It's time to secede!
Posted on 09/12/2009 11:26:46 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Joe Wilson brought a taste of the summer’s contentious health care town halls to the floor of Congress Wednesday night, and on Saturday thousands of fired-up conservatives are planning to bring some of that anger to the streets outside the Capitol.
Borrowing tactics more familiar to protestors on the left, they’re pouring into the Washington area in hundreds of buses, newly engaged grassroots activists who plan to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and voice their mounting displeasure with their government. Their issues are a hodgepodge, ranging from the bank and auto bailouts to President Obama’s push to overhaul the nation's health system to concerns about perceived erosion of First and Second Amendment rights.
Saturday’s “Taxpayer March”– at which organizers expect anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 people – as well as dozens of smaller marches around the country, will prove that the fledgling “Tea Party” movement is real, according to Mark Williams, a conservative radio talk show host from Sacramento who is vice chairman of Our Country Deserves Better PAC, a political action committee that is co-sponsoring the march.
“If I’ve learned one thing in 30 years of doing activist talk, it’s that you can’t manufacture this kind of thing,” said Williams. “I could get on the radio and rant and rave until I was blue in the face, but if it’s not out there, it’s not going to happen.”
But whether the marchers reflect a small minority’s continuing anger over the more liberal direction the country began taking in the 2008 election or something deeper that could have repercussions in 2010 and 2012 is one of the questions the march may begin to answer.
Equally important for Republicans is whether Washington’s institutional conservative leaders and groups will be able to channel this energy to help the party’s candidates, or whether it will remain diffused, fueled by radio and television talk show hosts and susceptible to extremist positions that could do more harm than good to the GOP.
GOP strategist Craig Shirley, whose 2005 book chronicles the significance of Ronald Reagan’s failed 1976 presidential bid in reinventing the GOP, thinks the activism of the Tea Party movement could have a similar role today.
“At that point, the Republican Party was essentially an empty vessel, and the movement took its ideas and poured them into it,” Shirley said. “What we’re seeing today is somewhat analogous, but all they’re doing so far is anti-liberalism, which doesn’t necessarily have a political philosophy or an agenda of its own.”
Shirley said the Tea Party movement “can’t sustain itself just as anti-liberal movement. It’s got to evolve. And it will.”
But Sam Tanenhaus, whose recent book, “The Death of Conservatism,” traces the split in the conservative movement between “revanchist” forces and those more willing to participate in the political process, predicts the Tea Party activists won’t have much lasting impact on mainstream politics.
Instead, he compares what's happening now with the peak of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, during Kennedy’s presidency.
“These are Americanists, is what they used to call themselves,” he said. “This is similar to that in many respects,” he asserted, explaining that the Tea Party contingent has shown the same deep suspicion towards Obama that the Birchers felt towards Kennedy. “That’s what we’re seeing now,” he said. “They’re looking to recover a lost America.”
It was Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texas Republican, who first dusted off the Tea Party nomenclature in 2007 during his bid for GOP presidential nomination, as both a fundraising technique and an homage to the 1773 Boston tax revolt that played a major role in sparking the American Revolution. Some modern conservative activists use “Tea” as an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.”
In February, tens of thousands turned out to Tea Party protests around the country, and on April 15, tens of thousands more took to the streets for Tax Day Tea Parties. But it was last month’s congressional town halls, when constituents turned out in droves to voice their displeasure with their federal lawmakers, that drew attention to the movement.
But defining the movement beyond its generalized sense of grievance is difficult.
“Where the real problem comes in, is that – because it’s so organic – if you ask 1,000 people what this should be, you’ll get general agreement on the broader theme that we have to get the government back under control, but you’re going to get 1,000 different answers on the specifics,” said Williams, who has been traveling on the Tea Party Express, a bus caravan that started in his hometown of Sacramento and zigzagged across the country, holding rallies at 30 stops along the way.
“We don’t want to turn this into some kind of organization with a top-down hierarchy,” he said. “We want to keep it a democratic kind of organization, but people have to be herded into the same general direction, which is kind of what we’re doing here.” There are two divergent explanations for the energy behind the marches, and they reflect two different sides of the conservative movement, each with a different vision for its future.
One is represented by FreedomWorks, the fiscally conservative non-profit group chaired Dick Armey, the former House Republican Leader turned lobbyist. It helped plan and promote the Tea Parties, town hall protests and Saturday’s march using online organizing techniques similar to those employed for years to great effect by liberal groups and more recently by Obama’s own presidential campaign. And because of its involvement, and that of other established conservative groups, many on the left have been quick to dismiss the entire movement as something manufactured by big-money Republican interests.
It was FreedomWorks that set up the main march website (which lists FreedomWorks as the lead march sponsor) and has handled the permitting and logistics for the march. By the time all the bills are paid, group officials say they expect they’ll have spent about $600,000 on everything from sound and stage equipment to port-a-potties and security, though they asked other conservative groups to chip in as much as $10,000 each to co-sponsor the event.
Though there’s been some sniping in conservatives circles about FreedomWorks’ efforts to use its infrastructure to co-opt or “own” the Tea Party movement, the group stresses that the marchers have used the group’s website and online social networks to organize themselves and plan – and fund – transportation and lodging.
“People are saying FreedomWorks is trying to jump to the front of the bus,” said FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon. “But we helped organize hundreds, if not thousands, of Tea Parties, and we helped with the town halls and we built a network and we gained some credibility as being a helpful organization to people as they wanted to get involved in activism.”
He predicted Saturday’s march would be the “largest gathering of fiscal conservatives in history” and that it would demonstrate “a new center of gravity forming in the conservative movement. The gun guys, they can turn out a crowd. The abortion guys, they can turn out a crowd. And for the first time ever, the fiscal conservatives will be able to, too.”
FreedomWorks has seen its membership and online donations spike as a result of its involvement in the Tea Party movement, Brandon said. And, he said, FreedomWorks picked September 12 for the march before the Tax Day Tea Parties to give activists something to work towards and because it was about the time Congress was scheduled to return from its summer recess.
The other version of the march’s genesis is that the popular conservative Fox News television host Glenn Beck set it in motion when he unveiled what he called The 9-12 Project during a March broadcast in which he urged viewers to try to recreate the united America that emerged the day after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
“It’s not about politics,” Beck said during the March broadcast. “You actually believe in something. And you thought for a while there your politicians did as well. And now you kind of realize well, maybe they don’t.” Beck’s 9-12 project rhetoric leans much more towards fiery populism than anything coming from FreedomWorks and, while it certainly takes Democrats – and Republicans, for that matter – to task for reckless deficit spending, it also includes a heavier element of religious and social conservatism.
Beck has voiced support for the marches and will broadcast from Washington Saturday afternoon. He even recorded a two-minute video welcoming marchers to the city though it’s unclear whether FreedomWorks will play it before the march. But he has downplayed characterizations that he’s leading the marches or the movement.
Some activists, however, look to him more than any national conservative leader or group. “Glenn is probably the unofficial leader of the group – he doesn’t want to be, but he is – more than any national group,” said Brian Britton, who heads the Greeley, Colo. 9/12 group, which he estimates has an email list with about 400 members.
Britton and his group are going to a Saturday march in Denver, which he hopes will attract as many as 10,000 people. He sees the movement as most effective at mobilizing to affect local and state debates, and said it doesn’t lend itself to national political organizing.
“It’s like trying to harness a bees’ nest,” he said, explaining “Within our group, there are a lot of people who are just as upset at what the Republicans did when they controlled the presidency and the Congress. A lot of the people look at Washington itself as being broken.” The schedule of speakers for the Washington march includes a handful of fiscally conservative Republican officials and conservative celebrities – such as Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina (whose political action committee is also listed as a march co-sponsor) and Reps. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tom Price of Georgia, as well as actor Stephen Baldwin.
But Brandon, the FreedomWorks spokesman, said the group purposefully created a speaking roster heavy on grassroots activists from around the country.
“We wanted to keep the politicians and the TV folks to a minimum and leave this to the Tea Party folks and I think that they’re going to go back even more energized than ever,” said Brandon, who plans to wear full Revolutionary War regalia to the march.
After Saturday, he said the next step would be to organize activists by congressional district around key issues of their own choosing, possibly including opposition to Democratic proposals to overhaul the nation’s health care system, and to cap and trade carbon emissions.
“Are we going to keep this movement going forever?” Brandon said. “Probably not. Every movement has its life cycle. But I think we’re at the beginning of this movement’s life cycle.”
I wouldn’t call it a “movement.” It’s more like a REVOLUTION! America is going to show Barry the Kenyan the same door they showed to King George.
Here, here!!
Small minority?
The blindness of willful ignorance.
Are they kidding? Spending quadrupled, unemployment rose, and the economy got worse ever since Obama got elected. I don’t think for one moment that people who voted for him expected this much incompetence (except for me and you all on FR).
They know what it is,, they choose to ignore it.
How to distinguish Liberty from Tyranny:
| Liberty | "Soft" Tyranny | |
| 1 | Rights are inherent in, and unalienable from, individuals | Rights are granted/rescinded by the majority through the government |
| 2 | Fundamental rights are life, liberty, and property (absence of coercion) | Fundamental rights are food, housing, and healthcare (absence of necessity) |
| 3 | Property is owned by individuals who make decisions as to its use, improvement, and transfer | Property is owned by 'the public' with government officials making decisions as to its use, improvement, and transfer |
| 4 | Government exists to protect the rights of individuals | Government exists to plan and direct the resources of society |
| 5 | Government authority is decentralized in a federal system with limited and enumerated powers | Government authority is centralized in a national system with broad and necessarily intrusive powers |
| 6 | Government action is prescribed by rules fixed and announced beforehand | Government action is arbitrary and at the descretion of "czars" and planning boards |
| 7 | Economic activity is driven by a large number of small entities interacting according to simple rules | Economic activity is driven by a small number of large entities operating within the constraints of complex regulations |
| 8 | Effective innovation results from contrarian thinking, individual initiative, and the voluntary exchange of property | Efficient implementation of government planning requires conformity of opinion, collective action, and the coerced transfer of property |
| 9 | Standards of living for the many increase permanently as they utilize improved products and services conceived by the few | Standards of living for the many increase temporarily as they utilize property redistributed from the few |
| 10 | Altruism is using one's own resources in concrete acts to help specific individuals | Altruism is obligating the resources of others for broad-brush programs to help mankind in the abstract |
Rights exists solely as a way to fairly decide whose will shall prevail in cases where two or more people disagree. They do not exist for the purpose of enslaving one person for the benefit of another (e.g., the "right" to free medical care.)
Liberty is the right to do whatever does not infringe the rights of others. Rights empower you to help yourself, free from interference by others.
Tyranny makes you a serf to be used by the elite to further their own power. Once upon a time, the nobility used religion to convince the serfs they had to serve the nobility. Modernly, the elite use good people's feelings of altruism to convince them to enslave both themselves and their neighbors. It's basically the same con game, just using a more sophisticated hook.
I’d say it was a movement about 5 months ago. I think it’s reaching Revolutionary standards right now.
I’d say it was a movement about 5 months ago. I think it’s reaching Revolutionary standards right now.
This article indicates that Brandon expects that the next step will be organizing groups in congressional districts around what he calls key "issues." Big mistake!
Such groups, drawn from all political affiliations, all races, all ethnicities, should be organized around principles and ideas of individual liberty and limited government power as articulated by America's Founders. That umbrella group could then battle the ideas of tyranny and expansion of government control of individuals and their hard-earned labor--the antithesis of America's Founding ideas.
The battle will never be successful for those who call themselves "conservative" if they continue allowing the Far Left to define the debate around "issues" like who can most successfully take our incomes and redistribute back to us for any kind of goodies.
The Left is weaponless in a battle between the principles of liberty and tyranny. Why allow it to continue to reset (President's semantics) it on peripheral issues, when the Left's goal is accumulation of power to Washington?
Most of the earlier protest groups were by paid for protesters. Most of todays TEA party people pay their own way.
It's time to secede!
Hell yeah!
[and *this* time, come free Maryland the *right* way, please!]
C-Span keeps shooting pics of grass with a few people sitting around.
Why is this not of Fox News!
Here’s a shocker-NBC belittling the dissent targeting The One. The more successful the march is, the more venom we’ll see from MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS and the print propagandists like the NYT. The good news is that no one is paying attention.
The NBC lib who wrote this piece of attack-tripe has allowed the left’s true concern to show through. The anger and outrage of the American people are real and run deep.
NBC New York wouldn’t know a political movement from a bowel movement (like their network).
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