The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Terrorists for Tax Increases

Posted on | July 25, 2011 | 7 Comments

This morning I got a Twitter message from a friend who works at the DC offices of Americans for Tax Reform, informing me that they had been evacuated after a bomb threat. Alex Pappas at The Daily Caller reports:

Staffers at Americans for Tax Reform, the anti-tax group run by conservative activist Grover Norquist, evacuated their building Monday morning after a bomb threat was called in, according to authorities.
A spokesman for the Washington D.C. police department, Anthony Clay, confirmed to The Daily Caller that officers from the explosive ordnance division were called to the building that houses the organization’s D.C. offices shortly after 9 a.m. . . .
No explosives were found, the officer said. Police had shut down 12th Street in Washington near ATR’s offices.
“The police are conducting an investigation,” said John Kartch, a spokesman for ATR, in an email.

Read the whole thing. Several left-wing bloggers (and, I’d imagine, some MSNBC hosts) have blamed ATR founder Grover Norquist for the debt-ceiling crisis, saying that Republicans who signed the ATR’s no-tax-increase pledge are the obstacles to a bipartisan “balanced approach” compromise. A few relevant points here:

  • Not every conservative is a Grover Norquist fan. Michelle Malkin especially hates him.
  • David Brooks took a cheap shot at Norquist last week, calling him a “Beltway bandit.” At risk of offending Michelle Malkin, then, I’ll confess to having a soft spot in my heart for anyone David Brooks doesn’t like.
  • Did I mention that Norquist is reputed to have said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”?
  • Remember when every host on MSNBC was accusing Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin of fomenting right-wing extremist violence? Yeah. Tu quoque, Ed Schultz.
  • It strains our minds to think that anybody could be so stupid as not to see through the debt-ceiling kabuki-dance that Obama and the Democrats have orchestrated in their attempt to score a political “win” by blackmailing Republicans into voting for tax increases. However, as Russ Emerson pointed out in reference to Democratic Underground, there are some liberals so clueless that they believe everything they’re told by their so-called “leaders.” Such people are dangerous.

My frequent (and sometimes tasteless) jokes, my blogging about silly celebrities, the fun of “Rule 5 Sunday” — all of these are ways of signalling to readers that politics is not the be-all, end-all of human existence.

Even though there are times when we must rally the troops and exert maximum effort to win elections or fight other political battles, the minute we start thinking that our ideology or agenda is so urgent that it can and must be advanced through force or fraud, we have surrendered whatever claims of honor our cause ever deserved.

The Left has always been dishonorable. But we cannot defeat the Left by becoming the Left.

(P.S.: Alex Pappas is a good kid, even if he does work for Tucker Carlson. Alex is a ‘Bama boy. Roll Tide!)

Category: Democrats, Terrorism

Comments

7 Responses to “Terrorists for Tax Increases”

  1. Quartermaster
    July 27th, 2011 @ 12:29 am

    Norquist married a Muslimiya. Why expect anything different out of the idiot.

    I noticed the pro-Alabama bigotry in the fine print. It was either bigotry, or you are going soft shell on us. Good kids don’t work for the likes of Carlson. he may have been a good kid at one time, but he has clearly gone to the dark side. You, therefore, owe an apology to all Confederate states. “My Maryland” has obviously gotten to you.