The Plot to Kill the Tea Party
House Speaker John Boehner, busy selling the narrative of Harry Reid, namely that the Tea Party has taken his speakership hostage with its demands, says he doesn’t have the votes to reopen the government. He most assuredly does. He has 200 Democratic votes, and he has 22 Republicans who have publicly said that they will vote for a clean continuing resolution. The Democrats could force just such a vote with a discharge petition, but neither option appeals to Boehner or Pelosi because they aren’t after a re-opened government.
They’re out to kill the Tea Party.
Bipartisanship in Washington, D.C. usually involves the establishment of both parties coming together to agree on something, usually expanded federal control of education, as was the case with No Child Left Behind and as is presently the case with Common Core. In fact, when it comes to spending, the establishment wings of both parties have no real disagreements. Republicans like John Boehner have no issue with food stamps, or entitlements in general, because J.P. Morgan Chase and Northrop Grumman make a mint administering those programs. Democrats are the same.
And so it is with the Tea Party, the last grassroots movement left in American politics. What the Tea Party represents is a group of individuals, fed up with centralized, top-down political organizations that have frozen their voices out for decades, coalescing around a decentralized, fractious, and rowdily democracy of sorts. They have generalized areas of agreement and concern, but there are no creeds or confessions, no doctrine or dogmas to spout. They tend to be better organized than their counterparts on the left, because the Tea Party at the local level is run by individuals who have experience running things.
There are no patchouli-scented white men with dreadlocks running a local Patriot Group.
There are, however, deacons, small businessmen and -women, the wives of doctors and lawyers, and salt-of-the-earth types who have worked their entire lives and are madder than hell about their shrinking opportunities to continue working. They don’t seek lives of leisure; they seek lives of opportunity to make whatever they will.
Liberals insist that the motivation is racism, as though they can read the minds of Middle Americans. It is only because Barack Obama is a black president that these individuals oppose him. It has nothing to do with his rampant deficit spending, which outpaces the record deficits accumulated by George W. Bush, nor does it have anything to do with the shrinking workweek or the disappearance of jobs. To posit that a white president presiding over such a record as Barack Obama would face the same rage and dissatisfaction is to miss the point: Barack Obama is black, and, as several of my liberal friends noted when they said they voted for him because they wanted a black president, his blackness is all that matters.
All of this ties into the present debate in Washington, where the issue is how you disagree.
The Tea Party has trained its sights on Republican incumbents; Ted Cruz is running ads in Republican districts to ratchet up pressure on Republican congressmen. This kind of aggression will not stand. It is perfectly fine to call Democrats out for behaving like Democrats; it is not permissible to call out Republicans for behaving like Democrats. No, that party designation should suffice to immunize those congressmen from attacks from their own party members, no matter how their actual policies deviate from the party and its core convictions.
As these men and women can agree with the Democrats on so many other items, all involving loosening the purse strings to drown the nation in debt, it is not so surprising that they now agree with Democrats in their assessment of the Tea Party as a threat. This shutdown, ostensibly conducted over the continued funding or implementation of Obamacare, is and has always been about discrediting the Tea Party and any candidate affiliated with the Tea Party for the midterm elections. Good little establishment Republicans will point to this moment and bemoan their status as hostages, and blame the Tea Party caucus and its associates, some sixty congressmen, and they will try to coast to re-election as moderates.
Lindsey Graham and others know that they are in trouble. Barack Obama’s ratings are falling to the lower 40s; Lindsey Graham is in the 30s. Harry Reid has a lower approval rating than John Boehner. Yes, Boehner, Reid, Graham, and Obama presided over an era that led to economic implosion, malaise, and disaster. However, they will now take this opportunity to paint a minority as the problem, when the majorities they were part of heaped up $17 trillion in debt and a $29.3 trillion bailout to the financial sector.
Oh, yes, the Tea Party is the problem. They’re the hostage takers. 475 congressmen who keep turning the debt ceiling into a new floor in their deficit fueled plans for a Tower of Babel made out of Treasury bonds are not the problem. Anyone who objects to this arrangement, who insists on retrenchment and spending cuts, is an extremist, an arsonist, a kidnapper, a hostage taker, a litterer and a loiterer. In this atmosphere of hyperbole, the pickpockets of the establishment, having looted the Treasury of trillions, now object to the so-called arsonists who would burn the bank to the ground in order to stop their continued looting.
After all, this is the American normal: if you’re elected, it legitimates everything you do thereafter, from pushing through legislation you don’t even read over the objection of the American people, to killing American citizens abroad without so much as an indictment.
The plot to kill the Tea Party is barreling on, and John Boehner and Barack Obama are cruising towards a default in order to preserve the establishment and the status quo. Who are the suicide bombers now?