John Yoo’s perspective on Marin’s GroupaPalooza

I attended the Marin GroupaPalooza, and did a tongue in cheek blog post here, imagining how a Progressive would have perceived the event.  John Yoo has just published his take on the event, which is straightforward and clear — and nicely rebuts Obama’s (and the rest of the Left’s) paranoid fantasies about the event.  I think you’ll find Yoo’s post interesting.

A couple more related points:

First, on the subject of denigrating the Tea Partiers, Stanley Fish, writing at the NYT, urges liberals not to make the mistake of doing so.  After eight paragraphs of compelling arguments urging that the Tea Partiers be treated with dignity even as the Left opposes them, Fish wraps up his article with some rousing paragraphs that . . . yes, you know where this is going . . . insult the Tea Partiers.  Honest to God, they just can’t help themselves.

Second, did I tell you what happened when I saw my liberal friend, the same one who castigated me for attending Tea Party gatherings because they are nothing more than Koch-funded, racist orgies (conducted in code, of course)?

Well, when I saw him, he asked, “How was it?”

I have to admit here that I’m not a very nice person, because I could not resist the impulse to yank his chain.  In breathless tones, therefore, I replied, “It was awful.  It was a bloodbath.”

“What happened?!”

“Well, when Ward Connerly got up to speak, people started pelting him with eggs and hollering the N word.  It was really ugly.”

My friend couldn’t help himself:  “They didn’t!”

To his credit, he framed that last one as a negative, meaning that even he couldn’t believe what I told him — yet he must have believed it just a little bit, or he would have realized instantly that I was pulling his leg, making his horrified exclamation unnecessary.  It says something that he could even entertain the possibility that I might be saying that Ward Connerly, a conservative invited to speak at a conservative gathering, would be subject to that kind of treatment.