Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

What the Media Miss About the Tea Party Movement
realclearpolitics.com ^ | 5/21/14 | John Hart

Posted on 05/21/2014 9:15:53 AM PDT by cotton1706

Even before Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blew out Tea-Party-conservative-by-day-cockfight-rally-goer-by-night Matt Bevin, many in the media walked down a tired, well-worn narrative path. An afternoon headline from CNN blared, “How Mitch McConnell crushed the Tea Party” well before the polls had closed. The primary result was a big “win” for the GOP establishment and a “loss” for the Tea Party. For those keeping score, it is now roughly the GOP establishment 5 (Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia) and the Tea Party 1 (Nebraska).

But this win-loss story line doesn’t reflect reality. The real struggle in 2014 is not between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party but within the Tea Party itself. And, more importantly, in spite of this struggle, the Tea Party continues to ascend.

Primary campaigns in states like Kentucky are merely bringing to the surface long-simmering tensions within the conservative movement. On one side is the grassroots -- the Tea Party. Alongside it is crabgrass -- the Tea Party establishment’s sometimes invasive tactics, bad judgment (i.e. the government shutdown) and even worse candidate vetting that draw nutrients away from the grassroots.

And what is the Tea Party establishment exactly? Like with the Republican Revolution of 1994, it’s the part of the reform movement that went native after acquiring real political power. Today, it’s the gilded conservative neighborhood of “This Town,” Mark Leibovich’s book about D.C.’s culture of self-love. It’s the catered lunch that never adjourns; the cabal, the mutual-admiration society of master strategists who have never successfully limited government but know how.

In primary campaigns, it’s the part of the Tea Party that has the hubris to suggest candidates like Bevin are representative of an organic uprising because it says so, regardless of what the real grassroots may think.

(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: elections
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-24 next last

1 posted on 05/21/2014 9:15:53 AM PDT by cotton1706
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: cotton1706

2 posted on 05/21/2014 9:17:31 AM PDT by cripplecreek (Remember the River Raisin.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: cripplecreek
And, more importantly, in spite of this struggle, the Tea Party continues to ascend.

The Tea Party = The Bitcoin of American Politics.

3 posted on 05/21/2014 9:33:56 AM PDT by The Duke ("Forgiveness is between them and God, it's my job to arrange the meeting.")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: cripplecreek

We are so screwed.


4 posted on 05/21/2014 9:36:53 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Early 2009 to 7/21/2013 - RIP my little girl Cathy. You were the best cat ever. You will be missed.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: cotton1706

Personally, I’m tired of fundraising calls from the Tea Party folks - as they don’t distribute the funds to the candidates as much as they do to themselves.

Now I send funds to candidates directly. Only.


5 posted on 05/21/2014 9:37:35 AM PDT by datura (We have a 2 party system. Conservatives vs Uniparty)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Lazamataz

I don’t think so.

Each election, the TEA party gets a few more candidates to Washington.

All this gloom is silly. At this rate, in less than a decade, they will run the RNC.


6 posted on 05/21/2014 9:40:52 AM PDT by TheThirdRuffian (RINOS like Romney, McCain, Christie are sure losers. No more!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: TheThirdRuffian

We’re all gonna die.


7 posted on 05/21/2014 9:41:40 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Early 2009 to 7/21/2013 - RIP my little girl Cathy. You were the best cat ever. You will be missed.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: datura

I’ve always been opposed to an organized tea party structure.

The tea party is where ever a tea party individual is at any given moment. We aren’t monolithic in thought or who we support.


8 posted on 05/21/2014 9:42:58 AM PDT by cripplecreek (Remember the River Raisin.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: cotton1706

It’s pretty nice to see a Coburn confidant perfectly analyse the influence of the Tea Party, which basically appreciates the conditions of the times in the Founding Fathers that has been so lost for so long.

The result of becoming a post Christian nation is a shattered, corrupt future. The evidence lay everywhere around us in plain view. Lost children confined in corrupt public schools, and culturally appropriate churches full of politically correct, feel good insights and this is what we get.

Sadly, if we don’t restore classical education and stop cold the curriculum of public education, there is absolutely no hope of anything changing, but for more Marxists coming.


9 posted on 05/21/2014 9:43:58 AM PDT by RitaOK ( VIVA CHRISTO REY / Public education is the farm team for more Marxists coming.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Lazamataz

True.

I would like to die in my sleep like my grandpa.

Not screaming and yelling in terror like all the people on the bus he was driving.


10 posted on 05/21/2014 9:44:01 AM PDT by TheThirdRuffian (RINOS like Romney, McCain, Christie are sure losers. No more!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: cotton1706

Lets take a look as to why we even have a Tea Party.

The liberal fascists who are in political control of America, in many ways are us.All you need do is look at the social mechanisms involved in the rise of the Third Reich. The dynamic of intolerance of freedom for the sake of governmental control in the lives of the people was then accepted by people across the political spectrum. This comes from fear, and an abandonment of the fundamental principles evident in our Constitution. That malaise in many ways is a result of a devolution of spirit, and a complete dedication to the lights of materialism, as if the material realm holds every solution to the happiness of future mankind, and we are to be dragged willy-nilly down the road to a predefined utopia, inflamed by the glory of so called historic justice,where the sons and daughters of the so called wrongdoers of our history must pay the material and spiritual punishment of such historic justice, the running light of every fascist throughout history. This has resulted today in the gutting of all of our military and scientific institutions ( such as NASA), defining the death of American exceptionalism so much that China’s Renminbi is actually in the works to replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and us with a budget deficit in excess of 17 Trillion dollars, purposefully generated to destroy America, by these Utopian liberal fascists. (Jonah Goldberg was right in his book, “Liberal Fascism.”)

This ALL is fueled by a complete confidence that the ideology one espouses is so vastly superior to any other, such as those who are purveyors of the Obama Movement and its insidious disempowerment of America.The fascists of Europe were no different.

So I would trade Lois Learner for the strength of those who have served our nation , and who are beyond the engineered fear which drives so many towards the totalitarian imperative in todays government. And that trade is now in the process of happening electorally, as America now begins to awaken to the travesty that is the Obama executive branch, thugs and liars for the most part, including those who haul their water for them,(Lois Lerner and her constitutional crimes being a prime example of the so called “well qualified.”)

The post WWII excuses for those immoral excesses given by administrative people like Lerner in Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia were that they were just following orders.
Six million human beings were gassed to death as a result. They were to a man ( and woman)highly qualified , from better colleges and universities,with a complete abandonment of moral compass for the sake of unquestionable loyalty.These are the prime qualifications of civil service made by a fascist dictator, not an American president.

Winston Churchill advized us to fight such fascism through exposure, publication and ridicule. That works. And that may offend people like you.You have to decide whether you prefer civility over freedom,and the rest of America has the same choice before it.This awareness is what the Tea Party brings.

And we have been in the same position before, although the dynamic was of a different flavor, just peruse the statements of well known liberals and democrats from history, waxing as liberal fascists:

***************************************************

CHARLES LINDBERGH (Heroic Aviator)
“The leaders of the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”

NEVILLE HENDERSON (British Ambassador to Germany)
“The hostile attitude in Great Britain was the work of Jews and enemies of the Nazis.”

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN (UK Prime Minister) told to JOSEPH KENNEDY (Family Patriarch)
“Chamberlain (speaking off the record to Kennedy while playing golf) stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war”. (The Forrestal Diaries ed. Millis, Cassell 1952 p129).

JOSEPH KENNEDY (Family Patriarch & US Ambassdor to the UK)
“As Ambassador to England, Joe would later make clear that he thought the Jews had `brought on themselves’ whatever Hitler did to them. During a 1938 meeting at the German Embassy in London, Kennedy assured the German ambassador that America only wanted friendly relations with Hitler.
Joe said that Hitler’s government had done `great things’ for the country, and that the Germans were `satisfied’ and enjoyed `good living conditions.’ Joe told the ambassador that a recent report which said the limited food in Germany was being reserved for the army could not be true. After all, Joe said, the professor who had made the report `was a Jew.’
Excerpt from “The Sins of the Father”

************************************************

So the question for all politicians including the Bushes and the Cheneys, and the Obamas and Clintons: is it totalitarianism or freedom? Take Your Tea Party pick.

The seductive nature of absolute power appeals
to all of the political elite, Democrats and Republicans alike, such as Speaker Boehner who still touts an amnesty America does not want so that we can have a renewed , exploited under class.They ALL must make the choice between totalitarianism and freedom clearly. Many are so traduced they are petty kings with no clothes, fooling none, trembling before a newly reawakened American electorate.

America awaits the outcome of choice, but there is little else to mitigate the dynamic of polarization invoked by the exploitation of every American social weakness that Obama and his minions can find, other than eventual civil war. I for one bear great hope for the continuity of free , fair elections, and I may be wrong that even that is still possible at this point. If it is not possible then America is doomed to war.

Its down to the count that the social inter-relationships of those in power, and the basis of their interconnectivity, is indeed a subject worthy of examination, as you say. People such as Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Trey Gowdy and Sarah Palin say much the same thing, but much more diplomatically, using the language of inference.

Good luck to you and yours, if you are not a Tea Party supporter. You will need it.

Reference:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html


11 posted on 05/21/2014 9:45:24 AM PDT by Candor7 (Obama fascism article:(http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: TheThirdRuffian
Game over, man.
12 posted on 05/21/2014 9:46:24 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Early 2009 to 7/21/2013 - RIP my little girl Cathy. You were the best cat ever. You will be missed.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: Lazamataz

Quit sucking that wench.s toes and put the bong down.......


13 posted on 05/21/2014 10:08:23 AM PDT by Paladin2
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 12 | View Replies]

To: cotton1706
The issue that spawned the Tea Party has not gone away: how do we preserve our liberties and a Constitutional form of government when surrounding by the crushing, tyrannical regulatory and police authority of a bureaucratic administrative state.

All the Republican Party has shown is that most of its elite members, with some honorable exceptions, have no interest in preserving our liberties or our Constitution. All they want to do is to curry some kind of favor with a tyrannical state for interest groups that they claim to represent. Both the GOP and the interest groups are fine with this arrangement, as it's been the GOP’s role since the 1930s of serving as the Democrats “me too!” party - as in we love the administrative state too, but we just want it to cut some of our people some slack now and again.

I'm sick and tired of the me too accommodations of the beltway GOP while the bedrock freedoms of our country are destroyed. If the GOP doesn't want to fight for them any more, to he!! with them.

14 posted on 05/21/2014 10:13:32 AM PDT by mojito (Zero, our Nero.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: cotton1706
Calling all FReepers: I'd like to know more about the "Tea Party establishment" and its role in selecting primary contestants.
15 posted on 05/21/2014 10:18:50 AM PDT by ConservingFreedom (A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Paladin2
Game over, man.
16 posted on 05/21/2014 10:23:12 AM PDT by Lazamataz (Early 2009 to 7/21/2013 - RIP my little girl Cathy. You were the best cat ever. You will be missed.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: cripplecreek

My thinking is that anyone who claims to be a “Member” of the TEA Party, doesn’t get it.


17 posted on 05/21/2014 10:23:58 AM PDT by Chuckster (The longer I live the less I care about what you think.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: Chuckster

The left simply can’t fathom the concept of a movement that has no elite leader directing and guiding the whole thing.


18 posted on 05/21/2014 10:26:51 AM PDT by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter admits whom he's working for)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]

To: cotton1706

In the Roadrunner cartoons, the coyote would come up with ideas. Many werecstupid but a fewcseemed workable. When even the good ones didn’t work the first time, he gave up on them. I’m not sure the coyote is the best model for guidance in a political movement. Success is hard and rare. We need to keep working.


19 posted on 05/21/2014 10:26:51 AM PDT by muir_redwoods (When I first read it, " Atlas Shrugged" was fiction)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Chuckster

Exactly. I’m a tea partier. I don’t wear a badge or a uniform or anything. I look just like everyone else and can only be identified as a tea partier by my opposition to overgrown government.

I’m an undercover tea partier.


20 posted on 05/21/2014 10:29:58 AM PDT by cripplecreek (Remember the River Raisin.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-24 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson