Mark Steyn fillets authoritarian mayors

While Rush Limbaugh cut right to the chase on Chick-fil-A, calling out the "Stalinist" tactics of several big-city mayors for their "direct assault on Christianity," the inimitable Mark Steyn was busy with a fine-point pen.

Referring to a Chicago alderman's opposition to Chick-fil-A opening a restaurant in his ward because the company president, who is a Christian, recently stated his support for traditional marriage and opposition to gay marriage, Steyn writes:

...in a city with an Aurora-sized body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants...

The city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, agrees with the alderman: Chick-fil-A does not represent "Chicago values" - which is true if by "Chicago values" you mean machine politics, AIDS-conspiracy-peddling pastors, and industrial-scale black youth homicide rates.

But, before he was mayor, Rahm Emanuel was President Obama's chief of staff. Until the president's recent "evolution," the Obama administration held the same position on gay marriage as Chick-fil-A.

And referring to Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who suggested in a letter that the company stay out of Boston, Steyn further observes:

If you've just wandered in in the middle of the column, this guy Menino isn't the mayor of Soviet Novosibirsk or Kampong Cham under the Khmer Rouge, but of Boston, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he shares the commissars' view that in order to operate even a modest and politically inconsequential business it is necessary to demonstrate that one is in full ideological compliance with party orthodoxy.

Romney campaign surrogate, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, campaigning in North Carolina on Saturday, called the official intimidation "chilling":

Now you have the police power of government intimidating and threatening people... based on their free speech rights and their religious views.  I mean it's chilling.  I mean it's stunning, it is jaw-dropping.  And so I think strong people who see this need to stand up and say no we don't do that in the United States.

We have seen this same behavior in attempts to demonize Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the tea party, among others, always following the Alinsky maxim - "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Palin, for her part, tweeted a photo on Friday of herself and husband Todd from a Houston-area Chick-fil-A, noting that "we don't have that in Alaska,' and adding "love me some Chick-fil-A."

In a May National Review article, John Fund reminds us that it's "Still the Alinsky Playbook" for the Democrats, quoting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

...they'll go after anybody or any organization that they think is standing in their way. You know the drill. Expose these folks to public view, release the liberal thugs on them, and then hope the public pressure or the unwanted attention scares them from supporting similar causes down the road.

And here they are, at Chick-fil-A.  Fund concludes:

You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky.

As R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. observes in his 2012 book The Death of Liberalism, (p. 161), "there have always been authoritarian currents in Progressivism, the New Deal and Liberalism." 

An understatement, perhaps, but painfully obvious when the mask comes off.