Reacting to Vice President Joe Biden’s indictment of the supposed disastrous results from the Bush administration’s economic policies, Shields fretted:
The problem for the Democrats is this, that the energizer bunny for the 2006, 2008 campaigns has disappeared because of George W. Bush’s being a circumspect and discreet former President it makes it very difficult for Democrats to demonize him again. He’s become a non-person. He shows up at a ball game once in a while, he greets soldiers coming back. He hasn’t said anything controversial and that makes it a tougher fight for Joe Biden to make.Charles Krauthammer is a regular on the weekly program, so I’ll use that as a hook to highlight his latest column, “The last refuge of a liberal,” which includes this well-framed observation:
Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.Krauthammer elaborated:
Another great formulation, about how those tricky Tea Party activists weren’t clever enough to fool the liberal media:-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.(Inside Washington is a weekly show produced by ABC’s Washington, DC affiliate, which airs it Sunday morning after it runs Friday night on DC’s PBS affiliate, WETA-TV channel 26, and Saturday on local cable’s TBD TV.)