It’s been reported that Joe Biden referred to Republican opponents on the debt issue in the following terms:
They have acted like terrorists.
Biden now denies that he used that phrasing. But there’s no question that Democratic representative Mike Doyle, who was in the same meeting, said:
We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.
Numerous other Democrats and Democrat-leaning media types have used the T-word or close synonyms of same in referring to their American political opponents, for example NYT columnist Joe Nocera, who refers to the Tea Party Republicans as having “waged jihad on the American people” and Maureen Dowd, who approvingly quoted “some Democrats” as having described the Tea Party as “the Republican Taliban wing.”
Note that this vitriol is coming from a party which rejects the idea of calling actual terrorists “terrorists.” They prefer to call terrorist attacks man-caused disasters, and to refer to wars as overseas contingency operations.
I’m reminded, as I often am, of something Neptunux Lex wrote in 2008:
The innate character flaw of the political right, with its thrumming appeals to the logic of blood and soil, is its lamentable tendency to go in search of enemies abroad. The left, on the other hand, with its own appeals to the politics of envy and class warfare, is content to find mortal enemies closer to hand.
Today’s American leftists view American citizens who strongly differ with them politically as enemies to a much greater extent than Islamic terrorists or any hostile nation-state.
Regarding Mike Doyle’s complaint about it having been made “impossible to spend any money”…the Democratic politicians are like teenagers who have been unwisely been given a credit card and who, now that consideration is being given to not raising the credit limit yet again, whine that “you won’t let me spend any money at all“…indeed, they also follow the typical teenage pattern of whining “but all my friends get to spend more”…in this case their friends from Europe…while ignoring the little problem that their friends’ parents are being driven into bankruptcy even more rapidly than their own are.
Links: James Taranto
The era of the condescending President
Some of the above links via Instapundit and Maggie’s Farm
