I’ve pointed this out time and again at http://www.openmarket.org:

Slandering the Tea Parties
by Hans Bader
April 16, 2009 @ 2:43 pm

The “tea party” protests against out-of-control government spending have been very clear in identifying what wasteful spending they object to. One example is Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which was sold to the public as a way of preventing the economy’s “irreversible decline,” but which the Congressional Budget Office repeatedly pointed out would actually cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” Another example is the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout, which would benefit even high-income people with modest mortgages (see the “I can’t afford your mortgage” sign in the Olathe and other tea party protests).

But the protesters are frequently criticized by journalists like Andrew Sullivan for supposedly offering no solutions or constructive suggestions.

For having the temerity to protest Administration lies and out-of-control spending, the protesters have been attacked elsewhere in the left-wing blogosphere in the most vicious language as “redneck, racist Republicons” and as “a bunch of white old people and rednecks” who “got together and tried to start a revolution…to drive the Fascist/Communist nigger out of the White House and stop the fags from stealing their children.”

As a Harvard-educated, arugula-eating, urban dweller whose office hosted the end of the Washington tea party, I find these claims baffling. I am certainly not afraid of my Asian, black, and Hispanic relatives, my French-born wife, or the gay neighbor whose children play with my daughter.

Andrew Sullivan derides the tea parties as “opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s.”

I did too make “serious objections to George W. Bush’s” spending plans. I condemned his costly prescription-drug entitlement (which Sullivan himself predicts will add $32 trillion to the national debt) in the Washington Times, and repeatedly condemned the $160 billion Bush “stimulus rebates” in 2007. I publicly called his $700 billion Wall Street “bailout bill dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” And I condemned his multibillion dollar auto bailout.

And contrary to Sullivan’s claims, I do indeed have a “constructive and specific argument about how . . . to reduce spending and debt and borrowing” — cancel the wasteful $800 billion stimulus package, most of which has not been spent yet, and may cause inflation when it finally is.

http://www.meltingpotproject.com/mpp/2009/04/worst-reporter-ever.html

This is true in general, but doesn’t really apply to the specific conversations in question. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the vast majority of people who spent yesterday publicly whining about taxes haven’t bothered to learn anything about how our government spends its citizens money (or have and are ignoring it in bad faith); haven’t bothered to figure out how to push any of the civic levers available to them; and would generally prefer to just angrily pout about the obligations that our unbelievably wealthy democracy has decided upon, or at best to engage in magical thinking about how the tax code changes that are uncontroversial among their peer group will somehow slash their yearly bill. (I should add — though it’s obvious — that while these things are true for most of the teabaggers, I’m sure they’re not true for anyone here.)

The above is harsh, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. The conservatives with smart things to say about what’s wrong with our tax system typically say them on days other than just the ones when they have to cut big checks to the IRS.

But I guess we just disagree fundamentally about the ‘silliness’ of the paving statement. Yeah, it’s nonsense, if read literally. And there are plenty of other not-so-straightforward ways that you can read it which similarly make it nonsense. But the to my mind obvious intent is … obvious. And it’s a valid, if mean-spirited and only partially effective, rhetorical approach.

Dignified and respectful? Really? When I lead with, “That’s simplistic and infantile”?

That’s my point. You can reply in ways that do NOT dignify the claim (any more than any response dignifies it, at least), without making similarly silly claims yourself.

If you want to go pithier, you can says, to someone who says “taxes bad,” “You’re an idiot.” There’s nothing that says you have to resort to dumb arguments just because you want to quickly dismiss someone.

Well, yeah, that’d be the dignified & respectful approach. And necessary one, if you want to engage in any sort of meaningful exchange. But when the other guy starts w/ ‘taxes bad’ or ‘the muslim president sure loves terrorists,’ it seems fair for the lefty type to write off the possibility of discussion, and it’s hard to blame him for going straight to gleeful mockery. There’s really no place for the discussion to devolve to. Which isn’t to say that much of the twitter squacking isn’t rather embarrassing … though I think the medium itself shares a good bit of blame. (What sort of political discourse will we have if we limit thoughts to 140 characters? Yeah.) Nobody’s going to accuse the left of elevating the conversation surrounding the teabagging business. All I was saying is that, much as I agree w/ the overall gist of the piece, I think Julian’s a bit off in his judgment of that particular statement.