Ron Chusid's Attack on 'Vile Conservative Thought'

In his essay, "Vile Conservative Thought About Euthanasia," Ron Chusid once again assures readers that he's got the superior knowledge to make sense of the issues of the day, and to make hash out of those "stupid" conservatives purported to be flailing away on the current ideological/political issues in debate:

One problem with discourse between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives have zero understanding of what liberals actually believe. The modern liberal movement has largely developed from a merger of traditional liberal thought with a reaction to the authoritarianism and denial of science and reason by the right wing in recent years. Conservatives, who tend to be mislead on so many subjects, tend to believe the distortions of liberal thought promoted by the right wing noise machine and comments about liberals from the right tend to have virtually nothing to do with actual liberal thought.

Ron's taking a whack at Dan Riehl's essay "Isn't It Time To Euthanize Reid's Wife?", now trending at Memeorandum. Readers should check the links. It's a tempest in a teapot, really. Dan made a Jonathan Swift attack on the Democrats, who have shown repeatedly that they couldn't care less about human life (as it relates to abortion politics in particular). Dan snarked about how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's wife was "pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with." Looking at this in cost/benefit terms (Nancy Pelosi's especially, since the House Speaker claims that abortion services are cost-effective budget items in Obama's health program), perhaps Landra Reid medical care was rationally inefficient?

Again, check Memeorandum for the outrage. I want to stick with Ron Chusid. Ron's blog is called "Liberal Values," and while one might think that he'd be a proponent of "classical liberalism" (with its stress on free markets and individual liberty), the guy has twisted political ideology into some strange brew of progressive leftism that masquerades as enlightened thought. Indeed, I meant to write something about Ron earlier, but ran out of time. He wrote an essay a couple of weeks ago that was so bad that I'm almost moved to suggest he hang up his keyboard for blogging malpractice. The post was titled, "Coffee Party Makes Tea Party Supporters Jittery." The title alone should send up some red flags. No conservatives are getting jitters over the "coffee party" parasites. These people are Obamabot Astroturfers, and Annabel Park is a radical left-wing hack. If any one's got the jitters, it's Ms. Park. I posted on her coffee party YouTube when her story hit WaPo a few weeks back, and she was jonesing for some attention. The fact is that the tea parties have captured the mantle of grassroots activism today; and the left -- now that it's in power and failing -- is hoping for a way to recapture some momentum. I actually feel kinda bad for them in that sense. They've definitely got to get some mojo working before November.

But Ron Chusid's problems are deeper than blog-post propaganda titles. He's seriously ignorant about the ideological basis of the tea parties, and he makes some really awful historical analogies. He's doing whatever readership he has a great disservice. He notes, for example:

The Coffee Party has many conservatives upset. One of the more irrational attacks on it comes from the Legal Insurrection blog. The attack begins:

The New York Times and Washington Post are promoting a group called the “Coffee Party” organized by filmmaker Annabel Park.

The Coffee Party is a political parasite which presents itself as something it is not…

The author figured out that the Coffee Party really is a put down on the Tea Party. Wow Sherlock, next you are going to question whether Rick really went to Casablanca for the waters perhaps even figure out that there was some gambling going on? I’m afraid that, as with many conservatives, this type of satire is just going totally over his head.

The post as written is quite nonsensical but perhaps the worst irony here is to try to support the Tea Party by complaining that a critic is something it is not. There are few if any prominent groups which pretend to be something they are not than the Tea Party.

It is the Tea Party which protests against an imaginary tax increase from Obama when Obama actually cut their taxes. They protest against the deficit oblivious to the fact that the deficit is primariiy the fault of George Bush and the Republican Party while it is Obama who is trying to restore some fiscal sanity. They are oblivious to how the right wing is ripping them off, both on the issues and financially.

Worst of all, the Tea Party pretends to be something it is not when it uses imagery of the American Revolution. The Revolution was a classic battle between liberalism and conservatism, and in any analogy to the American Revolution the Republicans are the Tories.

Let me go item by item here:

First: William Jacobson delivered a crushing rebuke to the "coffee parties" at the post cited by Ron Chusid. These people have foisted themselves off as some spontaneous grassroots reaction to the tea party movement, and William dug around a bit to reveal Annabel Park's substantial ties to the Obama presidential campaign and the radical left's netroots establishment. None of this is mentioned by Ron, which clearly impugns his little snarky asides he's reduced to uttering.

Second: Ron criticizes the tea parties for pretending to be something that they are not. His evidence? Well, first of all are these bogus claims suggesting that President Obama "cut taxes." Of course, this is the real nonsense. As I showed in my essay, "Obama Didn't Cut Taxes." the administration has handed out "tax rebate" checks but has NOT cut marginal tax rates. Basically, it's a gimmick, and in fact, the Democrats are expected to raises taxes to finance the healthcare reform, so Obama's claim that he's cutting taxes for 95 percent of Americans is a blatant lie.

Third is this claim that tea partiers are actually protesting against budget deficits that are the fault of "George Bush and the Republican Party." Now this is just a patent lie by Ron Chusid. Yeah, the U.S. ran large deficits under 8 years of out-of-control government spending, and that's while the Bush administration fought the war on terror and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with bipartisan votes in Congress. But, while deficits did increase during the Bush years, the projected fiscal explosion of the Democratic Obama administration is unprecedented. Even the mainstream press took Obama to task."See the Wall Street Journal, "Obama Submits Largest Budget in History, But Networks Portray Him as Fiscal Conservative." And according to another piece at WSJ:

As for the deficit, CBO shows that over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history.

At the New York Times, "Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power":

By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

Indeed, if that's not enough, we have the widely circulated chart from the Heritage Foundation, popular on conservative blogs when the tea parties took off last year:

And finally, fourth, Ron Chusid argues that "the Tea Party pretends to be something it is not when it uses imagery of the American Revolution," and " in any analogy to the American Revolution the Republicans are the Tories."

This is really awful analysis and reductionist history. Anyone who knows anything about the tea parties is aware that activists have had both parties in the crosshairs. True, we have seen some movement to synthesize the tea parties with the GOP, but key conservative activists have repudiated Republicans who have abandoned tea party principles. Keli Carender, who started anti-big-government protests even before they were called tea parties, was interviewed at New York Times last month. And as she noted there, even Sarah Palin would have to "campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support," and "... 'if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired'."

And I'm just going to ignore this this patently stupid remark about how the Republicans are the tories."

Ron Chusid needs to get it together. His attacks on conservatives are worse than the routine fever swamp posts at the most disgusting left-wing blogs. He positions himself as some kind of sophisticated analyst with a deep grounding in limited government philosophies. But in the end, his writing amounts to nothing more than uninformed smears and hack jobs, and not very good ones at that.