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On the Left, the View of the Tea Party Gets a Little More Nuanced

Baby Steps

By: Brian Faughnan (Diary)  |  October 6th, 2010 at 06:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Who says the Left will never understand the Tea Party movement? Sure, they may have a long way to go, but they are making progress.

Take for example, this new ‘documentary’ from… some liberal activist. You can watch the preview if you have a masochist streak, or you can just accept my word that it’s another hack job aimed at grassroots activists – one that will make a nice rental for some sad left-wing coffee parties, starting on November 3. They’ll pop this in the DVD player ($14.99 – with free shipping!) and console each other with tales of how they could never hope to compete against the power of the Right Wing Machine. Because you see, the whole movie is about how the Tea Party movement is an astroturf operation. They have fancy charts and everything, which prove that this was put together by a bunch of shady billionaires. (Remember that projection is one of the signature habits of the professional left.)

But here’s where they are taking baby steps toward the truth: they no longer believe that the millions of people who have come out to tea parties are paid. Right there at the 1:40 mark, they mention that those millions of activists ‘are being secretly guided to suit the agendas of America’s corporate elites.’ And again at 1:55, they say that the people ‘are very much unaware of the front group,’ and of how ‘their thoughts are being manipulated.’ Now that may sound like an ignorant comment designed to soothe wounded egos on the Left, but nevertheless it represents progress.

Recall: it was not all that long ago that the Left seemed to think most of the Tea Party movement were paid political operatives or agents of the Republican party. Now some on the Left have graduated millions of tea partiers out of the ranks of ‘paid hacks,’ and into the ranks of ‘well-intentioned dupes and pawns.’ It may not be much, but it’s progress. At this rate, it might only take a few more years to convince them that this is a coherent movement, one that can change America and bring the nation back to its roots.

Ah… who am I kidding.

COMMENTS

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  • Marcus_Traianus

    Hardly, the work of paid, professionals and corporate types;

    Meeting last October in the back room of a fishing-tackle shop in Ashland, Va., Ms. Radtke and the heads of a dozen other groups took the first steps to form a statewide tea-party federation. With each of the groups leery of losing its autonomy, they kept the organization loose?formal meetings once a quarter, conference calls once every two weeks.

    By December they had a board, a set of leaders, and a mission: to pass legislation against the Obama administration’s health-care overhaul, which was then struggling forward in Congress.

    Maybe they got free nightcrawlers or something? They had to somehow get paid- right?

  • Next93

    First, it was barely-disguised amusement. when the movement got too big to shrug off, they tried to write us off as a fringe, then a DANGEROUS fringe, then as a dangerous, racists fringe. When it got too big to call a fringe, they tried to claim that it didn’t really exist, but was actually an astroturf operation of the VWRC.

    The latest, sad strategy seems to be co-opting. I recently read a piece that claimed that the TEA partiers aren’t *really* against taxes in general, just “unfair taxes” (there’s a nugget of truth there, but what I’m unhappy about isn’t the 5% that pay 80% of the taxes, it’s the 40% who pay nothing, use more government services, and keep voting themselves raises).

    I just don’t understand how people who think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country can’t seem to get their collective head around the concept of “STOP SPENDING MONEY!”

    • aesthete
    • realvoice2010

      Sadly, the democrats and liberal republicans and those that support them are always looking for not only a free lunch but free everything at the expense of all of the rest who are working or seriously, in this depression, looking to be productive again. All of those “moochers” care only about themselves and their perverted social agendas. They can be compared to having a bunch of people who you thought were your friends stay at your house, totally at your expernse, and never actually leave. Well, hopefully, if we at least unite in our votes, THEY WILL NOT ONLY HAVE TO LEAVE BUT WILL WITHER AWAY. Well this is only a brief fantasy because statists, globalists, communists, anarchists, socialists, and the devil itself, will never leave. We must constantly kick them out.

    • realvoice2010

      Sadly, the democrats and liberal republicans and those that support them are always looking for not only a free lunch but free everything at the expense of all of the rest who are working or seriously, in this depression, looking to be productive again. All of those ?moochers? care only about themselves and their perverted social agendas. They can be compared to having a bunch of people who you thought were your friends stay at your house, totally at your expernse, and never actually leave. Well, hopefully, if we at least unite in our votes, THEY WILL NOT ONLY HAVE TO LEAVE BUT WILL WITHER AWAY. Well this is only a brief fantasy because statists, globalists, communists, anarchists, socialists, and the devil itself, will never leave. We must constantly kick them out.

  • johnt

    Front cover of the estimable[?] Time magazine. We could see fantasy links between this so called militia revival and the Tea Party.
    Upon whose heels you will then hear the inevitable “these people scare me”, from a supposed man in the street who cleans the restrooms at DNC hdqrters , when or if they are cleaned.
    Who knows what else will follow from the smear. we do have Janet Napolitano on watch here after all.

    Leftists breath what and when they are told to breath by the msm, they are completely in thrall to a type of people gross in their ignorance & twisted in their antagonism. And they rave about manipulation !
    We are looking at psychosis here.

  • Green_Lantern

    It’s “Right Wing *Hate* Machine”.

  • BA Cyclone

    I’d much rather have them keep thinking the TEA conservatives are sheeple lemmings with no real political power (certainly not staying power) right up until 2013…or later.

  • jaykali

    Bc most likely the worst thing would be if the Tea party ever becomes irrelevant. The TP movement is a major threat and so the Left is pulling out the stops to try to stop it. They’ve tried every kind of attack and it has only made democrats look desperate and out of touch.

    I am so geared up for November. Up until November 2nd or 3rd or whenever it’s still all ‘theoretical’ that the American public has turned against the Liberal ideology governing the country. On that day for reals we’ll actually get to point to something and say once and for all – you have been rejected. For 2 years Liberals have had the chance to prove they can govern and as we all correctly predicted it was a horrible failure.

    Now the rest of the country is finally catching up. Welcome back America.

  • renny

    since Kent State, so they had a hard time believing shopkeepers, grandparents, housewives,and anyone middle class could be out marching somewhere.

    See, Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, a la 1980s, it takes the (anti-) hero half the novel to realize the right reverent (a clone of Sharpton) produces the same demonstrators all over NYC whenever the :”issue” calls for protest. He even notes eventually that the protesters lay around and smoke pot until the news cameras arrive, and then they struggle to their feet to carry their pre-printed signs and shout, “No justice, no peace!” for the evening news.

    The left just thought it OWNED the streets, How dare a bunch of retirees and veterans would take over lefty territory when their messiah had been elected and the US had finally been punished with a minority regime installed in DC. Who woulda thunk.

    • etlib

      As always, they accuse the right of behaving and thinking like they do. They find it impossible to believe that people would act honestly and with conviction and on their own.

  • http://www.spanishamericans.webs.com luismagno

    The American nation-state can survive socio-politically only under an Ethnocultural Amendment which sweeps away the nation’s debris from the past stemming from the triad of original sin (genocide, slavery, ethnicide).

    The Ethnocultural Amendment makes all ethnoraces ethnoculturally sovereign and ethnoracially equal. The European American demographic and electoral ethnoracial majority would, in the short, medium and long terms, be the principle beneficiary of the Ethnocultural Amendment.

    The Ethnocultural Amendment: No citizen shall be denied or deprived of the right to an ethnoracial identity; no citizen shall be denied or deprived of the right to belong to an ethnoracial group; no ethnoracial group shall be denied or deprived of the right to ethnocultural sovereignty.

    Luis Magno
    A sovereign American citizen

    • dambama

      “The Ethnocultural Amendment: No citizen shall be denied or deprived of the right to an ethnoracial identity; no citizen shall be denied or deprived of the right to belong to an ethnoracial group; no ethnoracial group shall be denied or deprived of the right to ethnocultural sovereignty.”

      This is leftist bullshiit if I’ve ever read progressive bullshiit.

      Go away and leave us alone!

    • http://theminorityreportblog.com Repair_Man_Jack

      is if you whore yourself out.

    • timchgo9

      Thank you, for deciding to come on here, and in your smug sense of superiority, decide to unload a pantload of left-wing pseudo-intellectual garbage.

      “Ethnocultural”… sheehs who comes up with this stuff? Is there a committee that sits around and comes up with new “intellectual” sounding words? The above smacks of another garbage line of claptrap that says nothing, but sounds good. In essence what you are saying, Luis, is that every American has the right to belong to whatever cultural, or ethnic group they wish…..Ummm.. yeah, I thought we were already doing that….. I don’t think anyone has been prosecuted for calling themselves an “African-American”, “Polish-American” or any other kind of hyphenated American.

      Do you people really think you sound smart when you talk like this? I daresay sir, you sound less than intellectual.. in fact, you sound rather feckless, and to be honest, pusillanimous as well.

      Take your little pseudo-intellectual spiel and try it out on those whol will sit there and “ooh” and “aah” over what they perceive as intelligence.. it’s not working around here. Perhaps your like minded friends would be impressed with that mass of empty phrases, and hot air, but I for one, am not.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      Wow the careful phrasing of language in this reminds me of a CPSU functionary’s careful efforts to stick to the party line or else be purged.

    • MF
      • http://www.spanishamericans.webs.com luismagno

        First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. ~ Mahatma Gandhi.

  • dambama

    They can’t believe the TEA Partier s are not paid operatives, because this is how they get their people to show up.

    These people are loathsome.

    • texasgalt

      People can be that way. Some will even use the most vulnerable to make a point.

      • timchgo9

        at my son’s high school just recently. The organizers of the protest were from some left wing group (he didn’t remember which one) . Curious, and driven by a constant need to be a pot-stirrer and a smart-ass, my son approached one of the organizers, at the specified location at the school, and asked about the protest… She told him where to sign up, what time to be there, and he would get $15.00 to march and $25.00 if he carried a sign, in addition, she stated that she could get him class credit as well. So.. he told her he was working the day of the protest, and wasn’t interested. She replied that she could make it more worth his while, and that “lots of cute girls were going to be there too.”

        He then engaged the woman in an debate, not about the nature of the protest, but rather, why they feel they have to pay for protesters to show up…. She couldn’t answer him.

        I don’t know what the protest was for, or where it was, or, if it even happened. But, my son says that this is kind of common around the school, he has been asked twice before if he would participate in a protest, and it is always with the promise of it being compensated in some way for his participation.

  • jcmooreusnret

    $15 to protest, $25 to carry a protest sign, lots of pretty girls, class credit. Ah! The American (leftist) Way.