Posted on 02/17/2010 11:18:04 AM PST by Fred
How glorious is the tea-party movement? Some talk of its purity of heart, its patriotic spontaneity, and its abundance of republican virtue. To hear others tell it, the movement is but a few steps away from sacred.
After attending the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, the prominent blogger Glenn Reynolds wrote last week in the Washington Examiner that the movement amounted to "America's Third Great Awakening," a massive popular rising against "politicians and parties" that have "grown corrupt, venal and out-of-touch."
How strange, then, that this flowering of populist integrity should have been tended and pruned and succored by a group of Beltway operators known primarily for their venality and insider power.
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post sketched out a blueprint of the movement's leadership, naming the players and the organizations who have made the right's resurgence possible. It focused in particular on a shadowy but influential new outfit called the Conservative Action Project, which reportedly works to coordinate the movement's far-flung organizations, bloggers and publishers.
What struck me about the Post's story was the familiarity of it all. In particular, I kept being reminded of that ultimate conservative insider, the now-imprisoned superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the work he did on behalf of the Northern Marianas Islands, where garment factories churned out "Made in the USA" clothing under re-education camp conditions.
The object of Mr. Abramoff's lobbying, you will recall, was to protect that peculiar economic arrangement from federal meddling, a task his firm accomplished by bringing politicians, staffers and media types on trips to the tropical Marianas and urging them to understand the situation as a matter of "liberty" versus big government tyranny.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Oligarchy getting antsy when the peons and peasants start gettin uppity....
Okey dokey, Tommy boy. You go back to sleep. We’ll take it from here.
It is just a reflection of the 4th Great Awakening in America.
The socialists on both sides of the aisle are looking for a label - we know why.
What a liar and buffoon this Frank guy is. There is nothing astroturfed about Tea Partiers. In fact, I know some long time Republicans who after years of spending and the GOP losing their way, got discouraged and went on their own way. The Tea Party movement, spawned by even worse irresponsible behavior, got these people involved again; from attending summer town halls, to donating cash to campaigns, to volunteering for campaigns.
“Big Government has learned that Clintonistas are plotting a “push/pull” strategy. They plan to identify 7-8 national figures active in the tea party movement and engage in deep opposition research on them. If possible, they will identify one or two they can perhaps ‘turn’, either with money or threats, to create a mole in the movement. The others will be subjected to a full-on smear campaign. (Has MSNBC already been notified?)” ~ roses of sharon
Big Government has also learned that James Carville will head up the effort.
See:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2453479/posts?page=23#23
The reason we haven’t heard more in this respect, I suspect, is because deep down it doesn’t offend. The history of conservative idealism is, in some ways, a history of lobbying, of ever-more inventive schemes to make politics answer to money.”
Puleeze. Now that’s rich. That the TP movement is nothing but a giant money making scheme brought to you courtesy of the vast right wing conspiracy. And this coming from the same folks who label us rubes in flyover as gun-totin’, bible-thumpin paranoids.
Well, Mr. Frank, who looks like the parnoid schizo now?
Stop and or contain infiltration of the left and or the RINOs (as in McGlowan)
True Tea Party supporters don’t want a “third party”. They want the current parties to clean themselves up and remember the constitution and founding fathers.
It would be a travesty to allow this wonderful movement of Americans who proclaim that they are weary of the partisanship, weary of the finger pointing and grandstanding and want simply for America to be the great and wonderful dream that our forefathers dreamed and died for to slide into oblivion over some inflated egos.
My fear with regard to the Tea Party movement was that it would attempt to become a “party” with all the negatives that come with that connotation. The Tea Party is a philosophy. The movement is a group of people that have come together in support of that philosophy to rescue what is left of our great nation.
To let it become another “party”, ponderous with bureaucracy, in-fighting, and egos that the current two parties allow to bog them down will stop the movement in its tracks.
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