The ones not working cant' afford to drive to DC to protest.
We'll find time to vote your marxist kool aid buddies out of office come
November.
"sittingduck" <du...@spamherelots.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9D6342CA9CAAdu...@nomail.afraid.org...
> Are the Tea Partiers Losing Steam?
> By Richard Kim, The Nation
> Posted on April 23, 2010
> http://www.alternet.org/story/146586/
>
> When tea party organizers chose the Washington Ellipse as the setting for
> their Tax Day protest, they were undoubtedly thinking of its theatrical
> potential. Behind looms the Washington Monument, an obelisk to the hero of
> American Revolution and Constitution and a fitting symbol of the tea
> party's esprit de corps. In front stands the White House, whose occupant,
> according to protesters' signs, is busy plotting more taxes, more
> communism
> and the end of America. Those who took the podium borrowed from the
> surrounding majesty to endow their struggle with an epic righteousness:
> "We
> are going to keep faith with every generation since 1776 that has
> successfully passed the baton of freedom to the next generation. We will
> not allow that...chain of freedom to be broken on our watch," declared
> Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. But beyond the rhetoric and amid the crowd
> of a few thousand, the concerns were on a smaller scale--like about
> incandescent light bulbs.
>
> That's what inspired one woman, Dot, to drive down from Montgomery County,
> Pennsylvania. Dot is concerned about the deficit and the healthcare bill
> that "nobody read," but most of all she is panicked about light bulbs.
> "The
> government is already starting to fine people if you have the incandescent
> kind," she said, "but if cap and trade passes, then you're going to have
> each home audited, and that information is going to be listed to real
> estate agents, and you won't be able to sell your house."
>
> Dozens of tea partyers I spoke with repeated some version of Dot's tale of
> government intrusion, little lies laced with tiny truths. "With this
> consumer protection agency," one man told me, "the government is going to
> make it illegal for you to have more than two credit cards." A woman in a
> red-white-and-blue pantsuit said, "There's a charter school in New York
> City teaching children how to be political activists--Muslim activists."
> Each of these stories lurks in the substrata of tea party blogs, and many
> are simply warmed-over right-wing myths that predate the tea party itself.
> What impresses is the fine-grained obsessiveness with which these ideas
> are
> pursued; I came to Washington looking for Ahabs, but the tea partyers I
> met
> are preoccupied with chasing minnows of their own imagining, not hunting
> the great white whale of government.
>
> What does this kaleidoscope of kookiness add up to? According to a recent
> New York Times/CBS News poll, tea partyers are richer, whiter, better
> educated, older, more male and more likely to be employed than the rest of
> America. In other words, they largely come from society's "haves," who now
> worry, as Thomas Edsall argues in The Atlantic Monthly, that "the
> competition for resources cannot be resolved by...economic growth," and so
> are rallying to hold on to their wealth, status, authority and autonomy.
> Or
> as one tea party sign put it, Your Fair Share Is Not in My Pocket. For
> those on the left who believe that government should act as an agent of
> redistribution, this evidence should put to rest the idea that the tea
> party is a constituency we can work with. The question is, How useful are
> they to the GOP?
>
> Earlier in the day, a coalition of groups, including FreedomWorks and the
> Tea Party Patriots, unveiled the Contract From America, a ten-plank agenda
> determined in part by an online poll of tea party activists. Comprising
> slogans like "Protect the Constitution" and "Stop the Pork," mixed with
> reversals of Democratic proposals like "Reject Cap & Trade" and "Defund,
> Repeal, & Replace Government-Run Health Care," the Contract is almost
> entirely bereft of policy ideas. In that vein, it is a rebuke of
> Republicans like Congressman Paul Ryan, who released the detailed "Roadmap
> for America's Future" earlier this year, and House minority whip Eric
> Cantor, who has urged the GOP to put forth a specific legislative agenda
> for 2010 and beyond. Although the Contract and Ryan's Roadmap share the
> presumption that government is too big and too intrusive, the similarities
> end there. The Contract is just 613 words long; the Roadmap goes on for
> forty-three pages, and while not as comprehensive as Ryan claims, it
> covers
> issues like tax codes, Social Security, job training and universal
> healthcare. Most important, Ryan frames his program in the language of
> shared growth and opportunity. Copping a page from Reagan's "trickle-down
> theory," he holds that "each American's pursuit of personal destiny" makes
> a "net contribution to the Nation's common good as well."
>
> All of this, I suspect, fails to capture the heads and hearts of tea party
> patriots. Fed a steady diet of paranoia and emotional appeals to vague
> concepts like freedom and liberty, they appear uninterested in the details
> of governing, to which even the Republican Party's elite pay lip service,
> and unable to espouse a vision, however cramped, of collective interest.
> Their logo and logic is simply Don't Tread on Me. That might work, for
> now,
> in securing enough "haves" to muck up GOP primaries. But it is hard to see
> how, in a nation still tilting toward the "have-not" column, the tea party
> approaches anything close to an enduring national political force. Heaven
> help us if I'm wrong.
>
> Richard Kim is a senior editor at The Nation.
>
> --
> Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of
> the average man, he follows not reason but faith - Reinhold Niebuhr