No, really. Not only are members of the media trying to irresponsibly and erroneously tie J. Patrick Bedell, a registered Democrat, a Troofer and a total loon, to the “right-wing” in general, but they are now upping the defamation by attempting to libelously imply that the words of Jim DeMint “fed the rage.” Jim. DeMint. Full disclosure; I love DeMint. I was thrilled when moving from New Jersey to South Carolina because it meant I’d be trading Senator Frank Lautenberg for Senator Jim DeMint. Score!

However, even if I didn’t think so highly of DeMint, I’d obviously feel the same way about the following vile statements by the Associated Press:

In an Internet posting, Bedell had suggested an act like the 2001 terrorist attacks could have been the work of a criminal organization controlling the U.S. government, accepting a “sacrifice of thousands of its citizens … as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control.”

His poisonous view of the government appears well out on the extreme—until you see what some people close to the center of power are saying these days.

“America is teetering towards tyranny,” Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina told the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. He accused the governing Democrats of peddling socialist policies “that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world.”

Republicans have been branding Democratic policies as some form of socialism for generations, par for the course.

But tyranny? America has real issues with that—it violently overthrew that enemy at the start.

Wow. Firstly, DeMint’s statement isn’t “inflammatory”; it’s accurate. Secondly, while the media still insists upon claiming some sort of delusional moral authority, with aggrandized claims of journalistic integrity, it should now be quite clear to everyone that they truly have given up on any attempt - at all - at objectivity. They are no longer journalists; they are propagandists. The media is no longer merely biased, but they are now outright lying and propagandizing purely for the purpose of driving a false narrative.

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I’m not really sure who this Dylan Ratigan is and I suspect that maybe 3 people — tops — watch his show. However, his behavior, whilst interviewing Mark Williams about Tea Parties, is indicative of how desperate MSNBC and many on the far left have become.

Just keep screeching “you want to kill black people. Racists! Nazis!” That’s working out really well for you so far, lefties!

Sigh. While I, at times, point and snicker at their foolishness and buffoonery, it also infuriates me. Not only because they are obviously using their typical tired and old, yet still cruel, Alinksy tactics, but also because they are sickeningly diminishing real acts of racism by their constant and vile claims of faux racism. If everything is racist, idiots, then nothing is.

Insanity in action below:

Tea Parties and their participants have been an ongoing mystery to the media, including some commentators that we sometimes think are relatively unbiased.  When it comes to the participants, even though they’re acknowledged to be mostly independents and Republicans, the pundits have strange ideas about what motivates them, where they came from, and what they mean for the future of the Republican Party.  One reason is that the media pundits are all too ready to accept the Democrat spin on any issue.  Another reason may be that they and we have the wrong mental picture of the electorate.

When people called “independents” are imagined, where are they placed in the political spectrum?  Usually, they’re thought of as being between the Democrat Liberals on the left and the Republican Conservatives on the right.  They are the moderates, occupying the middle ground, neither liberal nor conservative, neither Democrat nor Republican.  They are pictured as torn between both camps, willing to go with the one that appeals to them on some particular issue, but not very strongly interested in either philosophy of government.  That’s why Republicans are often encouraged to create a “Big Tent” that will attract these uncommitted voters on their left flank.  This picture is probably accurate in some cases.

But this vision of independents becomes very confusing when applied to the Tea Partiers, and as a result, some of the pundits, listening to Democrat spin, label them “haters” and racists and fringe characters of all sorts–gun nuts, rubes, angry white men; fearful, uneducated and uninformed boobs, you name it.  But it’s only confusing because that stereotype isn’t an appropriate description.

They are obviously more than slightly energized by a philosophy of government, the one that says the federal government is too big, too intrusive, too expansive, too expensive, and out of control. But this implies that, rather than being the aforementioned boobs, they’re as well-educated and better informed than the average man on the street.  They certainly know enough about the issues to ask questions about them, and they don’t like the answers they get back.

They aren’t just anti-Obama, and there’s really nothing to indicate that either hate or race is a motivating factor behind the movement.  They aren’t even necessarily anti-Democrat–many of them are probably disaffected Democrats.  And it’s not helpful to describe them as “haters” who are anti-everything unless you also identify the object of the projected “hate.”  That object is not the President–it’s the huge government, and the increasingly intrusive government, and the exponential growth of government that he’s advocating.  You could as well say that they’re “lovers”–they love smaller, less intrusive and less expensive government that is controlled by the Constitution.

They are fearful, but not because of ignorance, and they’re not afraid of a Black President, as is always implied.  They’re afraid that their modern-day Captain Edward Smith is in the process of steering that Titanic government into a field of icebergs from which his successor won’t be able to escape.  Those are their motivations. To dismiss them as merely “angry and afraid” (media code for “irrational, ignorant racists”) is to disparage them as irrelevant, which they obviously are not.  Yet the left has tried to do that, perhaps because they’ve given up on winning any of these voters to their side.

If we accept this alternative view of Tea Party supporters, they aren’t hard to explain at all.  It’s only because the media pundits want to believe they’re some new expression of extremism that they haven’t understood them yet, and why they don’t recognize where they’ve come from. I would describe them as a group of voters who would be Republicans if the Republican Party could convince them it stood for the things they want–a government that’s under control, that follows the Constitution, that isn’t trying to do everything for everybody while taking their money in taxes to do it.  (In fact, that’s basically what the Republican Party says it stands for.  The Tea Partiers would just like to see Republicans acting on those principles, not just more often but all the time.)  Picture them not on the middle ground between the Democrat left and the Republican right, but as an overlay stretching philosophically from somewhere left of the political midpoint all the way to the right, soaring above the Republican party. They haven’t come from anywhere; they’ve been there all along.  They are conservatives and conservative-leaning independents, Libertarians, Republicans, and even Reagan Democrats that the Republican Party has been ignoring for years.

If the Republicans want to expand the size of their tent, they don’t need to put on faddish Liberal pretenses to entice the odd passerby in through the side entrance.  They need to blow the roof off the tent, replace it with a giant magnet of awareness, understanding, and responsible conservatism, and let those millions of independents, Libertarians, and disaffected Democrats and Republicans come pouring down from the sky above.  It will happen if Republican leadership responds to their pleas, not for Compassionate Conservatism, but for effective, Principled Conservatism, conservatism with a backbone.

This is not news to Democrat strategists. It’s precisely why they’re afraid of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and even Glenn Beck (not a Republican) and every Tea Party speaker and supporter who firmly believes in and convincingly advocates conservative principles.  Those philosophical trailblazers already have the attention of the American people, including independents.  Democrats are afraid that Republican Party leadership just might start following that trail as well.  They had a glimpse into the future last Thursday, as Republican after Republican gave conservative, principled reasons for their opposition to ObamaCare.  It’s a future Democrats don’t want to contemplate.

We’ve seen the likes of Time Magazine, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and Newsweek link the Joe Stack airplane attack to the conservative movement.  But in an interesting twist, a political blogger for The Nation has inexplicably linked Stack to several players at the recent CPAC convention - including Tim Pawlenty, Scott Brown, and most notably Glenn Beck. 

One of the stories coming out of CPAC this year is the embrace of the tea party movement not by the Republican Party, but by the conservative movement.

The issues of spending and smaller government are shared across the board.

But while conservatives are embracing the tea party movement, Republican Senators continue castigating tea party activists and hoping they shut up and go away. The latest is Senator Orin Hatch who is petrified that tea party activists might elect Mike Lee and defeat Bob Bennett in Utah.

The Hill reports:

Speaking to constituents at a town hall, Hatch warned Tea Partiers not to split the Republican Party.

“If we fractionalize the Republican Party, we are going to see more liberals elected,” Hatch said, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune.

This is in line with the GOP talking point that we who are here at CPAC should be perfectly fine with moderates. But we know that is not the case. In a state like Utah, we can legitimately move the state right by electing Mike Lee over Bob Bennett.

But Hatch gets even more disingenuous than that. Dan Riehl notes Orrin Hatch gets his history wrong. Hatch blames tea party activists for gordon Smith’s defeat in Oregon. As Dan notes:

Not only did Hatch lecture people he’d better start listening to, instead - he didn’t have the slightest clue what he was talking about. The Tea Party movement didn’t even exist in 2008. It’s out of touch Republicans like Hatch, presumably living in some elitist echo chamber who can still snatch defeat from victory for the GOP in 2010 if no one fills them in. Based upon this nonsense, Hatch doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s going on at street level in America today.

If Conservatives win in Utah this year by beating Bob Bennett with Mike Lee, Orrin Hatch will be on notice to get with the program or shove it — a fitting taste of his own medicine.

Please calibrate accordingly.

Admittedly, it looks a little, well, small by right-wing activist standards, but that’s a real, live Lefty protest against a business organization* using actual pitchforks and functional torches.  Feel free to pass that around the next time somebody has the vapors about a Tea Party protest…

(Via Instapundit.)

Moe Lane

*The Connecticut Business and Industry Association; goodness only knows why they in particular half-aroused the ire of this particular bunch.  Probably they were late on the vig.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

…third parties are a dead end.

…she quickly pivoted to the broader question of whether the Tea Party movement might successfully field its own candidates in national elections, and on that point she sounded far from convinced.

“Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party,” [former Governor Sarah] Palin said. “Which party reflects how that smaller, smarter government steps to be taken? Which party will best fit you? And then because the Tea Party movement is not a party, and we have a two-party system, they’re going to have to pick a party and run one or the other: ‘R’ or ‘D’.”

Ace (the aforementioned, and self-described, GOP shill*), cut right to the chase when responding to both this, and the fairly obvious point that a functional third party = Democratic victory:

I’m not interested in “sending messages” when those messages come with the other, all-caps message: BARACK OBAMA AND HIS MOST STALWART LIBERAL ALLIES WIN, IN BLOW-OUTS, FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION.

I’m not interested in a message like that, either.  Mind you, I’m not as worried about this as either Ace or Allahpundit is.  Third parties are often threatened, but are rarely a problem on the federal level.  Indeed, if the Democrats are really relying on and spending resources on the plan of encouraging a national third-party in time for November then it’s official: Congress will flip in the next election.  Both Houses.  You don’t make desperation plays like that unless you’re, well, desperate.

Besides, the RNC had a rush of oxygen to the brain.  I guess that we must have tried everything else, first**.

Moe Lane

*I’m the partisan hack, in case that wasn’t obvious.

**I didn’t say that I was a blindly partisan hack.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I’m finally getting around to review the Tea Party “Contract from America“. I think it’s good that people who aren’t professional activists or party leaders are getting involved. But I’m wondering how realistic this “Contract” is. So let us look at the items and see what is in there.

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I’ve taken a lot of flack for my involvement in the Tea Party movement. The fact that I added “Proud 9/12′er” to my activities on Facebook caused a two-day commotion, in which I was labeled a racist (by default), a misogynist (why not?), a militia-loving anarchist, a homophobe, and (the horror) a Paul-ite Libertarian.

I was able to get over it, except for the thing about me being a Libertarian.

At any rate, the slurs didn’t bother me, because I believed (and still do) that the Tea Party movement is important to maintaining a sense of hope (not to be confused with Hope© ) and motivation within the conservative base. They shouldn’t bother you either—people fear what they don’t understand, and the front page of today’s New York Times provides conclusive proof that people—at least the sort of people who work at the Times—do not understand the Tea Party movement.

It’s not just the Times, either. Dinner last night turned into a 2 hour affair in which I and three of my girlfriends hashed through current events, and how they relate to relative Left and Right ideology. It was interesting to see how public perception of the Tea Parties and the grassroots conservative movement at large has shaped how even my friends see me with regards to political ideology. For a movement that has been classified as “directionless” and “disorganized,” I heard an awful lot of comments about the Tea Parties start with phrases like “they believe” and “what it all comes down to is…” as if the benevolent VRWC is some sort of Dollhouse-esque (nerd points!) brainwashing club, where our hero Glenn Beck sits us down in a chair and imprints us with dangerous and angry ideas about Constitutional rights and freedom from tyranny.

I did my best to quash the Lefty-version of what the Tea Parties stand for, but mid-rant I discovered that defending the Tea Parties against every criticism is nearly impossible to do, simply because of the movement’s “directionless” and “disorganized” nature. Since I was with friends, it was a bit easier for me to explain where we’re coming from, since they pretty much know I’m not a violent anarchist who hates on black people and thinks Pat Robertson has a good point about Haiti. The issue at large, however, is a difficult one to tackle, and this is evidenced by the subtle mudslinging and disparaging commentary provided by this morning’s Times.

I’ve got to hand it to them—this piece wasn’t as bad as I anticipated. When I sat down to read it, I half expected to be choking on my Fat Tuesday donut (don’t judge) by the end of the first column. The whole thing lacked the usual venom (they only mentioned Bush twice!) but at the same time, was extraordinarily…backhanded. Sneaky. There are few truthiness problems—apart from the sweeping generalizations we’ve come to know and love from our friends in New York—but what I take issue with is the web the author weaves between your average Tea Party activist and separatist/militia/crazy pants extremist groups, extreme anti-tax groups, Ron Paul (I’m sorry, I can’t, don’t hate me), and the fine people over at WorldNutDaily.

Unlike most people who like to talk trash about the Tea Party movement, I actually went to a Tea Party last April. (SHOCK. AWE. GASP. Lock the doors and hide your children.) I will be the first to admit that the Tampa gathering was not free from conspiracy theorists and racially insensitive signs. However, what I will say, and what the Times piece conveniently fails to mention, is that the honest patriots greatly outnumbered the witless jackasses, and it was those honest patriots who avoided the witless jackasses like the plague. By the end of the rally, we’d made it abundantly clear that their brand of “patriotism,” motivated by fear and anger, was not welcome in our midst. We were all working for change (not to be confused with Change© ), but their brand of change was not consistent with our brand of change. Their motivation and end was anger; our motivation was for reform born from a frustration with the status quo. Their goal is destruction; our goal is tearing down and rebuilding in a manner consistent with the Constitution, American values, and ideas of individual liberty.

I do not fear the government—I do not have enough respect for the government to fear it. I am not a birther or a truther or a rabid, paranoid protestor, and I do not want anything to do with any movement that seeks to promote one person’s liberty at the expense of another, even if that means fighting tooth and nail for Markos Moulitsas’ right to post disparaging comments about Trig Palin on a daily basis. (Yikes. I know.) I am, however, a reluctant activist who believes that the current Administration is corrupt, and that my President plays second fiddle to the whims and worries of very small men. I am not a violent extremist, but I will fight on behalf of the Constitution if I see that its principles are being threatened by irresponsible legislation and out-of-control executive power grabs. I don’t promise this because I hate Obama (I don’t) or because I’m still bitter about Republicans losing power (I’m not,) but because I hate any policy that treats the Constitution like yesterday’s garbage.

I wonder what the New York Times would have to say about that?

The Tea Party movement draws its strength and its relevance from its spontaneous, organic and populist nature. That is also the source of its greatest weakness. Because it is a fledgling, leader-less and platform-less movement people are tempted anoint themselves leaders and project their own values upon the rest of the movement. Every faction thinks they own it, but no one really does.

The Tea Parties are best understood and used as a force of opposition. It is a broad coalition of anti-big government forces. It is comprised of many factions that have united to fight the radical, socialist agenda of the Obama administration. But uniting those factions in opposition to something is much easier than uniting those factions in support of a single platform or a single candidate. This is the difference between 2009 and 2010.

As we’ve fought Obama’s radical agenda, we’ve joined concerned Democrats, libertarians, populists, paleocons, independents and some tin-foil-hat-wearers. We needed their help to amplify our outrage. But the elections are near and conservatives must start promoting their own candidates. Some of those candidates may have warts, long voting records, ties to the establishment and specific policy positions that run contrary to many in the Tea Party movement. I fear that the populist fire that was lit in 2009 may turn into a conflagration that consumes important GOP candidates.

It is folly to assume that the Tea Parties simply represent frustrated Republicans who will fall in line if presented with a good conservatives. These factions agree on a couple of broad principles involving limited government and have united to fight a grave threat. But we cannot assume those same factions will automatically unite behind specific candidates with specific policy positions on foreign affairs, wars, social issues, cultural issues, trade policy, big corporations…

I started to write this last week on a whim, but canned it. And then I read about the events in Nevada; a Tea Party candidate is threatening to split the anti-Democrat vote and save Harry Reid. This is not the first time this has happened, and it wont be the last. Again, people tend to love the movement because they get to project their own ideals upon it because it has no platform. To many, it is a populist uprising of real conservatives “just like me”. The Birther eruption helped quash that notion. But that is just one split. On libertarian sites, they are irate that Sarah Palin “hijacked” the movement to promote a “neocon” foreign policy. There will be other splits. But as long as the focus remains on the radical, big government agenda of Obama and the Congressional Democrats, the Tea Party coalition may hold. We cannot allow ourselves to become distracted with other issues.

The founding fathers are often referenced as inspiration for the Tea Parties, but it often forgotten that the original Boston Tea Party leaders turned against the populist mobs after the Revolution because those same mobs undermined our young Republic. Famed Tea Party leader Samuel Adams led the movement to suppress the uprising of his former patriot brother Daniel Shays. George Washington led the march against the Whiskey Rebels. The founding fathers realized it was time to contain the populist fire. It had outlived its purpose.

This is not an anti-Tea Party diary, just another cautionary note. The torch lit by the Tea Parties still belongs to conservatives, but playing with fire is dangerous. Raw populism is difficult to control. The Republican Party should work to take ownership of the Tea Parties or they should dismiss it. I think Sarah Palin tried to initiate the former option at the Tea Party convention, but this process will require alienating some in the Tea Party movement. Otherwise, conservatives should recognize the Tea Parties as a great moment and not a long term movement. Well before November, conservatives must start rallying around all decent GOP candidates and support the GOP brand with or without Tea Party fervor.