"America has no center today. You either accept a left-wing status quo or you are fighting against it."
...and if you fight against it, you are an "extremist."
Posted on 06/15/2014 4:52:17 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Just when Tea Party obituaries were being sounded around the country, Washington fixture of 42 years, Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, loses to upstart Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel.
And one week later, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in the blockbuster of this year's political season, is booted out of office in the Virginia Republican primary by an economics professor from Randolph-Macon College, total undergraduate enrollment - 1,312 students.
Turns out that reports of the death of the Tea Party are greatly exaggerated.
According to the New York Times editorial page, writing about Cantor's defeat, the Tea Party is "producing candidates who are light-years from the mainstream."
Many continue to harbor and sell the illusion, nurtured by media sources like the New York Times, and reaching sometimes to even the Wall Street Journal, that somehow there is a "mainstream" in American politics today and that anyone with strongly held conviction, who actually cares about that conviction, is an "extremist" or "ideologue" and not part of this "mainstream."
But if mainstream means not clearly on one side of the political spectrum or the other, a new report from Pew Research shows that what is supposedly mainstream today is not mainstream at all. The report, "Political Polarization in the American Republic," shows that it is now the minority of Americans who are not clearly on the left or the right.
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Only 39 percent of Americans define themselves in the middle, as a mixed bag of liberal and conservative values. The majority of Americans, the other 61 percent, see themselves as on the liberal left or the conservative right. Thirty four percent say they are mostly or consistently liberal and 27 percent say they are mostly or consistently conservative.
Just ten years ago 49 percent – ten percentage points more – defined themselves in the mixed middle.
The New York Times would like us to believe that there is a "mainstream" in America today because what "mainstream" means is status quo – don't rock the boat. Because of the massive growth of government over recent years, today's status quo means acceptance of a great lurch leftward, which has already occurred.
It sounds so measured and sober to call a candidate "mainstream."
But "mainstream" is not measured and sober.
It means shrugging your shoulders at $17 trillion in federal debt, $4 trillion in federal spending, and a tax code of over 73,000 pages.
In polling reported by Gallup, for 45 years from 1952 to 1997, over 80 percent of Americans said there is "plenty of opportunity" in the country. By last year this was down to 52 percent.
The Tea Party is not an ideological movement. It is a movement of decent, hard-working Americans from quiet communities who are no longer willing to accept freedom and opportunity disappearing as result of the massive growth of government and a power-satiated political class in Washington.
Most of America's Declaration of Independence consists of listing of the violations of the personal liberties of the American colonists by the King of England. The founding of the country was not born of ideology but of the practical realities of individuals wanting to live free finding it harder and harder to do so.
This is what is happening today and it will only stop when either Americans at the grass roots re-achieve freedom and perceive that the opportunity that comes with it is back, or they stop caring about it.
America has no center today. You either accept a left-wing status quo or you are fighting against it.
Some are saying that Eric Cantor is a conservative.
But given where we are today, a politician, particularly one in a position of leadership, is seen as either part of the problem or part of the solution.
Increasingly, after many years in Washington, and enjoying the trappings of power, Cantor grew to be perceived as the former.
IF ONLY we could have taken out Lindsay Graham and/or Mitch McConnell this party would be really started...
SO LET KEEP THE PRESSURE ON!!!!!!!!!!
There are MORE PRIMARIES!!!
Look how scared they are after just these losses... More scared than they ever seem to be of Democrats
"America has no center today. You either accept a left-wing status quo or you are fighting against it."
...and if you fight against it, you are an "extremist."
/johnny
That is what the left says the mainstream is. I don’t call them Bolshies without reason.
I’m sorry, but the left doesn’t get to decide what mainstream is.
AGREED.
In 2013, Mitch McConnell worked with Harry Reid, D, NV, & Obama to raise the debt limit, increase taxes, and fund Obamacare. He betrayed the voters in his own party.
If true, then "Mainstream" means "traitor" because the leftists are nothing but oxygen-stealing traitors.
I’ve been arguing for some time now that the Tea Party is just pulling politics back to the center, rather than to the far right, as most media claim.
Far right is as bad as where we now are, which is far left. The center is a country based on the rule of law, and the Constitution. We are way left of that now, and need to return to it. The principles of the Tea Party constitute a return to such a government, i.e., a return to the center.
So, anytime someone calls the Tea Party the party of the far right, remind them that we’re trying to drag the country back to the center, and to the central principles on which the country was established.
If they disagree with a country based on the rule of law and the Constitution (as written), then at least you know where they stand. We’re not far right, but they sure as hell are far left.
Hey...New York Times...I got yer “mainstream” hangin’ right heah. Come get it. Heh, heh...heh, heh...
“Immigration reform” now means legalize them all and destroy those racist borders.
But it sounds like an bill meant to secure and protect our borders...
The left and their lunatic supporters have turned the English language into a sick joke.
Gay means men humping each other, not happy people...
Wars are now compassionate wars based on love and respect.
Black folk rioting, looting, killing and physically attacking the innocent, are just oppressed teen youths....it’s a just a game, a knockout game...It’s all just a misunderstood, misunderstanding and certainly not racism....
“You either accept a left-wing status quo or you are fighting against it.”
Correction: You either accept a left-wing status quo or you are a bigot.
Also, they’re spinning this by pretending the left-wing gains of the last six years (in the assaults on the family and Constitution) are finalized, and that the assaults are over. As bad as things are now, we have much further to fall.
Her parents gave her a very fitting name....
...and taught her well, too.
Abortion for any reason...gay marriage...minimal penalties
for the most outrageous crimes...out of control spending
on entitlements...restrictions on the Bill of Rights...
kicking religion to the curb...allowing foreigners to
enter the country illegally, stay, and collect benefits...
allowing the school systems to implode for the benefit of
teacher unions...over taxing. The list goes on.....
The right always has and still opposes these things. Yet
the left which has foisted these things upon the republic
claims that it is the right that has become extreme. And,
the so called fourth estate (the media) helps to solidify
the myth in the minds of the uninformed masses.
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