largesse for their allies when in power. Most of them even believe in their own altruism, and are utterly unable to see that their advocacy is always Against their competitor power groups rather than For anyone. (Such as advocacy for the poor is 90% kicking some, but not all, of the rich and semi-rich.)
Tantrum of the damned.
Cohen, in a pitiful fit of projection…let’s his guilty mind free associate a confession.
The totalitarians were beaten by the parliamentarians. The Tea Party (which is nothing more than salt of the earth folks standing up for themselves and saying to the small c communists like Cohen….NO MEANS NO), elected representatives into a representative government….that had consistently failed to represent.
The Soros gang of thugs got a dose of pushback…and like all bullies, they start whimpering and peeing all over themselves when their tactics of distortion and lies don’t work any longer. Or don’t work as well, anyway.
So desperate for a small c communist takeover, he even forgot to scream “racist” during his latest tantrum. Elections have consequences…the smarmy leftists gloated just a short while ago.
That smirk has been momentarily wiped from their faces. But, that won’t stop the vile lies at the Daily Duranty or its ugly stepsister WishPo.
Shorter Richard Cohen: Waaaaaaaahhhhh!
“The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.”?
Can I have some of what is he smoking, and will Obamacare cover the cost for me? I wasn’t aware of the Great Tea Party Apology Tour, or of the way the Tea Party has alienated our allies and comforted our enemies, or of their cancelling of missile defense development and the F-22. I guess I thought Obama was opposed to the Tea Party.
Isn’t it endlessly fascinating to witness “liberals” and “progressives” as they gaze into their funhouse-mirror-version of reality, doggedly believing that they’re looking clearly at the rest of us when what they are actually seeing is the empty blackness at the center of their own souls?
Since when was Richard Cohen willing to use the American military as “a dominant power able to enforce the rule of law”.
For Mr. Cohen, that’s the United Nations job–isn’t it? So what’s his problem?
The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.
Notice how what was evil under Bush is suddenly desireable under Obama.
I’m now convinced the best reason the left continues to get their idiocies published is that it would just take too bloody *long* to refute — or even parody — everything they say and write. One just can’t keep up (though thanks, Ed, for trying). Every sentence in that Cohen piece is either objective nonsense or wildly distorted and cries out for a good Fisking, e.g.,
“As we have known since Lenin’s day, a determined minority is hands down better than an irresolute majority.”
*Lenin’s day*?!?!? I could probably write an essay on why Cohen might have picked him, but maybe he was thinking of ol’ Andy Jackson (“One man with courage makes a majority”) — but hey, he was a Democrat, so that doesn’t fit the narrative.
“The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.”
And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Other stuff, say, the happiness, security, wealth and well-being of its citizens? Wait, that’s here somewhere …
“It has shrunk the government and will, if it can, further deprive it of revenue.”
You say that like it’s a bad thing … because, after all, expanding the government indefinitely is the only route to … well, “power and reach”.
“The domestic economy will suffer and the gap between rich and poor, the educated and the indolently schooled, will continue to widen.”
Cats will sleep with dogs, black will become white, the skies will rain tears and blood … did I miss anything?
I could go on and on. That this fact- and evidence-free drivel was published in a nationally acclaimed newspaper the day after major legislation is passed is somewhere between laughable and pathetic.
Cohen doesn’t mention what he probably senses but doesn’t see—that the “small minority” of Tea Party types in Congress actually represent the views of a majority of voters now on the issues of government spending, public debt and uncontrolled growth of government. The oleftist meme of the day is that a band of “terrorists” have held the country hostage because of their brinksmanship, and so on. The reality is that the American voters have belatedly realized what both political parties have done to them in the last 11 years and are no longer going to stand for it. That small minority of Tea Party “fanatics” is going to become a tidal wave in 2012. The establishment types in both parties sense that and are trying to fool the voters with the “extremist” and “terrorist” narratives about “the Tea Party,” which is itself only an inaccurate term for the great rising of voters against the welfare state.
I love Cohen’s phrases; the Tea Party has “followers,” as if it’s a religious cult that somehow snuck in through the back doors of Congress and proceeded to take over the clubhouse.
“recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.” How – by trying to become more solvent, and not turn into the next Greece? If he really means diminishing the power and reach of people who can’t, and have no desire to, control their spending habits with money that doesn’t belong to them – then, sure, that’s exactly what the Tea Party is doing. Anyway, I thought that was Obama’s foreign policy; since America is the “bad guy,” and has too much influence in international affairs – wouldn’t that mean that Cohen and his cronies love the Tea Party?
His ranblings and rants are just like Obama the candidate’s anti-defense and anti-military screeds during the election; sops to people who have little concept of how the real world operates.
Great final line about the goal of the “totalitarian tea party” being to leave us alone. Only in leftist dillusion is a movement that wants to reduce gov spending and power, and let us keep more of our own money, considered totalitarian. I always thought the real totalitarians, like Hitler, Stalin, N Korea, and Iran, always wanted to make gov bigger. You could stretch things a long way, and say tea party goals are heartless and bad for the poor and old (although is having slightly less handouts now, to avoid have no handouts later, really heartless or is it just realistic), but calling it totalitarian or terrorist is completely crazy. I suspect this terrorist and totalitarian business is just the new leftist swear word, since nobody beleives the racism charge anymore. I also suspect most americans will realize it is just as crazy as the racism charge and will soon tune it out as well.
Lighten up Rich; progressives make up only X% of the population but they managed to ruin the health care sector and take away my right to free association on how I deal with related services I want. That counts for something!
The Tea Party has recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.
Is Cohen so dense to believe that other countries aren’t completely more aware of the current monetary situation than the average American ? Putin was bashing Americans just the other day as “parasites,” and he isn’t too far off the truth.