The Mainstream Media’s (MSM’s) latest sport is to try to accuse the Tea Party activists of being Republican hacks. The reality is that their spin is demonstrative again, of their Pavlovian simplicity and lack of vision for their own agenda.
via » Democrat-Media Complex Accuses Tea Partiers of Being On… the Other Side - Big Journalism.
Democrats are racing the clock to pass health care reform ahead of a wave of Tea Party-driven town hall meetings planned for the spring recess — the kind of gatherings that nearly derailed the package last August.
But there’s a big difference this time around. Last summer, Democrats were encouraged to hold the town hall meetings, and they were blindsided by the backlash, which was recorded and promoted in countless YouTube clips. This time around, they have a good idea of what’s coming — and they’re lying low, in case work on health care carries over into the recess.
“There’s not been the same push as there was in August to encourage members to do town halls,” said Stephanie Lundberg, spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
via FOXNews.com - Dems Race to Pass Health Care Bill as Tea Partiers Plan Town Hall Wave.
Even Mother Jones reported in January that Dale Robertson is not and never was a tea party leader and that the mainstream media had “lost its edge” in linking Robertson to the movement.
But, that didn’t stop liberal media hacks from repeating the lie that Robertson was a leader in the Tea Party movement.
via Gateway Pundit.
Have you watched with amusement as various political commentators have tried to demonize the amorphous Tea Party movement by outing behind-the-scenes bogeymen allegedly pulling the strings of this latter day Great Awakening?
Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. Dick Armey. Newt Gingrich. Grover Norquist. Jack Abramoff. Lyndon LaRouche. The John Birch Society. The list goes on.
None of it is sticking.
When suicide pilot Andrew Stack flew his plane Thursday into a Texas building that houses the IRS, killing himself and injuring at least two others, a number of media outlets immediately connected the words of his online suicide letter to those of the Tea Party movement — despite any evidence that Stack has ever been involved in the movement.
That’s something Levi Russell, spokesman for Tea Party Express, called “absurd.”
What do today’s tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement “is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective.” Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good.
Anyone who’s been to a Tea Party rally knows this is no Astroturf movement. These are ordinary citizens, rightly furious that the federal government has sold the country a junk mortgage on its future, sticking America with an unsustainable debt.
Yet there are those who doubt the new activists’ sincerity, asking, in effect, “Where were you when George W. Bush was spending faster than Lyndon Johnson?” It’s a fair question.
via Gene Healy: Tea Partiers should get serious | Washington Examiner.
A year ago today, Seattle taxpayers organized an unprecedented protest of the pork-stuffed, generational theft stimulus bill that President Obama rammed down America’s throat.
via Michelle Malkin » Anniversary of a porkulus protest: The roots of the Tea Party movement.
There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.
These weren’t the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.
via Glenn Harlan Reynolds: What I Saw at the Tea Party Convention - WSJ.com.
A year ago this movement did not exist. Now it is by some accounts the most potent force in American politics. So when the “Tea Party Nation” began its first national convention in Nashville, Tennessee, on February 4th, Republicans paid particular attention.
via The tea-party convention: Scenes from a counter-revolution | The Economist.
Finally, the Tea Party movement is not some subculture of bug-eyed lunatics. Any political movement is going to have some characters ranging from colorful to occasionally unhinged, but the insulting tone of much of the coverage of the movement would have you believe that these are fringe extremists who could snap at any moment.
Well, the truth is, they have snapped already. The sound we are hearing is the proverbial camel’s back breaking after years of reckless spending, punitive taxation and usurpations of liberty that have crippled every citizen’s opportunity to enjoy the full promise of what America is supposed to be about: freedom and opportunity, with the least government necessary to maintain an ordered society.
The people drifting toward the Tea Party movement are not extreme. They are, in fact, fighting extremism - the extremism that has brought us a government that takes far too much, spends far too much and runs our lives far too much.
via RealClearPolitics - The Tea Parties Are United in Favor of Limited, Responsible Government.
America’s prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified, and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith, and independence.
This time, it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties. They’ve grown corrupt, venal, and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, that they’re supposed to represent. So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.
via Glenn Reynolds: Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America’s Third Great Awakening | Washington Examiner.
The organizers of this weekend’s National Tea Party — who have been accused of trying to take a leadership role in the grassroots movement largely defined by its lack of centralized leadership — announced on Friday that they are forming a political action committee to “address the next step in the growing impact of the citizen activist movement.”
The first night’s speaker said the country “put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,” referring to the president by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and launching a tirade against the “cult of multiculturalism” that led to his election.
via Tea Party Convenes in Nashville, Speakers Assail President Obama, Republicans - ABC News.
The Tea Partiers are not a traditional third-party movement, they are instead the most visible manifestation yet of what Examiner contributor Glenn Reynolds calls “an army of Davids” made possible by the Internet and that empowers “ordinary people to beat Big Media, Big Government, and other Goliaths.”
via Mark Tapscott: Third party is the wrong party for Tea Partiers | Washington Examiner.
Subscribe
Keith D. Milby :: blog is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
