The Tea Party Terrorists

The recent tone that the left has taken towards the Tea Party is distressing, but it belies a deep realization on their part.

During the debt ceiling debate, Democrats started referring to Republicans who were allied with the Tea Party as radicals, extremists, even terrorists.  Of course, this is the same party that decided to refer to the actual terrorists as freedom fighters, so who the hell knows what they are really talking about.  Oh, wait, we do know what Willis is talkin' 'bout: scare voters away from the Tea Party.

We have known that the debt ceiling was getting ready to boil over and burn us for a long time.  When the Dems controlled the Executive and Legislative branches, it didn't matter - they were drafting major spending bills in secret, passing them through dubious methods and jamming all sorts of garbage through, with nary a care towards the economy.  In fact, Harry Reid and Co. haven't passed a Budget in over 2 years, so that probably illustrates just how much thought and attention they put towards their fiscal responsibilities.  Anyway, the left would have you believe that a handful of Tea Partiers were responsible for bringing the country to the brink of...well, let's detour for a moment before finishing that thought.

They told us that Aug 3 was the deadline for DEFAULT, until we learned that it wasn't.  Turns out that DEFAULT is based on decisions by the Executive to not pay our debts, and that we certainly had enough money and cash flow to pay our creditors...we just wouldn't be able to pay our creditors AND  meet our domestic expenditures.  Gee, seems like that might not have been such a problem if we had implemented a budget.  Then, Timmy "Why Do I still Have A Job?" Geithner turned from his gloom and doom tour of the networks to explain that what we are really trying to avoid is a downgrade in our credit rating, before assuring us that there is NO CHANCE that our credit rating would be downgraded.  The White House was telling Wall Street that we would never fail to meet our debts and to not worry about the US defaulting.  So, to recap: we weren't going to default and therefore there was no chance that our credit rating would be adversely impacted.  Do we still have stocks?  I mean the old-fashion kind where you clamp a guy between some boards by his neck and hands so that the community can come down and laugh at him and throw things at him?  I think Tim Geithner deserves to spend a loooong time in one of those.

Returning from our detour...it seems we were brought to the brink of nothing, or to the brink of the inevitable.  Either way, it is ludicrous to suggest that a handful of congressmen  - most of whom are freshmen - got us to that point last weekend.  It was probably the rest of Congress.

But now we have the left calling these folks terrorists, and MSNBC's current in-house dolt, Martin Bashir,  (whom you may recall suggested that Palin be arrested for violating US Flag Code) recently brought a psychologist who is an expert on addiction onto his show to discuss the collective psychology of the Tea Partiers in Congress.  This was his learned contribution to the meme that the Tea Party is chock full of crazies.  Meanwhile, Congressman Wu remains at large, and I must have missed the show when Anthony Weiner was psychoanalyzed.

All of this rhetoric appears to be ineffective in rehabilitating support for the President.  Obama's numbers continue to founder - I suspect that they probably won't go much lower, but it doesn't matter because he has lost the middle/independents.  Instead this talk merely shows that the left is out of ideas on how to counter the Tea Party.  By resorting to the accusation that people are against the President solely out of racial bias is them scraping the bottom of the barrel.  How do you win back voters who are dissatisfied with your brand of leadership and your vision (more accurately, people who perceive a lack of leadership and vision) when you dismiss them broadly as racists?  I guess we'll see next November.

The attempt to paint the Tea Party as terrorists seems to be failing.  The only people left in that church is the choir.  I think that the newest MSNBC commercial for Ed Schultz' show tells it best; the ad shows Ed sitting at the counter in a diner trying to sound reasonable about things.  The various camera angles show that Ed is alone in the diner, talking either to himself or presumably to the poor bastard stuck being the counter who is his captive audience.  His words are reaching nobody.