Medary.com

In Salon

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals?

How, indeed? The "liberals" on the left are anything but liberal. They are dogmatic, angry, racist, classist, sexist, totalitarians completely and totally focused on controlling every single aspect of every American's life, liberty, and property.

A "progressive" is the exact opposite of a classical liberal--one who advocates individual liberty. The fundamental strategy of the progressive is "divide and conquer." First divide us into groups--races, classes, unions, businessmen, rich, poor; pit the groups against one another with the most vicious possible rhetoric; and then finally swoop in at the end on a white horse (or unicorn, as the case may be) to Save The Day For The Good And Virtuous People--who curiously enough always seem to be the same condescending urban/elite college cocktail-party snobs who always flit towards power like moths toward candles.

Who's left out in the cold, trying to scrape out a living on whatever crumbs the Virtuous People deign to toss out of their ivory towers?

The rest of us. The majority. The despised masses. The middle class. The poor.

THAT is why the Founding Fathers tried so hard to create a system of government so unwieldy that it would be almost impossible to use it to command how other people lived their lives.

Unfortunately, they underestimated the ability of The Virtuous People to twist and torture the language to suit their own purposes.

Progressive? They seek a return to serfdom, with themselves as the lords, and the rest of us as the serfs.

Liberals? No. There's nothing "liberal" about them.

they are Tyrants.