Jonah Goldberg has a remarkable rant about press bias over at National Review Online you really have to read. He takes on the fact that liberal commentators and liberal politicals now feel entirely free to refer to conservative Republicans, especially those aligned with the Tea Party, as terrorists, jihadists, thugs, dictators, and the like, without fearing the consequences of media blowback. But I’m struck by a quality shared by all those who engage in increasingly uncontrolled rhetoric about the role of the members of Congress who opposed a debt-ceiling increase and any deal: They sound impotent.They are hurling violent words at the people they dislike because they cannot believe their own arguments are not winning the day.
As it happens, I too think a failure to raise the debt ceiling would have been wildly reckless. But for those who voted as they did, the most minimal elementary fairness should be extended: They told their constituents they wouldn’t. They ran for election in 2010 promising to do what they could to change the relationship of the body politic to the federal government, to reverse the spending mania in Washington, and to hold true to principles of limited government. They won. They were presented with bills they thought failed the test. They voted against those bills. In what conceivable universe is this entirely appropriate behavior by elected officials trying to fulfill their campaign promises tyrannous, terroristic, jihadist, or anything else? Opposing tax hikes is the act of a jihadist? Wanting larger cuts in government programs is terrorism? Exercising the right to assemble into a loose coalition to oppose such things is dictatorial?
It isn’t, of course. These words are tossed about because the people who speak them are becoming aware of the fact that they have lost the national argument they believed they had won in 2008. They are revealing themselves as losers, sore losers, bad losers. And Joe Nocera, Paul Krugman, Fareed Zakaria, and others aren’t making arguments. They’re throwing petulant tantrums.
