Violent Left Wing Fantasies and Francis Fox Piven

At the WSJ, James Taranto dissects the left's violent fantasies and their refusal to acknowledge or discuss actual left-wing violence or calls for violence.

America's liberal left is preoccupied with salacious fantasies of political violence. These take two forms: dreams of leftist insurrection, and nightmares of reactionary bloodshed. The "mainstream" media ignore or suppress the former type of fantasy and treat the latter as if it reflected reality. This produces a distorted narrative that further feeds the left's fantasies and disserves those who expect the media to provide truthful information.

What prompted Taranto to pen this insightful observation was the left's attacks on Glenn Beck for quoting, accurately, an old school marxist, Prof. Francis Fox Piven, who called for riots in America resembling those in Greece. Beck and others have pointed out that the riots in Greece were violent and involved the murder of several innocent people - as was well publicized prior to Piven penning her ode to Greek-style direct action. Yet now the left is pulling out the stops to present Piven as non-violent - while at the same time painting the right, and in particular the Tea Party, as the font of violence in America. The left wing media is using two means to promote its canard:

. . . The first is by seeking out the most extreme expressions by Tea Party activists and sympathetic politicians and portraying them as if they were typical. This is in sharp contrast to the way left-wing political rallies are covered. Extreme and violent rhetoric is at least as easy to find there if you look--Michael Bowers has put together a photo gallery of "Left-Wing Hatred"--but the mainstreamers seldom look. During the Bush years, "antiwar" rallies were routinely depicted as nothing more than forums for wholesome, patriotic dissent.

The second is by presenting innocuous rhetoric from the right as if it were something sinister or dangerous. The most famous example--cited by Hertzberg, naturally--is the SarahPAC map of targeted districts, including Giffords's, which many on the left hoped had incited the man who shot her. Palinoiacs denounced the map as "violent" when it first came out last March, notwithstanding that the visual metaphor of a target is about as common in political campaigns of both parties as cartoons on the pages of Hertzberg's magazine. . . .

The only thing the left hates more than the right is being called to account for their hypocritical actions.