The Roots of the Tea Parties
Hat tip: Cato at Liberty
By David Boaz
The sight of middle-class Americans rallying to protest overtaxing, overspending, Wall Street bailouts, and government-directed health care scares the bejeezus out of a lot of people. The elite media are full of stories declaring the Tea Partiers to be racists, John Birchers, Glenn Beck zombies, and God knows what. So it’s a relief to read a sensible discussion (subscription required) by John Judis, the decidedly leftist but serious journalist-historian at the New Republic. Once the managing editor the journal Socialist Revolution, Judis went on to write a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. and other books, so he knows something about ideological movements in the United States. Judis isn’t happy about the Tea Party movement, but he warns liberals not to dismiss it as fringe, AstroTurf, or a front group for the GOP:
But the Tea Party movement is not inauthentic, and—contrary to the impression its rallies give off—it isn’t a fringe faction either. It is a genuine popular movement, one that has managed to unite a number of ideological strains from U.S. history—some recent, some older. These strains can be described as many things, but they cannot be dismissed as passing phenomena. Much as liberals would like to believe otherwise, there is good reason to think the Tea Party movement could exercise considerable influence over our politics in the coming years.
Tea Party: A Brewing Movement
by Joe Wolverton, II
hat tip: The New American
On a cold night in December 1773, some three years after passage of the Tea Act by the British Parliament, colonists were fed up with the British crown’s haughty disregard of their rights as Englishmen, and they dumped 342 chests of the iconic British beverage into Boston Harbor, becoming icons themselves. The protesters (estimates range from as few as 30 to as many as 130) refused finally to be placated by repeated promises of change and reform and, rather than wait for legislative response, they exercised the Lockean right of “self-defense” and boldly resisted the alienation of their God-given liberty.
Modern Americans know something of that level of frustration. It’s been just over a year since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States and the Democratic Party assumed majority control of both houses of Congress. In that short time, there has emerged a vociferous band within the electorate who, like their tea-tossing forebears, feel they have been precluded from participating in the direction the ship of state will sail, and they have decided to protest the insupportable behavior of a government that habitually oversteps its constitutional boundaries. Fed up and fired up, they have chosen to exercise their constitutional prerogative of peaceful assembly, hence the Tea Party Movement.
Why The Real Nature of Politics Is So Important
By Adam de Angeli
Hat tip: Campaign for Liberty
Published 03/26/10
An enormous body of new activists and groups with the moniker “Tea Party” have mobilized since the Obama administration took power. While the “tea party” meme originated from the $6 million money bomb phenomenon of Ron Paul’s grassroots, the “Tea Party movement” is a beast of its own. It was popularized by Fox News coverage, and—surprise!—is now largely infiltrated by GOP-affiliated groups.
If the victories in 2010 are for the GOP alone, the movement will have lost. One need only look to the origin of the problem: big-government Republicans drove the grassroots into apathy. Conservatives couldn’t get excited for the once-pro-choice governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, who signed a state-level version of ObamaCare into law, or the gun-grabbing John McCain. They stayed home. They didn’t vote, they didn’t mobilize, and they handed the election over to Obama and the Democrats.
That would be a tragedy, except the Republicans needed to learn a lesson.
If a GOP sweep in 2010 means a new breed of John McCains, Mitt Romneys, and Lindsey Grahams in office, we will be back where we started. We will be worse off, not better. Congress will still be over-run with statists spending us into oblivion, but, just as in 2005, there will be no serious opposition from the Right. There will be nowhere to go, but to wait for the Democrats to return to power. And the cycle will go on. And on, and on, until there is no money left to spend.
This is why the Tea Party movement cannot, must not, be herded into the “any Republican over any Democrat” mentality.
Zionism Unmasked: The Dark Face Of Jewish Nationalism
What we need to stand up and say is not only did they attack the U.S.S. Liberty, they did 9/11. They did it. I have had long conversations over the past two weeks with contacts at the Army War College, at it’s headquarters, Marine Corps and I made it absolutely clear in both cases that it is 100 percent certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation.
Period.
~Dr. Alan Sabrosky, March 14, 2010
- listen to podcast
By Dr. Alan Sabrosky
11 March, 2010 Sabbah.biz
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu once remarked to a Likud gathering that “Israel is not like other countries.” Oddly enough for him, that time he was telling the truth, and nowhere is that more evident than with Jewish nationalism, whether or not one pins the “Zionist” label on it.
Nationalism in most countries and cultures can have both positive and negative aspects, unifying a people and sometimes leading them against their neighbors. Extremism can emerge, and often has, at least in part in almost every nationalist/independence movement I can recall (e.g., the French nationalist movement had The Terror, Kenya’s had the Mau Mau, etc.).
But whereas extremism in other nationalist movements is an aberration, extremism in Jewish nationalism is the norm, pitting Zionist Jews (secular or observant) against the goyim (everyone else), who are either possible predator or certain prey, if not both sequentially. This does not mean that all Jews or all Israelis feel and act this way, by any means. But it does mean that Israel today is what it cannot avoid being, and what it would be under any electable government (a point I’ll develop in another article).
On this day: Remembering Rachel Corrie
Who is Rachel Corrie?
Rachel Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who traveled to the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada. She was killed by a Caterpillar D9R armored bulldozer operated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during a protest against the destruction of Palestinian homes by the IDF in the Gaza Strip on March 16th, 2003.
Tea party: It’s not about Republicans, but the US Constitution
Richard Mack is interviewed regarding the Tea Party movement. He responds with a call to return to constitutional values, all but forgotten by our federal government.
