At the moment, the most popular item on The Washington Post website is this blog post from Charles Lane, taking Democrats to task for referring to Tea Partiers as "terrorists." Apparently, Lane is unfamiliar with the concept of "metaphor" and believes it is inaccurate to call Tea Partiers terrorists, since they have not literally sent suicide bombers into the Capitol:
Certainly those, such as Michelle Bachmann, who vowed to vote against raising the debt limit under almost any circumstances were engaged in irresponsible posturing. I thought John McCain's "hobbit" line, cribbed from the Wall Street Journal, captured this nicely.
Having said that, terrorism is not defined by ideology or objectives; it is defined by methods. Terrorists are people who commit acts of physical violence, or threaten them, to influence politics. Tea Party members of Congress, by contrast, ran for office, got elected, and are now casting votes in the national legislature according to what they promised and what their constituents want. In the debt-ceiling debate, they played hardball politics in pursuit of their principles, as they see them.
If there's any violence, or threat of violence there, or any law-breaking at all — much less a "jihad," I can't see it.
But wait -- wasn't McCain being equally wrong, since Republicans in the House are not actually three-foot-high characters with large, hairy feet, who exist only in a fictional universe? What the heck could he possibly have been talking about?
I'd agree that it's going too far to call Tea Partiers terrorists. It's more accurate to call them hostage-takers. Had they actually gone ahead and prevented the debt-ceiling increase, then you could have made a case for the terrorism label, since they would have intentionally inflicted vast suffering on the American civilian population in pursuit of their ideological aims. And one of the few people actually advocating that course was Bachmann, whom Lane defends by saying all she was doing was engaging in "irresponsible posturing." But as it turned out, they let the hostage go once most of their demands were met. That's something hostage-takers do, but terrorists don't. If you're going to use a metaphor, you might as well use the right one.
UPDATE: Mitch McConnell has endorsed the hostage-taking metaphor!
I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn't think that. What we did learn is this — it's a hostage that's worth ransoming.
Translation: Some Republicans wanted to be terrorists, but it turns out it's better to be a hostage-taker.
