The national Democratic party, with the help of their friends in the mainstream media, has been throwing the term extremist around pretty cavalierly recently. It’s obviously a talking point that’s been shared on those conference calls between liberals and reporters.
“Extreme” usually indicates that your views are in the extreme minority. But that is certainly not the case for conservatives and Tea Partiers. Watch this video:
It’s clear that the views of the Tea Party insurgents are anything but extreme, at least in the textbook definition of the word. In fact, they’re more mainstream than those of liberal Democrats, like David Price, for instance. Check out his most recent ad and not the number of reference to his “extreme” opponent:
Note his mock outrage that anyone would want to eliminate the federal Department of Education, which was only created under Jimmy Carter in the late 1970’s, and which, from the beginning, was seen by many as a useless and wasteful department that should be eliminated. (I know that from first-hand knowledge because I, at the behest of Gov. Fob James, who I worked for at the time, and Gov. Bill Clement of Texas, wrote a resolution at the 1979 Southern Governor’s Conference calling for it to be eliminated. It failed, thanks mostly to then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s lobbying, but it’s clear that the Department of Education was considered sketchy from the start.)
Note also the false assumption that North Carolina would lose all funds that come from the Education Department. The truth is that without the department, states would have billions of dollars that are now wasted on the Department of Education, assuming we could wrangle that money back to the states from the hands of the arrogant bureaucrats and congressmen who use it as a cudgel against the states.
UPDATE: And then there’s this, a poll showing that most Americans think Democrats are more dominated by extremists.
UPDATE 2: Price uses a $4 billion figure in his ad to represent how much North Carolina would lose if the Department of Education is eliminated. I don’t know how he arrived at that, since in 2008-09 we only got $1.2 billion from the feds, and I doubt it went up to $2.8 billion in 2009-10.
