http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/the_rise_of_the_thug_left.html
June 03, 2010
By J.R. Dunn
Times are tough. Actually, they're getting tough in a lot of places.
They proved very tough for Hamas operatives in the Eastern
Mediterranean last weekend. They were tough in poor Balto as well,
with seven people shot to death. (Baltimore should be one of the
jewels of the East Coast, but of course, it's no such thing. I wonder
who's been running the place the last century.) It was nearly as
tough in Chicago, with twelve shot and three dead. But when has there
ever been good news from the Windy City?
But none of these, however bad they may be, have the potential to
shake up the political system the way Obama's more feisty allies have
been doing over the past year or so.
On Sunday, May 16, a gang of close to five hundred purple shirts
(that is, members of the Service Employees International Union,
reinforced by something called National Political Action) surrounded
the Silver Spring, Maryland home of Greg Baer, corporate law counsel
for Bank of America. They claimed to be carrying out a "protest" of
the bank's foreclosure policies. That was the excuse for surrounding
Baer's home, trampling his lawn, occupying his front porch, and
creating an uproar audible throughout the entire neighborhood.
Baer was not home. The only person present was his fourteen-year-old
son, who, overcome with fear, locked himself in the bathroom. On
returning home, Baer made his way through the mob to rescue his son,
suffering near-assault in the process. At no point did the police
attempt to control the mob or order them to leave the property. In
fact, evidence exists that District of Columbia police actually
escorted the mob to the Baer's home. Coincidentally, the SEIU owes
almost $100 million to the Bank of America.
This is the third example of blatant violence -- and yes, terrorizing
a young boy is violence -- by administration supporters since last
summer. (While other incidents have occurred, going back to the Black
Panthers menacing voters in Philly, these are the most blatantly
violent.) The first was the case of Kenneth Gladney, who in St. Louis
on August 6 last year was selling buttons and flags (identified as
Gadsden flags, with the rattler and "Don't Tread on Me" slogan, one
of the minor ironies of the incident) outside a town hall meeting
being held by Democrat Congressman Russ Carnahan. The SEIU,
ubiquitous at Democratic events these days, showed up to confront
Gladney and demanded to know what "kind of shit" he was selling,
along with calling him a nigger. (This from another black, which of
course makes it okay.) Gladney's answers were evidently
unsatisfactory, and he was then beaten, knocked down, and stomped on,
suffering injuries that required hospital treatment. (The purple
shirts were identified from video footage. All of them pleaded not
guilty this past April 20 -- justice moves frighteningly fast in Missouri.)
Even as the SEIU members were rehearsing their pleas in St. Louis,
yet another attack occurred a few hundred miles down the Big Muddy.
On April 9 in New Orleans, the Southern Republican Leadership
Conference held a dinner at Brennan's Restaurant in the French
Quarter. The event generated a protest, as everything seems to do
these days. The responsible organization here was the Iron Rail
Collective, an anarchist group. The anarchists chased GOP chairman
Roger Villeres as he left the restaurant, but this was only the first
act. A short time later, fundraiser Allee Butsch and her boyfriend
Joe Brown emerged. They were evidently followed and then attacked a
few blocks away by at least five people. Both were badly beaten, Ms.
Butsch suffering a leg broken so severely as to require an operation.
While the perpetrators remain unknown, the ringleader was identified
from video footage (Beard, dirty t-shirt, ponytail -- about what
you'd expect). This sense of uncertainty has been used to downplay
the political motives behind the attack. Even the Jindal
administration played this game, calling the assault an
"altercation", as if the two Republican operatives had stolen the
anarchists' parking space.
None of these attacks made more than the most perfunctory appearance
in the mainstream media...much less so than the arrests of the
"Hutaree Army", a strange Midwestern religious group that, whatever
their violent and obnoxious rhetoric, have never harmed anybody.
The attacks haven't drawn media attention because they are in
violation of a crucial liberal myth, the one holding that liberals
are the leading contemporary apostles of nonviolence and peace,
holding the line of rational behavior against the assaults by all
manner of rabid elements, almost all of them right of center. We've
heard that one to the point of exhaustion. It's an unspoken axiom of
American politics. Liberals inhabit the Isles of the Blessed, where
the lion lies down with the lamb and Willie Horton is only a
ballplayer, wearing white togas and discussing conflict resolution in
low, melodic voices. And the rest of us? We're somewhere off in the
depths of Mordor, on a perpetual rampage, following the demagogue of
the moment. These days, that would be Glenn Beck waving a musket and
Sarah Palin lugging whatever it is you use to shoot wolves from the
air. That's the great divide in American politics, from the liberal
point of view, one as sharply defined as the gap between the Eloi and
the Morlocks, and as permanent. All they need to do is point to Joe
McCarthy (who started out as a New Deal Democrat), Lyndon LaRouche
(who helped found the Students for a Democratic Society), and Timothy
McVeigh. (A rabid atheist. McVeigh refused to see clergy before his
execution and demanded that the old atheist chestnut "Invictus" be
recited at his funeral. He actually thought he was going to get one of those.)
What we're seeing now is that myth beginning to unravel. The type of
rhetoric liberals have been indulging in the past ten years, the
barely-controlled personal attacks and open menacing of every last
individual who opposes them -- Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rice, Palin, and
Bachmann -- serves as its own fuel. The more it's repeated, the more
incendiary it grows, the more it spreads, and the more used to it
people become. It's like a narcotic that you grow habituated to --
every time you hit up, you need a bigger jolt. Eventually the threats
become so lurid, so wild-eyed, that they begin to take on a life of
their own. They become the standard means of expression. And at some
definite but unknowable point, they begin to fulfill themselves. Some
of your comrades, the more stupid, the more unbalanced, the more
fanatical, begin taking them seriously, and start acting them out.
That's the process we're seeing at this moment. The left's civilized
elite are still living a delusion, gliding through toga world, while
the more unstable elements, the SEIU trash, the anarchists, the ACORN
hirelings, are starting to lose it. It will get worse as the Obama
dream continues to shred under the pressure of reality. The American
left has begun to crack -- deterioration has set in, and it is
beginning the long slide into goonhood.
It's all very similar to the events of the late '60s, where wild
rhetoric from the antiwar movement and related "revolutionary"
outfits -- the Black Panthers, the SDS, the Weather Underground --
triggered ever-graver disturbances around the country until the
entire cycle was brought to an abrupt halt at Kent and Jackson State
universities. Thirteen people were killed in those confrontations --
the price of cutting the revolutionary left completely out of
American society. Students and casual protestors abandoned the
antiwar effort. The movement withered and collapsed. The would-be
revos were transformed into little more than armed gangs, to be
hunted down and mopped up through the ensuing decade.
The more subdued leftists who had aided in triggering the nightmare
dodged the bullet in large part by being shielded by media -- at the
time effectively a monopoly under liberal control -- along with the
fact that their political opposition consisted of Richard Nixon and
his merry crew. The Watergate saga was on one level a complex and
successful effort to paint the political "establishment" as evil
enough to justify the more vicious tactics of the antiwar left. All
the same, it required quite some time for leftists to live down the
excesses of the '60s.
History may be repeating itself where the left is concerned. But it's
doubtful they'll duck anything this time around. Union thugs have
none of the romantic air of campus rebels, and the beards and filthy
tee-shirts of the anarchists lost their shock value long ago. They
will get little in the way of protection from a media that's on the
verge of collapse. But even more compelling is the fact that their
opposition is no longer a corrupt establishment, but a movement
representing Americans as a whole. Conservatives today are no longer
the staid, isolated remnant of mid-century, but a tougher, blunter
group that comes from a much wider slice of American life. Confront
them with people who attack women and threaten children, and it's
easy to surmise who's going to end up on deck. A violent left is a
dying left. If I were on that side of the fence, I would worry.
--
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and will edit the
forthcoming Military Thinker.
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