Strange brew: The Coffee Party
My latest piece at The Daily Caller:
In a tacit admission of the Tea Party’s success, backers of the wildly unpopular big-government, liberty-crushing policies of the Obama administration are brewing up their own movement—the Coffee Party. It all allegedly started with a random musing in a post by Annabel Park on Facebook in which she called for an alternative to the Tea Party movement.
Read more here.
Brooks’ Strange Brew
New York Times token conservative David Brooks always has an interesting take on the tea party movement (See his previous piece on the movement where he contrasts tea partiers with the "educated class.")
Mr. Brooks' most recent reading of the tea leaves is equally...intriguing.
Take Brooks' summary of the tea party movement which he contorts to fit his cute narrative comparing tea partiers to the 60's radicals of the New Left:
The people we loosely call the Tea Partiers also want to destroy the establishment. They also want to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.
Brooks goes on to characterization of the tea party movement as preoccupied with black helicopter theories:
In its short life, the Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters.
I'm curious to know how many tea parties Brooks has gone to and how many tea partiers he's interviewed in order to form the opinion that informs his commentary. Based on my experience organizing, participating in, and documenting the tea party movement, Brooks' generalizations of the tea party movement bears no correlation with reality. The tea party movement is in fact a mainstream, grassroots coalition of Americans concerned with the direction of this nation. Brooks would likely draw a different conclusion were he to look beyond the pages of his own paper. Sadly, Mr. Brooks appears to suffer from the same delusion as many of his colleagues: that the reporting on the pages of the Times truly is an accurate portrayal of "all the news that's fit to print."
CPAC This Week
I'm excited and honored to be attending and participating in CPAC 2010 beginning this Thursday.
I'll be participating in the following panel:
Thursday, February 18th - 11:45am
"Saving Freedom One Patriot at a Time"
Marriott Ballroom
Ginni Thomas, LibertyCentral.org
Dana Loesch, St. Louis Tea Party
Jenny Beth Martin, Tea Party Patriots
Moderator: Andrew Moylan, NTU
Afterwards, I'll be signing copies of A New American Tea Party in the main exhibit hall. Stop on by if you're at CPAC!
If you aren't already coming, be sure to check out the impressive agenda here. Online registration is closed, but you can show up and register for a few different packages.
The Tea Party Nation
Great op-ed in the Sacramento Bee this weekend on the recent tea party convention, the media spin of same, and the real principles - and people - behind the tea party movement.
Writes Ben Boychuk:
What tea parties represent is a revival of good, old-fashioned constitutionalism and the idea that government needs to get back to basics. There is a great yearning for a return to first principles. Millions of Americans, but perhaps not yet a majority, would very much like to restore the principles of the American Founding Fathers to their rightful and pre-eminent place in our political life.
Read the full piece here.
SOTU Wish: Stop Talking
In my debut piece at The Daily Caller, I outline why Americans are so frustrated with President Obama just one year after his inauguration: the rhetoric and the reality just don't match up. President Obama has broken the trust of the American people too many times in such a short window of time. It's time for less talk and more (substantive) action.
Below, Paul Bedard at US News & World Report has a great wrap-up of the growing discontent across party lines throughout the nation.
Puzzling Media Attention Re. One Tea Party
The New York Times and other outlets that haven’t given the enormously popular and politically potent tea party movement the time of day over the past year are suddenly quite interested in covering it.
Many political and media elites wrote the movement off as “fringe” – an irrelevant, small cadre of disgruntled right-wingers not worthy of their attention. As I told the Washington Times, know that they smell a hint of controversy, they’re suddenly quite intrigued.
Many in the media are quick to point out the missteps of this one group in TN throwing a convention with Sarah Palin as signs that the movement is in trouble. They see one event, one organization hitting bumps in the road and conclude from there that there is a significant rift in the movement.
It is particularly curious given that these very journalists, commentators, and politicians have to date characterized the movement as directionless and leaderless. The former has been proven untrue beyond doubt in the wake of the election of Scott Brown in my bluer than blue home state of Massachusetts. The later is true: this isn’t a top down movement by any means, and I argue that it doesn’t need a leader. This movement’s power comes from the millions of concerned Americans that constitute it. The movement rejects the creepy idolatry exhibited in the past presidential campaign. It represents an important shift away from partisanship and personalities to principles.
If only there was one book out there journos could take for a spin that clearly articulates the history of and principles behind this powerful grassroots movement…
The bottom line is, if millions of people getting involved in the political process through protests, town halls, and marches over the past year weren’t newsworthy, the attention given to a couple thousand in TN is…curious. Maybe I’m just being cynical.
The Electoral Counterrevolution
Last night Scott Brown clinched the MA Senate race with a solid 5 point lead. More from the good folks at the Boston Herald here.
This is a huge victory for the tea party and for the millions of Americans the recognize the threat of ever-expanding government exemplified in policies like ObamaCare, the bailouts, cap and trade, and the rest of the President's radical agenda.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco summed it up best before the final tally. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:
"Regardless of the outcome ... this should be a gigantic wake-up call to the Democratic Party - that we're not connecting with the needs, the aspirations and the desires of real people right now," said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
It gets even better:
...But Newsom said the Republican resurgence in Massachusetts suggests "there's real intensity and fervor out there, as represented by the Tea Party" activists expressing anger at government spending and at job losses.
"This is real," he said. "At our own peril, we dismiss these tea parties as ... some sort of isolated extremism. ... It's not."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
A New American Tea Party
BigGovernment.com Posts
- The President Gets Dirty
- Throwing Stones: The Left’s Hypocrisy Problem
- Real Health Care Solutions – Letting O Know
- The Leftist Bullies
- Obamanomics: An Advanced Course in Big Government in the Age of Obama
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Terror Trials in the Big Apple
- Ratner Family Ties: ACORN and Justice Department Plot Thickens
The Daily Caller Articles
- Squashing dissent with slander and libel
- Strange brew: The Coffee Party
- A civic reawakening: The Tea Party movement
- SOTU wishes: A lot less talk, a lot more action
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Hope for Change
The partisans in Washington that recently jammed through ObamaCare despite widespread public opposition may very well loose their jobs come November, but that's little comfort to Americans concerned about the legislation's long-term detrimental impact on the nation.
Fortunately, there's an old piece of paper meant to keep the nation's leaders in check even after they've hopped over every procedural hurdle and bent every rule to get their way regardless of the will and interest of the people: the United States Constitution.
The efforts of a dozen or so state Attorneys General and legislatures to mount opposition to ObamaCare has been couched by many cynical commentators as pointless, legally impotent wheel spinning. The Wall Street Journal ran a heartening piece last week that paints a much more hopeful picture by taking a look at the implications of some of the more egregious parts of the bill, such as the insurance mandate, on the role and power of the federal government:
Click here for the full piece.