The Left Melts Down

Dan Henninger explains why some of the most strident and influential members of the American left attempted to blame tea partiers and Sarah Palin for the Tucson massacre.

They (Democrats and liberals) expected to take losses in November. What they got instead was Armageddon. Suddenly an authentic reform movement, linked to the Republican Party, whose goal simply is to stop the public spending curve, had come to life. This poses a mortal threat to the financial oxygen in the economic ecosystem that the public wing of the Democratic Party has inhabited all these years.

The stakes for the American left in 2012 couldn't possibly be higher. If then, and again in 2014, progressives can't pull toward their candidates some percentage of the independent voters who in November abandoned the Democratic Party, they could be looking in from the outside for as many years as some of them have left to write about politics. A wilderness is a terrible place to be.

And so driven in part by their own fears and the belief that they are justified in fighting the opposition by any means necessary, they quickly saw Tucson as a political opportunity. That effort has backfired badly.

Other liberals who saw that this effort was a bad move and immediately said so. They are eliciting some very telling comments.

In defending Palin from nonsensical and overwrought attacks, Jonathan "Lord Help Me, I'm Defending Palin" Chait, received this comment on is blog:

Good lord, Jon! Who cares if it's intellectually dishonest to attack her and pin this on her. I admire your honestly and lack of cynicism here, but the teaparty has crossed the line of good taste in their vile and violence-laced attacks and rhetoric aimed towards politicians in BOTH PARTIES. I should think that all elites would agree that they deserve this and that this will calm them down and reinforce the temporarily forgotten social norm that over the top rhetoric is inappropriate.

If you're trying to argue that this won't work, then you're wrong. John Boehner has every incentive in the world to quiet these nuts down before a presidential election. Their usefulness is limited to base turnout elections (midterms).

Most Americans will buy these attacks on Palin, by the way, regardless of the facts. Why? Because they don't like her.

Who cares if it's "intellectually dishonest"? And this from somebody who claims to be a "Virginia Centrist."

It doesn't get any more cynical than that.

In fact, it kind of reminds me of Spencer Ackerman's infamous suggestion on the now defunct Journ-o-list to call some conservative commentator a racist for political advantage.

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. . . . This makes them 'sputter' with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

This is what happened to some on the left when they attempted to blame their opponents for the Tucson shootings. It led them to sputtering, overreacting and self-destructing.