How do we know that the tea party has become a force that can't be shrugged away in the five years since it emerged? When liberals in media smear tea partiers with ludicrous, over-the-top comparisons.
Appearing on Ed Schultz's radio show, Mother Jones reporter David Corn rendered himself incapable of being taken seriously when he likened the tea party to one of the most depraved criminals to appear in film, the Joker in the Batman movies. (Audio after the jump)
SCHULTZ: You can't be a tea party candidate and even talk about immigration reform.
CORN: No, well, you can unless you want to kill it and say it's going to ruin America. Yes, then you can talk about it.
SCHULTZ: Yeah.
CORN: But otherwise, no, but you also, you can't talk about compromise. I mean, the thing about the tea party is that it's not willing to make Washington work better. It wants to burn the village to, well, not even to save the village as the old Vietnam war phrase went. It just wants to burn the village. It just wants disruption, it wants, you know, it doesn't care about government shutting down and the loss of $28 billion in economic activity. It doesn't care about a possible default on our debt and what that might do it terms of triggering a financial crisis here and abroad. It doesn't care. It doesn't like the system, it wants it to be blown up. You know, it's like the Joker in the Batman movies -- it wants chaos and destruction.
Not far off the mark -- in describing what bin Laden sought to accomplish on 9/11.
What Corn means by "compromise" -- Republicans caving to Democrats. When uttered by a liberal, it never -- ever -- means the opposite. Same goes for "make Washington work better."
On the bright side, Corn somehow managed to avoid the kneejerk leftist tendency to label the tea party as irredeemably racist.
For Corn to converse with tea partiers poses too great a risk, because if he somehow miraculously survived such a conversation, his joke of a comparison would be seen as ridiculous.
Whenever I hear a liberal spew along these lines, I'm reminded of the title of Boston radio host Michael Graham's book on the tea party -- "That's No Angry Mob, That's My Mom."
