Extraordinary Liberal Delusions

"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Today's shrill climate should be no surprise, given that Bastiat penned that gem of a warning in 1848. Those who presently endeavor to live at the expense of everyone else are living quite a lie, and must become more and more shrill in defense of their fantasy as time goes on. It's a natural law.

The left has been engaged in a futile yet revealing smear of the Tea Party for months now, which slander reached crescendo as the April 19th rallies in Washington DC finally took place.

Most revealing of all is the left's attempt to misconstrue the significance of the date. When you have over six billion people on a planet and only 365 days in the year, any date will end up the anniversary of something significant. All the same, and somewhat remarkably, a number of history's most profound events have taken place on April 19th. The one that matters most to this essay is the shot heard 'round the world, fired in 1775 when the American Revolutionary War started in earnest at Lexington and Concord. April 19th is traditionally called Patriots' Day in honor of this history, and is still a state holiday in Massachusetts. Paul Revere's ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord are re-enacted annually. This is the history the left studiously ignores in all their smearing of the Tea Party movement, and listening to them one might never learn of our history.

Our history.

American history.

But how about April 19th in the years before and since? To anyone with a more than passing interest in Liberty, it's a fascinating study. In 1529, at the Second Diet of Speyer, a group of Protestant Furcht und Reichsstadt (loosely: leaders and cities) united against the reinstatement of the Edict of Worms, thereby launching the Protestant reformation into high gear. This came just 12 years after Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door - the intellectual spark of the Reformation. It was this unity in 1529 which fanned that spark into a flame and assured that the nascent Reformation would flourish. (Note that the term "Protestant" is rooted in the word protest.) This event set the stage for much of subsequent western history.

In 1861, the initial bloodshed of the (First) Civil War took place in the Pratt Street Riots in Baltimore on April 19th.

In 1943, that same date marked the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - an episode that any student of oppression (and particularly gun control) should become well acquainted with.

In 1956, two vestiges (perhaps the last two) of the ancien regime united when Grace Kelly married Prince Ranier in Monaco. (Not of the greatest import, but the passing of this kind of class and style is a noteworthy factor in our decline.)

In 1993, Janet Reno's troops picked the date to incinerate 82 Branch Davidians at the Mt. Carmel complex outside of Waco, TX, which had been under siege for nearly two months. Coincidence?

Two years later on the very same day came the OKC bombing, allegedly carried out by Tim McVeigh in retribution for the Waco conflagration two years earlier.

This last event is what the left desperately hopes to link to the Tea Party in people's minds. It's a far fetched ploy, that no honest person could embrace - unless they were historically illiterate. The Tea Party name very obviously derives from the action of the Colonists in 1773, an event significant because of the transition from talk to action. The present Tea Party philosophy is reflective of that same pungent attitude.

As with the Colonists in 1773, the Tea Partyers of today don't wish to be taxed excessively or without representation, and are just as concerned with the oppressive course of government today as their intellectual predecessors were then.

That concern is not universal. The left is quite pleased with the course of government these days, and the Tea Party movement is an unexpected and alarming challenge to the left's hope and change socialist nirvana, finally within reach.

Implicit in the sentiment behind these protests is potential for action, once again. Action that spells defeat for an increasingly unpopular agenda, to which the left remains totally committed. Their sympathetic media cronies understate attendance at Tea Party events, and diligently advance the base teabagger reference and every other desperate smear at every opportunity.

Underneath their condescending facade, the left knows that for every Tea Party event attendee there are hundreds of mainstream Americans who share the protester's alarm at our out-of-control government. An alarm that is founded in rather reasonable concerns, such as the impossibility of any nation successfully spending trillions of dollars that it doesn't have as a path to prosperity, or the ability (of a government that has failed conspicuously at every large program ever undertaken) to make any aspect of health care safer, more accessible or less expensive.

The left has no answers for those concerns. If they did, we'd have heard them before now. When the best you can bring against a reasonable and informed opponent is insults, innuendo and slander, you reveal more about yourself than you understand, and the revelations are less becoming than you would ever know.

The result for me, personally, is a new and vivid insight into the frightful nature of these enemies of freedom. These folks are delusional, and utterly passionate about their delusions. They actually do live in a fantasy world - one which they're willing to maintain/enforce at any cost - any cost to us, that is. They're profoundly dangerous, highly organized and intent on victory regardless of consequence.

We're talking civil war, and it's well underway. Think about it, and prepare...