One of the most time-honored tricks in politics is the act of accusing your opponent of your own worst crime. Doing so confuses the mass of the population. It allows the trickster to assume the mantle of righteous indignation, wrapping their stern lectures in the aura of high morality. And, of course, it is all a lie, nothing more than a device to try to escape accountability.

This came to mind as I read the ravings of the hard-Left in the “main stream” press.  From Krugman to Dionne, the arbiters of what is acceptable socialist thought in America have screamed their buzzword – “extremists.” What has them all worked-up is the possibility that the Supreme Court will follow the Constitution and as much as 69% of the American people and throw the Obama healthcare takeover into the trash where it so richly deserves to be.

“Extreme” they yell!  Where are the “good Republicans” of the past, those quisling souls who always agreed with the underlying assumptions of the all-powerful centralized state, those “moderates” who were the first to concede to the demands of the Left, who only wanted to make the state “run efficiently”?  Where are they?  I can tell you – they’re hiding, worried about being defeated in primaries or run out before there were defeated. They never represented the conservative movement.

Dionne can try to rewrite history all he wants but the facts remain – the “good Republicans” he longs for were never more than a fraction of the GOP and today are far less.

For a generation or more, the Left has worked to spin the illusion that there was a consensus in America in favor of the all-powerful, unrestrained, ever-growing federal government.  The only debate was a matter of degree, mere nuance.  Any true alternative was by definition “extreme.”  But this was the greatest lie perpetrated on the American people in the post-World War II era.  There was no such consensus and there was in fact no constituency inside the GOP for it. The deep alienation of millions of Americans – Republicans, Independents and yes, Democrats – from their government is a direct result of government pushing the policies of the Big Government Illusion to the exclusion of policies that actually have the support of the people.

Krugman and company view a Supreme Court decision over-turning Obamacare as radical. Millions of Americans view the expansion and distortion of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution as radical bordering on a coup. If this Supreme Court pushes back against the obscenity of the Filber decision and returns the federal government to a limited role in commerce, that is just good common sense.

Likewise, the Left views the budget created by Paul Ryan and passed by the Republican House of Representatives as draconian, they look at a budget that doesn’t result in a balanced budget for more than 25 more years and shed oceans of crocodile tears. Most Americans think spending $1 trillion more than we take in every year as radical to the point of insane.

For most citizens, the size of our national debt is the very definition of extremism. So for Mr. Krugman and his pals, just so you know, the Ryan budget does not cut. The Tom Coburn “Back in Black” budget that cuts $1 trillion a year for the next decade – that’s a cut.

As the “moderates” Dionne and others on the Left so adore have been driven out of the GOP, what has been exposed is deep ideological divisions in America.

The mouthpieces of the status quo want to paper over those divisions, pretend they don’t exist.  Failing that, they will engage in drive-by character assassination of the kind we have seen of late.  But the divide is real and will continue to grow.

What really scares the Left is the knowledge, deep in their hearts, that the vast majority of Americans oppose and hate their agenda. America wants a truly limited government with harsh restrictions on its powers. America opposes the radical redistribution of resources from those that work to those that don’t.  America is sick to death of the race-baiting and poverty pimping from the same people whose policies create poverty and further divide the races. And, America is adamantly opposed to the mutation and distortion of our Constitution for the ideological gain of a few at the price of lost liberties for the People.

So yes, there is extremism in the land.  But it lies with the radicals from Harvard and the other elitist brainwashing factories and the self-appointed “experts” of the punditry, not with the American people or those in the GOP who have finally decided to listen to them.