I gave this talk after the November 2010 elections, so as to hearten our group and point out how well we were doing, since no one else in ( the Obama claque) mainstream media would do so.
Tea Party Progress and Prospects as of December 2, 2010
This talk is divided into three parts: part 1 is about the causes of the tea party movement, the rise of the TEA party, and our accomplishments; part 2 is about who our friends are and who our enemies are, and how to tell the difference; and part 3 is about our prospects and where we go from here.
1. Causes, Rise, and Accomplishments
People have been unsettled and nervous about the direction of the country for a long time – freedoms being encroached upon, regulations about this and that every time you turn around, “Political correctness” in speech and thought, endless fights against gun-grabbers every time there is a shooting crime. People began to fear the loss of their money, property, and freedom in a big way during the 2008 presidential campaign, with the mortgage crisis. Pressure from Democrats in Congress (Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd and Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank leading) to lend to people who didn’t make enough money to buy a house created the situation. When the housing market dipped, suddenly the asset value of houses went south, so mortgages on those houses became worth much less or nothing. Since mortgages backed the lending of banks and FNMA and FHLMC securities, these institutions were now bankrupt due to the worthless mortgages they held as assets. Congress proposed and passed a huge $700 billion bailout bill, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, to save those institutions “too big to fail” by buying up mortgage-backed securities. 59% of Americans opposed this bill. This may have tipped the election of 2008 to the Democrat party.
The Democrats began feeding at the public trough in a big way early in 2009, with the Stimulus Package – another huge $787 billion bill. Then there was the “cash for clunkers” subsidy to promote sales of new cars, the takeover of GM and Chrysler, the destruction of the world’s best health care system by the “Obamacare” health care bill, which also caused the insurance industry to begin abandoning health insurance. Right now today we are discovering that the TARP bill and the Federal Reserve Bailouts not only were for U.S. banks and companies, but for European banks and countries as well, to the amount of $ 3.3 trillion – that’s three million, three hundred thousand of millions of dollars.
The unrelenting socialist executive branch and legislative branch assault on our American life provoked a groundswell of resistance beginning early in 2009, and the egregious (I looked that word up – it means wicked bad) ignoring of town-hall meetings by legislators during the summer of 2009 provoked the organization of the various state Tea Parties to protest the nonsense and the rampant ravaging of the public purse. By September 2009 the 912 project put 1.2 million people on the mall in D. C. We began to feel that we are not alone, that we had some muscle after all. Radio conservative Glenn Beck got another half million together at the Lincoln memorial in August 2010, although his “Restoring Honor” theme was not overtly political – Beck has become somewhat of a preacher as well.
What result so far? Republicans smart enough to jump in front of the Tea Party movement won 63 U.S. house seats, giving them a majority, 8 U.S. senate seats, and in state legislatures 680 seats nationwide; add in 5 governorships, including Maine. It’s a good start.
2. Friends & Enemies
This is fairly described as a conflict between “Liberals” and “Conservatives”. I know that these are loose labels, so lets look at some characteristics:
Liberals are convinced that they are right and anyone opposing them is evil; deserving of the most hard-mouthed rant they can spew. They will call you racists, bigots, homophobes and “tea-baggers”, for example, which is actually a snide homosexual slur.
Conservatives are convinced that they are doing the right things with regard to their own moral compass, and that anyone not of the same mind could be OK, if only they were better grounded in reality. Liberals want to impose rules upon you, Conservatives want to be left alone by others. A liberal will see a wrong and want to construct a government-enforced program to be inflicted upon everybody to right that perceived wrong. A conservative will want to correct the individual who committed the wrong. (TSA example: a single muslim man under 40 with no luggage traveling on a one-way ticket from a muslim country tried to set off a bomb (which fizzled) in his undershorts. TSA solution: put every single traveler through a naked body scanner or a groping pat-down. Conservative solution: screen single muslim men under 40 traveling from foreign countries with one-way tickets and no luggage, or any one or more of those qualifiers. That’s profiling, of course, which is not “PC”.)
Who are your friends? Conservative talk radio hosts. Internet reporters such as drudgereport.com, lucianne.com, canadafreepress.com, and Media Research Center, which keeps track of the mainstream media at mrc.org. Thousands of blogs on the internet. Three major newspapers – Wall Street Journal, Investors Daily, and Washington Times.
Who are not your friends? Mainstream media: CBS, NBC, ABC, Associated Press, most major newspapers, and their associated internet sites. Mainstream media will lie, spin, or simply fail to report anything which reflects poorly upon the Democrat party or the Obama administration. You simply cannot trust anything that comes out of these sources. As to the Democrat officials themselves, the truth is not in them. The more emphatic the statement, the more likely it is to be a lie. If you hear “let me be clear…” what follows is guaranteed to be the opposite of the truth.
I have found a good gauge of who is a friend and who is an enemy is their attitude toward Sarah Palin. Liberals hate Sarah Palin like vampires hate sunlight. Here is a bright and accomplished woman, mother of five including a downs syndrome child, and she is the subject of the most vicious calumnies and vituperation from liberals.
3. Prospects & Future Actions
Prospects are quite good, as long as we recognize that we must expand our base – attract likeminded people into the Tea Party. We must avoid factionalization. We must vote for conservative candidates, and expect them to be conservative in action. We must not attempt to become a third party – I have explained in a prior paper why the U.S. system is not conducive to third parties, unless a major party splits, as the Democrat party did in 1860 over slavery. Our current situation is not analogous to 1860, slave states vs. free states. We are in a conflict of people vs. the central government, not state against state, and we are using the Constitutional framework we already are blessed with, to resolve the conflict.
We have to push for repeal of the dreadful bills we have been saddled with already, particularly Obamacare. If we have the house, as we will in the next congress, we can force senators to take a position on repeal bills, and if repeal passes both houses, we then force the Executive branch to take a position. This will assuredly affect the election in 2012.
It would be good if all the bills enacted were constitutional, but we have a third branch of government to provide the check and balance –the Judiciary. If a bill is unconstitutional there should be no time wasted in bringing the key usurpations to court.
We as the Tea Party are for preservation of the Constitution, limited government interference in our lives, lower taxes, and limited government spending. As a member of the Taxed Enough Already party, you should be able to explain this to anyone who argues with you, and ask “What’s wrong with that?”
As for the next legislative efforts after repeal, we should push legislators for
· Border control
· Solution to the illegal alien problem of social services costs
· Opening of oil exploration, refining, and production
· Reject cap & trade – this is based on the notion of human-caused global warming, which is a hoax
· Lower the tax burden – this always increases tax revenue and releases the pent-up energy of the general economy
There are many other things that would be good to work on and to do, but we have seen in the last two years that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” should be one of the uppermost maxims as well.
To wrap it up, I have shown the conditions that started to make Americans heartsick and caused them to “get their backs up” about the direction society is taking. We organized, found solidarity nation-wide and showed our initial dissatisfaction at the ballot box. I have pointed out our conservative friends and our liberal enemies. You can get truthful information mostly only from the internet and talk radio, and are unlikely to get anything complete and truthful from newspapers and television. Lastly I have pointed out that we must get bigger, better, and adhere to our principles as we strive to influence the next elections in 2012. The liberal = Democrat, conservative = Republican split will probably not persist for very many elections. We should be willing to back Democrats who will jump in front of our Tea Party conservative principles as well, when we find them. What we want is to have every politician in public office subscribe to their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. We believe in Honesty, Honor, Truth, Justice, Freedom, and the American Way.
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