Tea Party Vindication from Across the Pond

Well, what a weekend on the economic front. S&P downgraded our credit rating, as I post this, the DJIA is down over 200 points, and the uber-lefties in Washington are in high dudgeon, feebly trying to blame the Tea Party members in Congress for the downgrade.

It won’t work.

Watch and listen for the next few days, as a Dem talking point is mindlessly repeated by the usual cast of characters. I fully expect Rush Limbaugh to have a montage of it by tomorrow. If you’re unfamiliar with how he does those, he takes sound bites of liberals saying the exact same phrase and compiles them into a handy reference.

You’ll hear this phrase repeated: “Tea Party Downgrade,”

Senator John F. Kerry and David Axelrod began the meme on yesterday’s political talk shows. It’s a shameless and false attack on the only group of people in Washington who truly recognize the trouble we’re in as a result of the wild Obama, Reid and Pelosi spending spree of the past two years.

And word travels quickly. Just prior to writing this piece, one of my best friends called me and started to rant about throwing all the bums out in Washington and starting over. When I suggested that we keep the Tea Partiers, he became particularly animated, and repeated the false talking point that TP’ers were the cause of all this economic chaos. I reminded him who controlled Congress for the last four years.

He finally gave up and said not to get him started.

My friend, you should be riled up, but you need to direct your anger towards the ones who are directly responsible for this mess, and it ain’t the Tea Party.

I’ll wade into the shallows of psychology for a moment to explain why this is so.

There are people in Washington who have egos so large that the Grand Canyon couldn’t begin to hold them. For years, they’ve bamboozled the public into keeping them in office through various types of deceit. These people love power and will do anything to keep it.

Which reminds me of a saying I heard: “Those who love power do not crave freedom. Those who love freedom do not crave power.” After some exhaustive Internet research, consisting of thirty seconds on Bing, I can’t find the proper attribution for that quote, else I’d credit the proper person for that little bit of wisdom. It’s very true.

The aforementioned “people” have also succumbed to the corrupting power of power. They have a fatal flaw in that they want to tell other people what to do, how to live and what to think. Instead of treating everyone the same way, they play favorites with their contributors and grant them special favors in return for their support. This is how our tax system grew into the monster it is today. And that’s not the only manifestation of corruption and favoritism to be found in Washington.

The Tea Party members of Congress threaten to take away the power of the People of Large Egos by removing them from office. Much like a mama bear seeking to protect her cub, these PoLE’s will attack anything or anyone that threatens their power baby.

It is a pitiful thing to watch, really. Our government was never designed to be inhabited by career politicians. Our Founders envisioned citizen legislators who served a term or two and then returned to their home to live under the laws they created.

This is what the Tea Party represents, a return to our political roots. And those in power will do everything they can to squash anyone who keeps them from their “right to rule.”

OK, digression over. There’s a title up there somewhere that I should talk about.

I found this little tidbit over at Ace’s place this weekend. It’s a good read and a welcome breath of fresh air from one Janet Daley entitled, “If we are to survive the looming catastrophe, we need to face the truth.” It’s a wonderful article that says virtually everything that the PoLE’s in Washington won’t.

I’ll give you a few morsels until you can read the whole thing.

Which of these is the most important question to ask in the present economic crisis: how can we promote growth? Should we pay off government debt more or less quickly? Is the US in worse trouble than Europe? Answer: none of the above.


The truly fundamental question that is at the heart of the disaster toward which we are racing is being debated only in America: is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society? On this side of the Atlantic, the model of a national welfare system with comprehensive entitlements, which is paid for by the wealth created through capitalist endeavour, has been accepted (even by parties of the centre-Right) as the essence of post-war political enlightenment.

That right there is some good stuff, but wait, there’s more…

This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you for pointing that out, Ms. Daley.

The Tea Party faction within the Republican party was demanding that, before any further steps were taken, there must be a debate about where all this was going. They had seen the future toward which they were being pushed, and it didn’t work. They were convinced that the entitlement culture and benefits programmes which the Democrats were determined to preserve and extend with tax rises could only lead to the diminution of that robust economic freedom that had created the American historical miracle.


And, again contrary to prevailing wisdom, their view is not naive and parochial: it is corroborated by the European experience.

In other words, we have reached the tipping point where our federal government is about to tip our economy over into a full-blown depression thanks to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama. And this is being done on purpose, ironically by folks who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and defend the country from enemies both foreign and domestic.

We have met the enemy, and it is Progressivism.

These next few months up until 2012 will decide which path our nation is to tread for the foreseeable future and what we will embrace as national policy. We have only two choices before us, one that served us well until around fifty years ago, where Americans were upwardly mobile, creative and free. The alternative, which has proven itself to be a failure of Biblical proportions in only two years, is one of redistribution, control, poverty, and a massive and unnecessary waste of human capital and potential.

You are the government. Your votes determine this.

How will you choose?