Targeting the targeters

Yesterday in this space I wrote about the Left’s attempt to exploit the Arizona shootings for political gain. I called the piece “How to Turn a Tragedy into an Emetic” and focussed largely on a truly execrable column by Paul Krugman.  Readers might also be interested in a column I wrote yesterday for NRO on a related theme. “What we have here in the tortured left-wing effort to enlist the ghastly Arizona shootings into their anti–Tea Party campaign,” I note, “is yet another example of political correctness on the march.”

The great irony . . . is that all this vitriol should be marching under a banner called “liberalism.” There is nothing liberal, nothing having to do with freedom, about it. It is all about control: power in the hands of a nomenklatura and submission visited upon you and me, my friends. It’s the good old strategy of Lenin, dusted off and infused with some new names. It all boils down, however, to what Lenin said politics was all about. Not the control of faction and controlling the power of the state so that individual freedom could flourish. That was the idea of earlier tea partiers such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. No, Lenin’s idea, like Krugman’s, is “Who/Whom.”

What so infuriates the party of the Left is that those on the accusative side of the equation have woken up and have decided they don’t like it. It’s a bit like the chap who came across the most amazing animal: It protects itself when attacked. Message to the world’s Krugmanites: Get used to it. We’re on the march, we’re targeting you, you’re in our crosshairs, and, no, this is not an incitement to “hate” or political divisiveness: It is what politics in a democracy is all about.

Read the whole thing here.