Posted on 08/14/2016 6:44:48 AM PDT by fluorescence
Remember when all those Tea Party candidates made all those promises and we voted for them?
Well the joke was on us. :)
Now go pay your taxes, someone has too. LOL! :)
The problem with anti-establishment political movements is that there are only 2 paths available to them:
they either start winning, which means they become part of the establishment
or they don’t, which means they never accomplish anything but they keep feeling good and pure
The Tea Party won. And now they hate their biggest electoral victory.
The IRS helped the GOPe in marginalizing the TEA Party, but its death is greatly exaggerated. Wait until November to see if it really died, or simply went underground.
While the idea of a formal “Tea Party” has largely been subsumed by scam artists (my personal example is Tea Party Patriots and Jenny Beth Martin, BTW), the SENTIMENT that drove the rush to capitalization of the movement is NOT dead.
We’ve gotten smarter, us Tea Party sentiment proponents, the one big mistake that liberals make is that the failures and peccadillos of formal Tea Parties of multiple flavor HAS NO IMPACT on that underlying prevailing sentiment.
You liberals and bluster and bloat how these formal “Tea Parties” flounder or fail, but you mistake that for the underlying sentiment, AND IT WILL BE YOUR DOWNFALL.
I have a historical analogy. The politics are completely different, but I think it’s meaningful.
In 1905, Russia had a revolution. There was a guy named Lenin involved, but the revolution didn’t succeed. Kind of like the Tea Party.
But about a decade later, there was a second attempt. In 1917 the Bolshevik revolution changed everything in Russia and put Lenin in power.
I consider Trump a good Conservative. He is not a Bolshevik or a Liberal. But he is the second coming of the Tea Party.
And I think he will change everything. I’m hoping.
Politico writer sends stories to the DNC before he sends them to his own editor
VIDEO: Ten minutes of CNN cutting people’s mics when they dare criticize Hillary
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Secretly Censored Abusive Responses To President Obama
DNC supplying CNN the very questions they want to be asked in interviews
DNC discussing their relationship with NBC/MSNBC/CNN and how to get better treatment
Sharyl Attkisson Discusses DC Journalist Bureau Chief Urging Colleagues to Take Down Trump
DNC directing MSNBC commentary segment to be pulled.
DNC controls the narrative with time-released stories.
DNC complains to Morning Joe producers
daring to mention a rigged system
PROVEN DOUBLE STANDARD: Khizr Khan Receives 50x More Coverage
Than Pat Smith on ABC, CBS, NBC
Top Polling Companies Make Fraud and Outed
For Skewing Polls For Hillary In Massive Trump Hit Job
” What was left of the Tea Party split for a while between Trump and, while he was still in the race, Ted Cruz, who was backed by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots group spent just 10 percent of the $14.4 million it collected actually supporting candidates, with the rest going to consultants and vendors and Martin’s hefty salary of $15,000 per month; in all, she makes an estimated $450,000 a year from her Tea Party-related ventures. “
Millions of us are hoping and praying shoulder to shoulder with you. God Bless America, again.
Bttt
I’m not reading any Politico tripe, but this statement is absolutely accurate:
“...the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives. “
You can add in groups like “Oath Keepers” in there as well.
And the kicker is that it’s the right’s own damn fault. Our general laziness when it comes to activism made it easy for people over here to just instead foist money to whatever group had any type of word like freedom, liberty, constitution, minuteman, and tea party in their name or made the usual pitch about “christian values” and “founding fathers”, after they all but promised they would do the hard work so that you wouldn’t have to give up your free time to defend your liberty.
What these groups did, because many of them had no idea what they were doing, consisted of making sure they got a good salary from the donations, and then paid lobbyists to supposedly make magic happen in DC.
The donator got a monthly “newsletter” detailing how the “fight is on” but “dark forces continue to battle”, and they need just a bit more money to make the final push.
Rinse and repeat until the executive boards of these groups are all very wealthy, have shown no real results, and have all moved on to consulting jobs. Likely to teach others how to run the same scam.
The tea party groups are now all shells, run by nobodies, and are completely broke because no one believes in them anymore.
I remember how I once got a phone solicitation from someone representing the Republican party asking for donations. He could barely speak English. I figured this was no Republican and it was likely a scam.
Does anyone else think there are a lot of half-truths in this article?
It seems to me that the illegal IRS suppression probably had a major impact. The author mentions it, but just enough so no one can say he omitted it. Then he says or implies that all the donations to Cruz and Trump were in hope that they would lose. What??!
While the information reported here about the misdeeds of (mainly conservative-sounding) PACs is useful, this article just seems to me to be more “Politico” propaganda, to discourage and dis-enthuse potential Trump voters.
Ron Jonson US Senator WI is a prime example
The Tea Party is still around. People are more likely to donate money directly to a candidate these days instead of to a PAC.
The Tea Party is not dead.
Some of the money-making scams bearing the name may be but many of us original Tea Party people are still out here looking to reduce government.
Oh, and in my district, we Cantorized our weasel, Eric Cantor.
It is a shame that more districts did not follow our example.
” ... the SENTIMENT that drove the rush ... is NOT dead.
We’ve gotten smarter, us Tea Party sentiment proponents, ...
... the underlying sentiment, AND IT WILL BE YOUR DOWNFALL.”
Sentiments are one thing. Results are something else. Unless someone can divine how to move from the former, to organizations capable of producing the latter, we will not succeed.
Worse, if we insist sentiments are sufficient, and that every step on any path to results must be scorned, we will not merely fail, we will self-destruct.
No action to date indicates anyone in the movement has become smarter. But it can be argued that many have gotten a lot grumpier.
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