Mendacity on Stilts

The Weekly Standard quotes Nancy Pelosi as saying that the nationwide tea parties were “Astroturf” i.e., a fake grassroots movement funded by “some of the wealthiest people in America.”

Let’s have a show of hands: how many people believe that, a month ago, Nancy Pelosi even knew what “Astroturf” meant – in the political sense, I mean? You, sir; is your hand up? Oh, you’re just swatting at a fly. Ok. So, nobody believes she knew the term.

I think that’s probably correct. I believe Pelosi was fed the term by somebody in what the National Review used to refer to as the Hive: the informal network of left-wing organizations, academics, MSM “journalists”, Democratic Party apparatchiks, and - to bring everything up to date – blogs funded by, er, ““some of the wealthiest people in America” (or rather, the world). And it is precisely the incessant buzzing of this Hive that threatens to destroy civil discourse, not so much through the elimination of free speech, as by rendering it irrelevant, through the practice of dishonest polemics and the distortion of language, with the ultimate goal of creating an intellectually inchoate society driven by base emotions, dubious theories, and throbbing larynges.

The hypocrisy of Pelosi – and of so many others in politics and the media – is amazing. In fact, I’m not sure it’s hypocrisy anymore; hypocrisy traditionally represented an awareness that one’s actions or beliefs were shameful, or at least (more cynically), injurious to one’s plans. I believe the Left in this country is so drunk with the prospect of power, since it now has one of its own in the White House, and the Democratic Party is acting in the capacity of its golem, that many of the more impatient comrades, including media types such as Susan Roesgen (as only the most recent example), have succumbed to an almost pathological mendacity. These are people who will lie, as the saying goes, when the truth will do. Stacy McCain made a similar point in this post: “The reason so many Americans hate the news media is because so many supposedly ‘objective’ journalists are transparently dishonest in what they're doing. Media bias is therefore not about a lack of objectivity (no one is strictly objective) but rather about a lack of honesty.”

So, how much more likely they are to lie, when the truth won’t do. The truth, for example, about the Tea Parties that were held across the country on April 15th, is that they represent a genuine grass roots phenomenon – the first tentative steps taken by people who understand, either because of education, experience, or simply intuition, that the end result of feeding the cancer-like growth of government is Leviathan, and that, as Franklin said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Update: How's about some Tea Party video from Richard McEnroe?