'Argument by Extreme Reflects Left-Wing Epistemic Closure'

“One day, we are totalitarian control freaks who want to post police at every ice cream shop to check for papers”, Prof. William A. Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog writes. “The next day, we are pseudo-anarchists who want no government at all”:

The argument by extreme reflects left-wing epistemic closure, an inability to engage in meaningful discussion of the failures of big government, resulting in a series of strawman arguments and extensive hyperbole meant to marginalize those who disagree.

We have seen this time and again. It seems to be all they know.

I really want to take these people seriously, but it is hard. But then again, what do I know, I am the mob.

Update: Right on queue, Politico (with healthy publicity via Reuters) runs this intellectual trash by a professor at San Francisco State University, Tea party: Dark side of conservatism:

When the tea partiers say they are true conservatives, there is no reason to doubt them. They stand in the conservative tradition of the radical right — a movement of the haves and the well-protected who, since the time of FDR, have feared that their freedom will be lost if the government extends a hand to the have-nots and the unprotected.

Of course, given that all the elite left seems to know at the moment is demonizing their more populist opponents, you could easily update Peter Arno’s classic New Yorker cartoon from 1936 to lampoon a new era of wealthy elites:

Just ask two prominent current and former senior employees of General Electric.

Meanwhile, at the Wall Street Journal, Kim Strassel explores the Democrats’ Civil War:

Given the obsessive coverage of the Republican “civil war,” you may not realize Democrats are also feuding. Angry and disappointed that their president and Congress has not done more, the party’s liberal base is throwing itself into the primaries, pushing the party to the left even as the country moves right.

Speaking of which, how ’bout this classic moment courtesy of the Gray Lady:

“Why do the conservatives always get the conservatives, but we don’t get to get the liberals?” Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, asked the Web site Politico recently, voicing the frustration of the left when Ms. Kagan was considered a front-runner but was not yet Mr. Obama’s selection. “What the hell is that all about?”

I dunno. But if I see David Souter, I’ll be sure to bring it up with him.