New liberal talking point: tea partiers = terrorists?

It's always easy to sniff out new Democratic talking points -- like good liberal foot soldiers, they repeat their assigned memes nearly word-for-word.  This week's left hook: tea partiers are like terrorists.

Writing for Politico, William Yeomans describes the tea party's "terrorist tactics":

It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House “hostage takers.” But they have now become full-blown terrorists.

They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victimsto achieve their political goals. A strong America has always stood firm in the face of terrorism. That tradition is in jeopardy, as Congress and President Barack Obama careen toward an uncertain outcome in the tea party- manufactured debt crisis.

TIME's Joe Klein:

The Republicans have been willing to concede nothing. Their stand means higher interest rates, fewer jobs created and more destroyed, a general weakening of this country’s standing in the world. Osama bin Laden, if he were still alive, could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.

Former Obama car czar Steve Rattner appearing this morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe:

You know, the problem with this is it's like a form of economic terrorism. I imagine these Tea Party guys are like strapped with dynamite, standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour and saying, 'either you do it my way, or we're going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country up with us.' So you tell me how those kinds of standoffs end.

Former green jobs czar Van Jones is careful not to use the term "terrorist," but the connotation is clear:

Any faction in America that would put a gun to the head of 310 million people and say 'If you don't do it our way, we will blow your dreams away, we will blow a hole in the American economy', that is un-American.

New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman:

[The tea party movement] is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

Seriously?

vs.

In the left's eyes, apparently we're all terrorists now.