The media’s use of violent rhetoric against tea partiers¹ stands in sharp contrast to their shocked! outrage at the use of map imagery in political ads several months ago.²

However, I’m very late to the bandwagon for making fun of the MFM for that failing.  William Jacobson, Jonah Goldberg, Stephen Green, and the lonely conservative among many others have done a great job of it.

I want to focus on the crazy, mixed-up nature of their attack. As has become all-too common, the media is recognizing a fault in leftist rhetoric—in this case President Obama’s—and trying desperately to pin that fault on conservatives, especially the fiscally-conservative tea partiers.

Throughout the debt ceiling debate our President threatened to destroy the United States economy. He threatened to needlessly default on our interest payments.³ He threatened to needlessly stop social security payments to the elderly. It was all needless—the tax revenue is there to make our interest payments and even to continue social security checks.⁴

Debt ceiling debate, not crisis. It was never a crisis. The only sense in which it was a crisis was that our Democratic President threatened to destroy our economy. Destroy it now and in the future, because if we default on our interest payments, anyone willing to “buy our debt” is going to do so only at much higher interest rates to reflect the higher risk of default.

All that tea partiers wanted to do—and want to do—is get on track to spend less than we tax. They want to end the vicious cycle of borrowing more and more. It’s unsustainable. They want spending cuts now, not fake spending cuts next year that next year’s congress can ignore. They want a plan that realistically brings spending in line with revenue.

The President threatened to destroy our credit rating if the House passed such a plan along with the permission to borrow more, rather than just passing permission to borrow more. The New York Times then ran the headline “Tea Party’s War on America.” But it’s not war on America to want America to be fiscally solvent. It’s not terrorism to want to reign in government spending. War on America would be more like trying to force a choice between immediately destroying America’s economy through a default, or slowly destroying America’s economy by cementing in higher and higher debts.

That war was waged by Democrats and the MFM pundits. Tea partiers aren’t extremists. The President and his enablers in the Senate and media are extremists. Anyone who thinks we can borrow infinitely is… infinitely extremist.