Charlotte Observer Distorts Establishment Diatribe on Tea Party

Big daddy, establishment republicans are fighting back against Tea Party criticisms.  Washington D.C. cannot stand having plebeians holding a mirror to their faces and reminding them of their wart ridden failures.  To insiders, like Michael Gerson, the lords of Washington D.C. are the beautiful people, while we are the great unwashed.

In order to maintain power within the Kingdom of the Potomac, the ruling class must marginalize its critics.  This tactic is as old as the republic.  Federalist and their Tory sympathizers did the same to the so-called Anti-Federalist.  They called these dissenters anarchist, mobs, and haters of government.  Anti-Federalist became a pejorative.  This wouldn’t have been possible without a biased media.  Yes, even back then, there was media bias.

Newspapers, like the Charlotte Observer, feature faux-conservatives like Michael Gerson in their Sunday editions.  This is perfectly natural when you have a republican writing like a democrat.  But what Mr. Gerson and his ilk had better understand is that papers, like the Charlotte Observer, will distort their message as well.  The following paragraphs of Mr. Establishment Republican’s op-ed were left out of the Disturber’s edition:

These habits of mind — desperation, utopianism, purifying zeal and ideological simplicity — have their uses throughout history. But they can’t be called conservative. This is one theme of a careful, instructive essay by Philip Wallach and Justus Myers in National Affairs that ought to be required beach reading for conservatives. The authors describe the attributes of the conservative temperament — humility, an appreciation for what is worthy in our society, a preference for incremental reform, a distrust of abstraction — and contrast them to the “misguided radicals of the left and right.”

Progressives, in their view, have created complex and ungovernable public systems by “doubling down on centralization and technocracy.” But “some on the right seek to break with the past in a very different manner — repudiating 80 years of institutional development and reinventing America as a nation that rejects the substantive role for regulation or a social safety net. Though they are often labeled as ‘conservatives,’ their ambitions, and especially their rhetoric, emphasize the need for a sharp break with many features of our current governing institutions.” The alternative is a more empirically grounded and practical conservatism, which displays a “deep interest and knowledge of our starting place and the plausible means of making improvements.”

I had to get the “unedited” version from the St. Louis Post Dispatch.  The Charlotte Observer didn’t have the decency to advise its readers that Mr. Gerson’s article was an abridged edition.  Go figure.  You would think establishment republicans would’ve learned by now.  But they’re too busy playing whack-a-mole with tea partiers.

Source:  http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/michael-gerson/michael-gerson-needed-a-conservative-temperament/article_38724ff6-5729-5884-ba33-8e4097f83911.html