Teed Off

This post is a response to a wide variety of statements that have been made about the Tea Party as well as responses to my column.

Conservatives in the Tea Party movement should be happy, they’ve reached Gandhi’s Stage Two of non-Violent Activism:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Currently, conservatives are being mocked. Andrew Sullivan calls the tea parties a Temper Tantrum. The far left, well versed in the language of perversity, is even tagging the conservatives with teh term “tea bag” which it views as a private obscene joke. Note to Conservatives, don’t use “tea bag” in reference to anything.

Then on Idaho’s most popular blog, I found the following statement from a a liberal blogger, who wrote:

“ They are quaking at boogeyman. Were the Dem’s really this bad about Bush, seeing evil in every word and breath? Secondly, I think our forefathers would be a little ashamed. They protested actual oppression – this political stunt is simply a weak form of parody.”

Actually, no. There’s no comparison between Democrats under Bush and Republicans under Obama.

When we start writing screenplays and novels about assassinating the President, and when the assassination of the President becomes fodder for conservative talk show hosts skits, then you can start thinking about making comparisons.

The left attacked the President’s daughters. We had commenters on major blogs calling for the French Revolution, which ended in the bloody death of thousands, and we had Idaho liberal bloggers cheering it on.

We had people hoping not that Bush’s tax cuts failed, but that American soldiers would be defeated abroad to prove their defeatist theories about in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Another question I’ve gotten out there is, “Where were you people during the Bush Administration?”  “There was a high deficit back then.”  I wonder whether people who say that were reading my blog and other conservative blogs that went after the pork barrelers in Congress. There was Porkbusters, there was Senator Tom Coburn and Rep. Jeff Flake who have been consistent on this for years.

Many conservatives did do something about the overspending: Passive aggressive behavior. They stopped giving money to the party, they stopped working for the party, and in many cases stopped voting for the party. This didn’t work out so well.

Even beyond that, Obama represents an acceleration of everything. The Congressional Budget Office claims the deficit over the next ten years will be $9.6 trillion, President Obama swears on a stack of Bibles it’ll only be $7.3 trillion.  Either way, it’s huge, way beyond the Bush years.

Take on top of this that President Obama is proposing major changes that will devastate our health care, increase the costs of energy for every household with cap and trade. It’s as if under President Bush, we were going downhill at 35 MPH, and now we’ve very quickly sped up to 105 MPH.

And then there’s an arrogant and haughty attitude from the Administration has eroded his public good will in record breaking time. According to Rasmussen,  On Inauguration Day, the hard-core strongly disapprove number for the President was 16%, it is now 32%, nearly as many as Strongly Approve of the President’s performance.

And now we get the Department of Homeland Security Report on right wing extremism, which unlike reports on left wing extremists which name  specific groups and incidents to specifically identify which groups are problematic such as the Animal Liberation Front, President Obama’s Homeland Security Department couldn’t be bothered with such details.

Instead, they issued a report that tarred most opponents of the Obama Administration as potential terrorists, including our returned veterans. The DHS report seems to take a, “Tar them all and let God” sort them out approach.

This is illustrative of the Obama bait and switch, and how the problems that will lead to come out to Tea Parties did not begin under Obama, but he is making them worse every day.