Huey Long would know what to do.
Angry people were the Kingfish's stock in trade. People dispossessed and victimized, pissed off at a government that only cares about them on Tax Day. The populist Louisiana governor channeled the rage of the poor into political support, wielded power on their behalf. And he delivered.
Born of the Great Recession and ongoing economic collapse, the Tea Party movement is America's latest contribution to a long tradition of populist agitation.
The Tea Party doesn't have a platform, which makes sense, since it isn't a party. The Tea Party movement is a loose, decentralized coalition of radical libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Sarah Palin-loving populists, black-helicopter militia types, nativist Minutemen obsessed with the New World Order, members of the retro John Birch Society, even a group of sheriffs who swear not to obey "stupid laws." Some of them hate Obama. They say they hate his policies, but some use racist rhetoric. They are almost all white.
(The Tea Party also doesn't have a media spokesman, or one willing to talk to columnists, anyway. I reached out; never heard back. If any major Tea Partiers want to chat, please get in touch.)
What unites the Tea Party, which is more or less symbiotically affiliated with the so-called "Patriot" movement, are three issues. First, they're Constitutional purists. Second, they want the federal government to shrink or go away entirely. Third: they want lower taxes and government spending.
So why is the Tea Party seen as a right-wing movement?
To be sure, many Tea Partiers fiercely deny that they're a branch of the Republican Party. Tea Partiers have declared jihad against Governor Charlie Crist of Florida (because he accepted federal stimulus money), and have forced Senator John McCain of Arizona, no liberal he, to tack right in his reelection bid. But, from the Palin connection to the openly stated goal of "taking over the Republican Party," the GOP-Tea Party overlap is undeniable.
Which makes no sense.
True, America First immigrant-bashing doesn't fit in with the politically correct Democrats of the 21st century. Liberals find the backwater cultural touchstones of Tea Party--country music, NASCAR, county sheriffs as celebrities, for God's sake--as alien as Muqtada Al-Sadr.
On the big issues, however, the Tea Party belongs on the Left.
Tea Party followers are obsessed with privacy rights. They want the government out of their lives. Worried about creeping totalitarian tyranny, they're against Obama's healthcare reform proposal in part because they believe it would grant the feds access to heretofore private medical records. "In New Mexico, Mary Johnson, recording secretary of the Las Cruces Tea Party steering committee, described why she fears the government. She pointed out how much easier it is since Sept. 11 for the government to tap telephones and scour e-mail, bank accounts and library records," reported The New York Times.
Doesn't she remember who was president after 9/11?
Americans have good cause to fear the Democratic Party on privacy rights. During the 1990s, the Clinton Administration ramped up the NSA's Echelon system, which supposedly intercepts and automatically analyzes every single email, phone call, fax and wire transmission on the planet. Obama has kept the USA-Patriot Act and Bush's domestic wiretapping program in place.
But on privacy rights Republicans have been at least as bad. The Patriot Act was their idea. They abolished habeas corpus. They created the Total Information Awareness data-mining program; after Congress protested, they canceled it, renamed it, and quietly reestablished it. As much as Tea Partiers hate Democrats on privacy rights, they ought to hate Republicans more.
The same goes for Constitutional purity. Probably the greatest subversion of the Constitution has concerned war. Only Congress has the right to declare war, but one president after another has stolen that right away. Both the D's and the R's deserve equal blame. But the R's deserve it most recently. The three biggest wars of the last two decades, Iraq twice and Afghanistan once, were started by Republican presidents. Surely, when it comes to respect for the Constitution, the Tea Party should look elsewhere than the GOP.
Most baffling is the Tea Party's willingness to look the other way as Bush ran up record deficits between 2001 and 2009. Yes, part of it was the wars--and guess what? Wars count. A real deficit hawk would have called for cuts equal to the cost of the wars or, better yet, not have fought them in the first place (since they were strictly optional and not required for defense).
If the Left were smart--hell, if it existed--it would talk to the Tea Party folks. "To hell with the Republicans," they'd say, "and to hell with the Democrats too. We might not like the same music, and we might talk a little different, and we sure don't believe 9/11 was an inside job or that the Bilderbergs control everything, but we're all tired of getting ripped off and lied to by a bunch of government scumbags and their dirtbag pals on Wall Street and corporate America. And we're going to stop them."
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TEA in Tea Party means Taxed Enough Already and underlies the basis of those who joined in an effort to do something about improving the situation. All else is speculation to be used by propagandists to spin their own ignorant paranoia left or right for their own personal benefit.
Unjust taxes, illegal taxes, and improper use of taxes was the final straw that drew these people from accross the political specrum, and thus includes sections of every group that pays taxes who are unhappy with the current state of affairs wrought by those tax dollars. They are as varied in scope as is the general population.
Constitutional purists perhaps see the greatest amount of agregious perversion of the Constitution by politicians over the last 150 years regarding taxes. All other tax payers have their own additional veiws of the injustices for varying reasons and lengths of time, and have various solutions they would like office holders to pursue, including fair tax, smaller government, etc. instead of spending us into a deeper hole. Does it make any sense to keep digging if digging got your in a hole to start with? No. Does using a bigger shovel to dig deeper get you out? Not even close.
The Tea Party revolves around the issues of justice, self sufficiency, self determination, self respect, and respect for others, little of which remains in the offices of our government and the media these days. This is why the movement is eliminating the incumbents where possible and replace them with more moral, loving individuals that know and understand the Constitution in the spirit and letter of which it was wriutten. Individuals who sincerely care about those they serve and the needs they have. (It is also why we have dramatically reduced buying traditional media forms like newspapers and newsmagazines as they have become so much biased propaganda by commentators instead of factual accounts by reporters.)
Thus the TEA parties are not a clear target for media propogandist to label and attack, though with their fear and ignorance they try. Eah one is a various mix with a different tack. Tea parties are not a clear target for the political parties to label and attack, though they try for the same reasons. We are quite aware of the slimy backroom takeover plans from neo-cons like Dan Quale, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, etc. that try to come in at the top . We are also aware of those on the left who are trying to infiltrate through the bottom. However, the TEA party movement is not a heiarchal structure to easily label, infiltrate, takeover, or topple though the "business as usual" party's talking heads try.
You asked where were "these people" during the Bush years. We also railed against Bush and were beaten, gased, tasered, and the media for the most part, ignored us as insignifigant. Perhaps if you had done a better job as a professional you would have known that. We have grown and made such inroads that now the "business as usual" crowd knows this awakening can not be stopped. We are the people and we will have our country back from the greedy clutches of elitists who think they know better how to run our life than we do, the corrupt politicians easily bought and sold by special interests, socialists, communists, fascists, racists, and other ignorant people who ridicule the Constitution and/or those who support it.
We are many millions and growing larger everyday. We will not be quiet, we will not shut up and sit down, we will not take the red pill or the blue pill, we will not follow anyone blindly anymore. We are all races, all ages, all sexes, all political parties, and no political party at all. We are wealthy, we are poor and we are middle class. We are teachers, we are preachers, we are construction workers, we are business owners, we are everyone from every shore, farm, city, and anywhere you can think of. We have awakened and thousands more are awakening everyday and we shall take back the leadership of our lives and thus our country by turning our office holders into servants instead of kings, and into followers of the people instead of leaders.
I respectfully suggest everyone get educated in the specifics of the founders' stated intents in the founding documents instead of hiding behind ANY organization including the ACLU to do your thinking for you. Membership in an organization doesn't mean a damn thing even if you carry a card. Or you can continue to sit on your duff, complain about what you don't know first hand, call people names, defame by association, and collect a paycheck, serving as a major part of the pollution.
However, we Americans are keeping our eyes on the goal of freedom and taking the necessary steps in regaining it and maintaining it. That is the truth that sets us free.
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English only is required? lets force that with a big police state... and a lack of respect for private businesses to do business in whatever language they want...
riiight.
i agree with the other statements except for your christian nation ... i mean you can say that but it smells like you are advocating church and state.
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In response to mj:
Part of the problem with a "organizing" a group of freedom-lovers is that we all have our own agendas. That's one reason we never seem to be able to compete with the big police state parties who are willing to sacrifice principles for expediency.
I agree with some of your "-non negtioible [sic] principles" and disagree with others. I think the idea of "Illegal Aliens" is ridiculous...unless you're 100% pure-blood Native American, you're an illegal alien. But the federal government's only responsibility/authority is protecting our borders. Once they're inside the country, it should be up to the individual states to decide how to handle them.
I can see English-only requirements in, say, government and public schools (then again, I had a couple of years of French in high school...should we get rid of foreign language programs completely? Where do you draw the line? These sorts of subtle details are the reason our legal system is such a complicated mess...ham-handed Congressmen wrote ill-conceived "feel-good" laws, then had to amend them over and over as exceptions and details floated to the surface). But I really don't think that's something the federal government should worry about. That's exactly the kind of intrusive interference in our day-to-day lives that I'm trying to end.
You feel free to encourage "Traditional Family Values" (whatever you think they are). Just don't try to force them on me (or anyone else). Government (at any level, much less Federal) has absolutely no business interfering in marriage...which is a strictly religious matter protected by the First Amendment.
Maybe we are a Christian Nation, but we have plenty of non-Christians who couldn't care less about your (or my) beliefs. Yet again: the First Amendment should protect the minorities from the majorities who want to code their religious beliefs into law and force them on everyone else. Instead, do that on your own time, by convincing them that your belief system's better than theirs.
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I'm not a "big-wig" in the Tea Party movement. I'm just an ordinary person who cares about freedom and doesn't have enough time or money to make any difference by myself. Which, really, makes me part of the heart and soul of the Tea Party.
I happened to be around at the beginning, and, Mr. Rall, you're almost precisely correct. True Tea Partiers welcome *everyone* who cares about freedom. We don't care about political parties, race, religion, or any of the other millions of artificial differences The Powers That Be use to blind us to the shell game they're using to destroy everything that's great about this country.
When we started, we knew one of the major parties would try to co-opt what we've built. At the time, the Democrats seemed more likely...the fires were kindled by President Bush's wars of foreign aggression, his bail-outs, the "Patriot" Act, etc.
Maybe some of the newer arrivals believe the nonsense that we have anything at all in common with neo-cons like Sarah Palin or the "National Tea Party Convention." We do not.
The fact that they're trying so hard gives us hope that we're actually on the verge of being able to accomplish something.
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Political parties are a joke. Arguing about nothing keeps the majority of america busy ignoring the very issues that got them interested in politics in the first place. Why did it take Senator Inhofe years to acknowledge and address the Bhopalesque third world contamination poisoning children for decades at Tar Creek? Why did Bill Clinton not arrest Osama bin Laden the several times he could have? Probably because the people in power are those with money. Osama with the oil industry and Inhoffe with the big dogs at capitol hill. I may not have a lot of money, but i have intelligence, and these days, that seems to be a rare find.
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Tea Party -non negtioible principles:
Illegal Aliens are illegal.
· Pro-Domestic Employment is indispensable.
· Stronger Military is essential.
· Gun ownership is sacred.
· Government must be downsized.
· National Budget must be balanced.
· Deficit Spending will end.Bail-out and Stimulus Plans are illegal.
· Reduce Personal Income Taxes a must.
· Reduce Business Income Taxes is mandatory.
· Intrusive Government Stopped.
· English only is required.
· Traditional Family Values are encouraged.
· Common Sense Constitutional Conservative Self-Governance is our mode of operation.
· ….and Yes, we are a Christian Nation!
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