The 'scary' Tea Party narrative

Mark Steyn:

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Hence Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder-statesman dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing Tea Partiers to the late Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c'mon, they've got everything in common. The Tea Partiers want to reduce the size of government, and so did McVeigh - McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the Tea Partiers through control of federal spending. But these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends. Also, both "Tim" and "tea" are three-letter words beginning with T. Picture him upon your knee, just Tea for Tim and Tim for Tea, you're for him and he's for thee, completely interchangeable. To lend the point more gravitas, Mr. Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he were trying to determine whether it was his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.

Will it work? For a long time, Tea Partiers were racists. Everybody knows that when you say, "I'm becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending," that's old Jim Crow code for "Let's get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson." Frank Rich of the New York Times attempted to diversify the Tea Party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare opponents were uncomfortable with Rep. Barney Frank's sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank's sexuality, but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first 4 trillion or 5 trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time's Joe Klein said opposition to President Obama was "seditious" because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Mr. Klein, thanks to "educator" William Ayers' education reforms, nobody knows what "seditious" means anymore.

So, enough with all the punch-pulling about seditious racist homophobes. It was time to go for broke and bring out Mr. Clinton to explain why the Tea Party is the new front in the war on terror. Don't worry about Iran's nuclear program, but if you meet a Tea Party supporter waving some placard about the national debt, try not to catch his eye and back away slowly without making any sudden movements lest he put down his placard and light up his suicide belt.

As longtime readers know, I have enormous respect for the Democrats as masters of the politics of personal destruction. What a track record. "Bushitler," "General Betray-Us"- excellent stuff, up there with Oscar Wilde. But this is, like, a whole new level: Mr. Clinton is on the road demonizing (and with an impressively straight face) half the American people as the express lane to ka-boom! And the poodle media are taking it seriously.

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Then there are the real threats, which Steyn goes on to explain. While Clinton may be getting some traction with the media by pushing this ridiculous narrative, in the real world and think most people are wondering "say what?"