The American Political Scene: A Hollywood B Movie in Progress

This is a president who cut his teeth as a “community organizer” (code for shaking down the “system”), who gives every indication of playing by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (whose methods he taught at the Developing Communities Project in Chicago), who enjoyed a close relationship with Weather Underground alumnus Bill Ayers, who is far too cozy with the trade unions and apparently approves their bullying tactics at town hall meetings and elsewhere, who supports the Honduran leftist and would-be strongman Manuel Zelaya and is disturbingly chummy with leftist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who believes in “spreading the wealth” or economic distributionalism (code for managerial socialism), and who wishes to ram through various pieces of nation-changing legislation without proper study, consultation, or plebiscitary review. It is not far-fetched to conclude that, though a Democrat, he is surely no democrat.

And he is surely no quintessential American, given his syndicalist antecedents, paternalistic convictions, and dubious affiliations. Moreover, the current occupant of the Oval Office is not a man who has proved himself in any meaningful way but seems lacking in almost every major respect. He has neither military nor executive experience and nothing to his credit but a few ineffectual years in Congress and two poorly written, self-congratulatory autobiographical books that were, to put it gently, somewhat premature. Add to this an oddly shrouded past with every significant document held under seal or otherwise kept from public view and one may legitimately wonder what is going on. Who exactly have Americans elected to steer the nation through these tumultuous times?..

The Tea Party movement's core purpose and motivation is opposing Tyranny and (re)affirming Liberty!

How to distinguish Liberty from Tryanny:

	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1	Rights are inherent in, and unalienable from, individuals	Rights are granted/rescinded by the majority through the government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.

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