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The Wall Street Journal is currently displaying “A Tea Party Manifesto” at the top of its website, and this thing includes a declaration of war on the Republican Party.
The tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it.
After that relatively bold war-whoop, most of the rest of it is just about the sort of anti-government hate-speak that you might expect.
By definition, government is the means by which citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily. Like pay high taxes. Or redistribute tax dollars to bail out the broken, bloated pension systems of state government employees. Or purchase, by federal mandate, a government-defined health-insurance plan that is unaffordable, unnecessary or unwanted.
By definition! It couldn’t be more obvious! Only a fool would dispute these self-evident truths!
All of this is already familiar, and none of it differs much from the Republican platform in every election for the last 30 years.
What’s more or less original about teabaggers in general and the Wall Street Journal “manifesto” in particular is a fantastic claim that all of it arose spontaneously out of the legitimate indignation of honest citizens, united from the ground up by their adherence to the American values of “individual freedom, fiscal responsibility and limited government.”
The many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics. Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds.
Decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge.
Let the leaders be the activists who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues.
In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is considered radical.
Activists! From the ground up! Common sense! Only a fool would dispute these self-evident truths!
But unfortunately this beautiful and apparently spontaneous harmony of all honest citizens is immediately discombobulated by a screeching dissonance!
The rebellion’s name derives from the glorious rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who in February 2009 called for a new “tea party” from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
What?
I thought it all began “around kitchen tables” and “at weekly book clubs!”
And now you tell me it was christened on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in a crowd of zillionaire traders, by a network TV reporter?
So it isn’t exactly surprising that the “manifesto” of so many humble activists is proclaimed by a billionaire’s newspaper, and proclaimed by none other than…
Richard Keith “Dick” Armey, the former Majority Leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives and immediately thereafter a $750,000 per annum lobbyist for DLA Piper, representing such humble clients as General Motors, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and more than 100 of the largest corporations in America!
So the next time a crowd of suckers gets together for a spontaneous demonstration they heard about on Fox News and CNBC…
They can bring along the full length version of Dick Armey’s Tea Party Manifesto, from HarperCollins…
…which is also owned by Rupert Murdoch, like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News and most of the other strings that jerk the tea-suckers around like so many pitiful puppets.
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This entire diary was also posted as a comment under Dick Armey’s article in the Wall Street Journal.
Take a step back and we see that ‘conservatism’ always been a bunch of BS. Take another step back a realize that we are witnessing the collapse of a world-view in real time.
The end of a world-view is an ugly thing: imagine what happened when the tiny brain of a dinosaur finally got the message that it’s tail was gone and it has already lost too much blood. The trashing and bellowing was quite the sight! What we are witnessing is the thrashing and bellowing coming from the reptile brains of the brainwashed masses.
As always the carrion birds of wealthy and the media are swooping in to claim the flesh of the true believers, eaten alive by those to whom they entrusted their rights and responsibilities.
I’d be happy to let them thrash and bellow on their own, but in doing so they destroy those things that us sane human beings have built and enjoy.