Well I guess you’re just a better Tea Partier then. Or perhaps the people here had respect for the flag and followed American flag protocol. Why don’t you ask Ken Crow. He organized the event.
Back in 2009, we paid our respects to God without wearing it on our sleeves... and nobody was in a mood to swear allegiance to a government gone mad. Its allegiance was the one in we were there to question. Representatives of three political parties showed up, and the Republican got booed. What people wanted to hear was what the Libertarians and Constitution Party folks had to say, and to hear what each other had to say. We were there because neither of the two major parties represented us.
Here's a reminder of what the Tea Party was when it was born.
Those people wouldn't recognize this event.
The mandate in this country is to return to the rule of law according to the Constitution, to end the spending and end the bailouts, and to end the special favors and open bribery that dominates Washington DC. Any faction in the GOP which thinks it is going to take this momentum in a different direction is going to lose a 25% chunk of the electorate that has just had it with the two parties acting as two wings of the same bird of prey.
At least Palin appears to be smarter than her supporters. She knew that the smart thing to be talking about was economic issues. In the first 1h 45m of that video only one other person mentioned even one economic issue (unemployment). Her problem is that being so closely associated with John McCain her credibility is suspect among these voters. (Thus my opinion is that she is ideally suited to be a party campaign chairman and not a candidate.)
Social conservatives need to understand that in this environment, economic conservatism is the winning hand. What better way to prevent abortion than cutting out the government subsidies for them on the basis that we simply can't afford it? It could not but be a more successful strategy than the past 40 years have been. Schools can't be controlled by Marxists if they are privatized, and kids might actually learn something. People will be motivated to work without an endless stream of welfare to support them, and so on.
Also, we don't have a choice. We have to deal with our budget situation, and not on a ten year plan, we need to deal with it now because there is a very real risk of imminent collapse, even before the election. If we do choose to ignore it then there will be a hard stop and the government will lose the ability to control events at all (which may very well end up being the cure for its excess).
We can't sustain what we've been doing, the debt-fueled binge in which we've been living. Every life saved from abortion... owes north of $183,000 on taking its first breath. The obscene practice of heaping debt upon the unborn is one of the most serious moral ills afflicting this country today, and the spending that allowing that practice allows enables the government to poke its nose in a whole lot of places it has no right to be, and doing things that it has no right to do... like running guns to Mexican drug cartels, or putting out $14 trillion of credit to a group of organizations that by any honest accounting were long ago failed institutions, or putting together a hideously invasive and expensive socialist health care scheme, or regulating energy production out of existence, or a million other things it does to mess with people for no good end.
The situation is immediate and critical. Even if Obama could be impeached swiftly, we'd just have Biden in the wings. We need to clamp down on spending in the House and put forth candidates who really understand the economics of the situation in order to fix it.