Ouch!

I made a mistake.

I flog my blog in social media (some might call that “trolling”) both to advertise it and to get more discussion going. This week, I wrote the come-on, “That’s just another day in the life of a police officer. So is the Liberal cry to Kill the Pigs.”

The piece itself doesn’t make much of a connection between Liberals and the slogan but I did.

“Liberals don’t want to ‘kill the pigs’,” my friend Dangerous Bill replied. “They want to see the justice system working the way it was meant to.”

If liberals don’t want to ‘kill the pigs,’ who are all those outsiders at the protest riots? I wondered.

If liberals don’t want to ‘kill the pigs,’ who posted that saying on Facebook?

If liberals don’t want to ‘kill the pigs,’ who is buying all the t-shirts?

Dangerous Bill brought me up short. “Angry people,” he said but “not necessarily ‘liberal’ in the Fox News sense of the word.”

Fox News has a sense that is different from yours and mine?

“Yes. It’s anyone who deviates in any way from teabagger ideology.” [emphasis added]

And that’s the mistake I made.

Dangerous Bill and others blame all things that Liberals hate on teabaggers and the teabagger ideology.

I want to overthrow Obamacare. I must be a “teabagger.”

I want government to stop spending my great-great-great-great-grandchildren’s inheritance. I must be a “teabagger.”

I want the Administration to obey the law. I must be a “teabagger.”

And, see, that’s the problem. Plenty of people who believe those ideals are indeed in the Tea Party but millions of Americans believe those ideals and are found in every other political persuasion.

Like Dangerous Bill, I blame all the bad things that Liberals do on liberals and the Liberal ideology.

It may be too broad a brush.

I’ve never met anyone but a liberal who would say “Kill the Pigs” and mean it, but I’ve met many, many Liberals who would never do so. And most of those decry anyone who would.

So.

I’ve now learned not to tar all Liberals with that “teabagger” brush some liberals wield.