Nor was it Young Americans for Freedom that burned ROTC buildings, vandalized professors' offices, toted the guns at Cornell or took over Columbia in 1968. And it was not the Birchers who set off that 1970 explosion in the Greenwich Village townhouse that killed three radicals and aborted the terrorist bombing of the NCO club at Fort Dix.
No, this was not the New Right. This was the New Left, and it was Obama not John Boehner who used to "pal around" with one of the boys who did the Pentagon and Capitol Hill bombings.
As for calling Barney Frank a naughty name, that is not nice. But one wonders what Rich thought of the students marching under Viet Cong flags chanting, about the man who signed that Civil Rights Act, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" and, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win," when American boys were dying in the hundreds every week fighting the communist NLF?
The 1967 attack on the Pentagon, where thousands tried to break through military police to get into the building, was the work of left-wing radicals. Did the Tea Party folks who chanted, "Kill the bill," outside the House behave worse than that?
Some of us recall the anarchy of May Day 1971, when 15,000 leftists tried to shut down Washington on a Monday morning by rolling logs onto Canal Road, smashing car windows, blocking traffic circles and wilding in Georgetown. Most wound up behind a chain-link fence at the Armory.
How many were arrested on Capitol Hill Sunday a week ago?
Not one Tea Partier, man or woman.
The "mass hysteria" of the Tea Party right, writes Rich, is at root about race. "By 2012 ... non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party is virtually all white. ... Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded."
Rich is implying that when America's white majority disappears, in 2042 according to 2008 Census Bureau projections, the day of the white conservative is over.
Given the rise in ethnic consciousness among all Americans, Rich may be right. But it is not just white folks who want illegal aliens deported and legal immigration curtailed, while 25 million of our own are out of work or underemployed.
A Zogby poll for the Center for Immigration Studies found that 56 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of Asian-Americans and 68 percent of African-Americans think legal immigration is too high.
If the Tea Party folks think it is leftist elites who detest and wish to be rid of the America they grew up in and love, they are right.