On one level, I sympathize with the Democrat members of Congress who received mean (if non-threatening) e-mails and voice mails as a result of their vote to impose staggering debt and scuttle the world’s best health-care-delivery system. Being on the business end of public opinion is one of the inherent, if few, drawbacks of their very privileged position. But voter spleen-venting does serve as a kind of canary in the coalmine, reminding us to remain watchful for the real wingnuts who might be even more stirred up — and there is always a wingnut, if not among, then at least “for,” every angry mass of humanity.
It is the members’ whining that I take issue with (and the piling on of their media and activist pals) — even if it is over nasty slurs, expressed hopes that the members die of cancer, etc. Because I receive the same thing on a regular basis, with spikes after media appearances on networks boasting strong leftist audiences. Yes, regular. For the act of speech, not slapping enormous debt on you and degrading your future health care in the name of ideology.
That’s what their team does. It’s their move. The one thing that distinguishes them from their counterparts on the right is the Left’s nastiness (see: Alinskyism).
And they regularly threaten and intimidate. Hell, Team Soros’s webmaster saw nothing wrong with a commenter on his site calling for assassinations in retaliation for the Competitive Enterprise Institute sending Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA. No, the editor’s issue was with someone who cautioned against such behavior by daring to invoke a Fox News story noting that the moonbats weren’t doing themselves much good with such moonbattery.
Also, please note the title of my second book: Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed. It was a thick book.
The Left is nasty by nature, having it as a modus operandi. But being certain of their own righteousness, they fail to see it as such — which explains their often hysterical double standards. All of which came to mind after the Left’s whining over the venting about the Dems’ health-care vote, particularly when a Greenpeace activist wrote on Greenpeace’s official blog that
if you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.
Greenpeace has now been stirred by the negative attention, relocating the threatening post and claiming that “It’s very easy to misconstrue that line, take it out of context and suggest it means something wholly different from the practice of peaceful civil disobedience, which is what the post was about.”
Greenpeace’s fatuous spin is that the context (somehow) made this benign. But their action of removing the context affirms they know full well it was not.
– CEI fellow Chris Horner is author of the best-selling Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism), Red Hot Lies, and a new book on Obama’s power grab that will be released by Regnery this month.