Irony Abounds in the Halls of Congress

Vice President Joe Biden
in a rare moment without his
foot in his mouth.

Insults and accusations fly unabated in the Capitol building. Angry responses empty the quivers of the accused, and the media still doesn't report the truth, content instead to keep the tempest stoked, basically seeding the news cycle for future harvest.

Shortly after the debt debate was settled, Vice President Joe Biden referred to the Tea Party caucus in the Republican-controlled House as terrorists. Rep. Michele Bachmann and one-time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin fired back immediately, letting Biden know that his words were "vile" and "quite appalling". Both demanded an apology. No one in the media has shared that sentiment, however. One can only imagine the reaction of the press had a Republican said such a thing.

Hypocrisy is rich in irony, however, and the Democrats have the former in abundance. As Biden uttered those despicable words, standing nearby was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head last January by Jared Loughner. It was the first time since the shooting that Giffords returned to the Capitol building.

In the immediate aftermath of that horrific event -- in which 6 people were killed and 13 wounded -- the Democrats took to the microphones and the cameras to decry "the tone of the rhetoric", which they blamed for the shooting. They railed against ads using cross hairs, they whined about what they consider vitriol from talk radio, and they demanded that it all be ratcheted down. Of course, this was all because of the mistaken belief and hasty assessment that Fox News and talk radio were somehow responsible for the actions of Loughner.

Miraculously, Giffords not only survived the shot in the head at close range, her condition improved rapidly and dramatically. So as the woman-become-victim -- who had been the rallying point for the Democrats for us to "tone it down" -- makes a triumphant return to Congress to vote on the debt ceiling debate, and then Biden calls his opponents terrorists.

In a doubling-down of irony is the use of that particular descriptive term. In March of this year, the Obama administration replaced the words "terrorist" and "terrorism". In fact, in the Obama administration, what was once called an act of terror shall now be referred to as a "man-caused disaster".

Let's see if we can get this straight now...Obama and Biden can't call an actual terrorist a terrorist, but it's quite alright to call a Tea Party member a terrorist. Am I the only one who sees something wrong here? Considering that a young Barack Hussein Obama was chummy with Bill Ayers -- a bonafide terrorist -- and the media not only ignored that factoid, but sought to suppress it, irony bursts forth like the crude on Jed Clampett's property after a misplaced bullet.

The left still may have a firm grip on control right now in America, but they are terrified of the Tea Party. Certainly there were a few strays in that caucus in Congress this time around, in this particular battle, but for the most part part, they held strong to the principles that we, the people, demanded of them with our votes. And because they entered their freshman terms in great numbers -- and therefore had a strong caucus going in -- they were not to be bought, bribed or coerced.

In the past, we have sent the most principled of people to represent us, but standing alone in the well or facing an entrenched leader always proved too daunting a task, and those principled people were quickly consumed by the machine into which they were cast. Deals were offered and accepted, and in short time the person we elected was no longer recognizable.

When that same machine met an 87-member-sized chunk of "new meat", as in the Tea Party members who gained freshman seats thanks to you, the machine suddenly found the teeth of its gears insufficient for the job, and the wild party ground to a halt. That's when the new power -- the formerly fringe left -- realized that their own soiree was in jeopardy, and the attacks began. Congressmen and senators who believed in the principle of fiscal responsibility, and really anything traditionally American, became targets (pardon the "tone") of the proponents of socialism.

Further, the cries of the president, the vice president and the Democrat Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid, that the Tea Party is a "disconcerting" movement is an indictment on all of us who elected them. All of the unwashed masses that were opposed to the health care debacle forced upon us must also be viewed as terrorists by the Democrats and this administration.

That is the ultimate irony in our current state of affairs, and one I simply cannot abide. For most of my life, the left has been the bane of American society. Today, after all of their painstakingly incremental victories, spanning decades, they have supplanted sanity and seized the reins of the carriage.

Irony exemplified  is the inmates running the asylum. We, America, are there now.

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Political Profit From the Pain

Liberal Talks Calm Face

I purposely avoided writing about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting because I felt it unseemly to take advantage of such a tragedy, particularly in light of a nine-year-old girl having been killed. Conservative talk shows probably would have shown the same reticence if not for the disgusting exploitation exhibited by the Liberal side.

Left wing pundits and politicians were instantly seizing upon the opportunity to ride this vehicle of violence until the wheels fall off. Nearly orgasmic were they in their unbridled glee at the chance to advance their agenda at the expense of every victim of Jared Loughner, the perpetrator responsible for the girl's death and Giffords' critical condition.

Now we are being treated to a relentless barrage of admonitions to mind what we say, and Conservatives are being accused unjustly for somehow encouraging Loughner to commit this heinous act, when the facts point in the opposite direction. Projecting their own culpability on the Right, people such as the Reverend Al Sharpton are demanding "civility in discourse", but only from the Right. The Left continues to feign innocence, and the media are willing accomplices in these baseless accusations.

The Ruins of Freddie's Fashion Mart

It is particularly ironic coming from the likes of Sharpton, considering his complicity in past incidents, actually and more directly resulting in death, acts for which he was never criticized by the media. Let's examine some of the past deeds of the good Reverend, who now seeks to be the voice of reason, shall we?

It was 1995, and Freddie Harari of the Bronx, NY was a business owner who rented a retail building on 125th Street in Harlem called Freddie's Fashion Mart.  The landlord, The United House of Prayer, was a black Pentecostal Church. They had asked Freddie to evict his subtenant in order to expand. That store was The Record Shack, a black-owned business that had been there for quite some time.

Sharpton led a protest in Harlem against the planned eviction, saying, "We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." On December 8th of 1995, one of the protesters, Roland J. Smith Jr., entered Harari's store and shot several customers. He sprinkled a flammable liquid and ignited it before turning the gun on himself. He was among the eight dead at the scene.

Yankel Rosenbaum

Four years earlier, it was also Sharpton's rhetoric that fueled the Crown Heights Riots, which lasted for three days. When it was all over, 152 police officers and 38 civilians were injured, 27 vehicles were destroyed, and 7 stores were burned or looted. And Yankel Rosenbaum was dead.Now he wants others to tone down the rhetoric?

Appearing on the Ed Schultz Show after the Arizona shooting, Sharpton said that "there are some very unbalanced people here, in this country, that anything can trigger". I guess Sharpton is suggesting that the rest of us, who are not "unbalanced",  must walk on egg shells as a result. Of course, that only applies to Conservative speech. The music that Loughner listened to is immune from such scrutiny and causal effect, despite the violent nature of the lyrics. It has not been demonstrated that he listened to Sarah Palin, or read any of her work, yet she is the object of the Left's angst.

And Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) actually suggested that the reading on the House floor of the United States Constitution - which he said was "uncalled for" - somehow contributed to the Arizona shooting. This is a member of the party that held a political rally in 2002, disguised as a memorial service for Paul Wellstone. The same party whose president said they would bring a gun if we brought a knife. And the same party that is once again pushing to censor freedom of speech in the name of the Fairness Doctrine - a misnomer if ever there was one - on the back of Gabrielle Giffords, and the memory of 9-year-old Christina Green, and the other five dead.

John Green, the father of Christina, asked that his daughter's death not be used as an excuse to remove more freedoms, saying, “We don’t need any more restrictions on our society.” I agree wholeheartedly, and condemn the greedy opportunists who refuse to heed his grief-stricken words.

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