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'Civility': The Denouement
...Last Wednesday Thomas Friedman described the Tea Party as the GOP's "Hezbollah faction." The same day Maureen Dowd approvingly quoted "some Democrats" as describing the Tea Party as "the Republican 'Taliban wing.' " (In fairness we should note that the Times's Roger Cohen registered a partial dissent: "Hatred of Muslims . . . is a growing political industry. It's odious, dangerous and racist.")

And it's not just the Times. NewsBusters.org quotes liberal Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson: "There's a nihilist caucus which is, 'Listen, we want to burn the place down.' I mean, they're not, they've strapped explosives to the Capitol and they think they are immune from it." NewsBusters also notes a cartoon from David Fitzsimmons of the (Tucson) Arizona Daily Star depicting President Obama ordering Navy SEALs to stage a bin Laden-style raid on the House side of the Capitol.

Politico itself got into the act, running two op-eds last week on the theme: "The Tea Party Taliban" by Martin Frost (a Democratic ex-congressman) and "The Tea Party's Terrorist Tactics" by William Yeomans, former chief counsel to Sen. Ted Kennedy. Mary Jo Kopechne's former chief counsel could not be reached for comment.

Hey, what ever happened to civility?

That's not a rhetorical question. Back in January, after a madman shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a crowd of her constituents, gravely wounding her and killing six, the liberal elite briefly developed an obsession with the supposed dangers of uncivil political rhetoric.

Before a suspect had even been identified, as we noted Jan. 10, Fitzsimmons, the Tucson cartoonist, was on CNN blaming "the right in Arizona" for "stoking the fire of heated anger and rage" and making the attack "inevitable." Fitzsimmons later apologized, but former Enron adviser Paul Krugman did not. ...

...Then it was February, and the liberal elite lost all interest in policing "the boundaries of public discourse." The faux goo-goo group Common Cause held a rally where participants urged the lynching of Supreme Court justices. Liberals--including at least one Democratic congressman--employed actual violent rhetoric against Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker, whose state budget reforms stripped government employee unions of many of their expensive privileges.

And now, of course, all of liberaldom is likening the Tea Party to terrorists. But really, that message is entirely consistent with the one in January, and indeed with the message the liberal elite has been propagating since the early days of the Obama administration: that the Tea Party is illegitimate.

"Terrorist," "racist," "uncivil," "insane," the list goes on--in this context, these words have no real meaning. They are mere epithets. The Obama presidency has reduced the liberal left to an apoplectic rage. His Ivy League credentials, superior attitude, pseudointellectual mien and facile adherence to lefty ideology make him the perfect personification of the liberal elite. Thus far at least, he has been an utter failure both at winning public support and at managing the affairs of the nation.

Obama's failure is the failure of the liberal elite, and that is why their ressentiment has reached such intensity. Their ideas, such as they are, are being put to a real-world test and found severely wanting. As a result, their authority is collapsing. And if there is one thing they know deep in their bones, it is that they are entitled to that authority. They lash out, desperately and pathetically, because they have nothing to offer but fear and anger....

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Tea Party terror?
If liberals believe anything, it is that the right is either solely, or mostly, responsible for the degradation of political discourse in America. And they are surely correct to condemn such ugly rhetorical excesses as the Obama-is-Hitler placards that flowered across the land in the summer of 2009.

But liberals are in deep, deep denial about their own incivility issues. Consider the “terrorism” analogy now being aimed at the Tea Party by Democratic members of Congress — in the acquiescent presence of the vice president, no less — and by some journalists who sympathize with the Democrats. To pick just one example of the genre, today’s New York Times carries Joe Nocera’s column, “Tea Party’s War Against America.”

According to Nocera, President Obama’s debt-ceiling deal with the Republicans violated a basic rule: “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He adds: “Much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” These “intransigent” spending cutters were indifferent to “blowing up the country” in pursuit of their goals. They are indifferent to “inflicting more pain on their countrymen” via “the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class” and the extra unemployment it will bring.

I’m puzzled. The Times editorial board only recently condemned “many on the right” for “exploit[ing] the arguments of division,” and “demonizing immigrants, or welfare recipients, or bureaucrats.” Right-wingers, The Times notes, “seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.” ...

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New York Times columnist accuses Tea Party of ‘waging jihad’
It’s almost hard to recall how the left howled about “civility” in the wake of the Tucson shooting horror. But that was then, and the standards the left sets for the right is one it hardly adheres to. We had Vice President Joe Biden’s now-denied comments casting Republicans in the role of “terrorists.” And then the hometown newspaper for liberal elites got into the act.

There’s no denying the depths — and hypocrisy — to which the New York Times opinion section has sunk. Remember that Paul Krugman carried on his own war of vilification, claiming Republicans were responsible for mass murder. ...

...Another conservative reader observed, “Remember how everyone wanted to tone down the rhetoric and use more civilized language. Now, we’re calling people terrorist and criminals. I guess ‘terrorist’ and ‘jihadist’ are only politically incorrect when they’re used to refer to actual terrorists and jihadists.”...