Pat Buchanan

In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters.

Comes now, the "Oath Keepers." And who might they be?

Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are "either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia."

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"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here," says founding father Stewart Rhodes, an ex-Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer. "My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can't do it without them.


Prediction: Brother Rhodes is headed for cable stardom.

And if the Pelosi-Reid progressives went postal over town-hall protesters, calling them "un-American," "Nazis" and "evil-mongers," one can imagine what they will do with the Oath Keepers.

As with Jimmy Carter's long range psychoanalysis of Joe Wilson, the reflexive reaction of the mainstream media will likely be that these are militia types, driven to irrationality because America has a black president.

Yet, the establishment's reaction seems more problematic for the republic than anything the Oath Keepers are up to. For our political and media elite seem to have lost touch with the nation and to be wedded to a vision of America divorced from reality.

Progressives are the folks who, in the 1960s, could easily understand that urban riots that took scores of lives and destroyed billions in property were an inevitable reaction to racism, poverty and despair. They could empathize with the rage of campus radicals who burned down the ROTC building and bombed the Pentagon.

The "dirty, immoral war in Vietnam" explains why the "finest generation we have ever produced" is behaving like this, they said. We must deal with the "root causes" of social disorder.

Yet, they cannot comprehend what would motivate Middle America to distrust its government, for it surely does, as Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal:

Pat Buchanan

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