Tea Parties: They just don't get it.
Even some people who are sympathetic to the idea of lowering taxes and shrinking the bureaucracy don't understand them. I think it's because these people suffer from the "beltway" mentality.
Bruce Bartlett is a Forbes.com columnist. He has written a book titled Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Mr. Bartlett recently wrote a piece for The New Majority about what he calls the "tax tea parties." In this piece, he writes:
In my opinion, these tea parties had little, if anything, to do with current or projected tax levels.I happen to agree with that opinion. However, Mr. Bartlett goes on to conclude that the protests were simply partisan Republican gatherings, and were designed to increase ratings for Fox News and radio hosts.
They just don't get it.
Maybe it's our fault. Maybe because of the nature of the protests--that they were real grass-roots, locally organized efforts, with no celebrity national spokesman--they just didn't pay attention. Or they got mixed messages. There were, after all, several themes to the signs even in the relatively small Carson City, NV protest.
For me, and for many others, we have just reached a point where we are sick and tired of the Statist Bureaucrats making plans and decisions about how we are to live our lives, and inserting their out-of-touch plans into our personal business. I did hear a very few folks in the media expressing this; Glenn Beck springs to mind. But it seems they were drowned out (if you can believe that) by the myriad voices intent on ascribing tax-only or partisan motives to our protests.
They just don't get it.
What's my point? I guess that maybe we just need to consolidate our message. I think that the TaxDayTeaParty.com website was a great resource for those gatherings. It is associated with the Don't Go Movement (follow Eric Odom on Twitter), and also Smart Girl Politics (Founded by Stacy Mott and Teri Christoph).
Maybe next time, they'll get it.
No, they don't get it because they don't want to get it. When you begin your thinking by labeling an entire segment of citizens as "right wing extremists" who live in "flyover country" and decide that their views are uneducated and merely the mindless parroting of some "celebrity's" (Rush, Hannity, Beck) moneymaking diatribe well where can you go from there? If you have utter contempt and disrespect for a multitude of of Americans' ideas, opinions and arguments AND you also believe that those who agree with you are wise, humanitarian, thoughtful, educated, compassionate, nonpartisan, god-like beings who only care about bringing justice to an unjust world you begin with distortion bereft of facts and the conclusions you reach are predetermined.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not with the participants in the Teaparty demonstrations the message, though stated in many creative, clever, intelligent and even humorous ways was very clear: government is expanding rapidly and must be compressed, defunded and restored to its proper role. The problem is those who have accepted the resonsibility to report events objectively have become contemptuous of the people they ostensibly serve. The servant has decided they are above the employer, they have co-opted the means of information and are spewing their own vain imaginations as fact.
We therefore have a twfold mission for the Teaparty Movement; reform government by replacing any member who does not hold to the tenents of our Constitution AND eradicate the elitist, discriminatory, biased, bigoted, autocratic, repressive,authoritarian, broadcast and print media who have opressed and misled the American public for decades. We must use the power of our vote to replace the Unconstituional Members of government and we must use the power of our pocketbooks to relegate the opinions of the elitist media to a their proper place of irrelevance.