Yet more on Tea Parties and “astroturfing,” which I’m only mentioning at this late date as a set-up for a very simple question:

The movement started with a “Porkulus” protest organized by Keli Carender, a blogger-mom in Seattle getting her first taste of political activism, three days before the now-famous Feb. 19 television news rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Carender was concerned about Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package. Blogger Michelle Malkin got wind of Carender’s activity and touted it, which led to similar protests in Colorado, Arizona, and Kansas. A national movement caught fire, organized by a bunch of mostly unconnected people who found each other via social networking on the Internet. These facts about the origins of the movement render especially goofy recent accusations from pro-Obama groups on the left that the Tea Party Protests are somehow part of an evil right-wing conspiracy funded either by CNBC or Fox News.

Even if this movement is being supported by some nebulous right-wing “conspiracy” — SO FUCKING WHAT? Do liberals really want to try arguing that, after years of chanting the “organize, organize, organize” mantra themselves, groups of like-minded citizens uniting in a common cause is somehow reprehensible?

Of course they don’t. Not that they’re bothered in the least by the brazen hypocrisy of Soros-funded, Juicebox Mafia-directed drones whining about Tea Party protests being guided by some sinister cabal; hypocrisy is an absolutely necessary counterweight for the cognitive dissonance wrought by the contradictions inherent in their incoherent world view. No, the plain and obvious fact is that they think speaking up and organizing to make our voices heard is reprehensible and oughtn’t be allowed because they don’t agree with the views being presented.

In other words, it’s just another shining manifestation of their “tolerance” for opinions that differ from their own. They simply can’t win via logic and reasoned debate, and therefore rarely attempt it, as anyone who’s tried to engage most any Leftist in such already knows; the discussion will always quickly degenerate to a nearly non-sequitur-ish stream of ad hominem and straw man attacks, appeals to authority, goalpost-moving, and finally, attempts to change the subject entirely. In the case of the Tea Parties, in accordance with Lefty gospel, they have to try to discredit the movement en masse by attacking the messengers themselves, rather than their ideas: pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

They know that America’s founding principles, based as they are on certain universal and eternal truths, still have deep resonance with Americans who are more open-minded than they’ll ever manage to be, and as such they can’t have those ideas being freely explicated and advocated. They fear that resonance, as well they should. That fear, and the frothing denunciations of the people espousing them that are born of it, is one of the better means of unearthing the mindless anti-Americanism that underpins their ideology.

As Andrew Klavan reminds us, the Left’s argument always and of necessity boils down to one simple statement: shut up.