Communists Represent the Middle Class?

Daniel Foster at NRO reports on a "confederacy of liberal groups" who plan to hold a rally in response to Glenn Beck's. They claim to represent "America’s embattled middle class.”

There are some mainstream left-leaning groups (the SEUI, the American Federation of Teachers, and others). What's more interesting, though, are the groups the confederacy fails to mention. It reveals this effort as just so much, very stale, communist bombast.

• Chicago Democratic Socialists of America
• Code Pink
• Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
• Communist Party USA
• Democratic Socialists of America
• International Socialist Organization

Yawn... It's clear that Progressives are out of ammunition. That won't stop them from initiating kamikaze raids, of course, but they officially now got nothin'. When you align yourself with groups like this, you've lost the middle class for sure.

More Tea Party Smears

An editorial at the Seattle Post Intelligencer titled A Mad Hatters' Tea Party? begins thus:

A year after it turned Congress' August town meetings into battle zones, the Tea Party movement is battling for power -- in the Republican Party, and the nation -- in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Note the subtle allusion to a non-incident in which a single individual (ill-advisedly but legally, mind you) carried a gun to a townhall meeting. The story doesn't mention, of course, that his behavior was roundly condemned in Tea Party circles.

It's mostly downhill from there.

In outlining the Tea Party's views (as if there were such a thing as the Tea Party), the penultimate paragraph states:

ROUGH JUSTICE: "How many of you have watched the movie Lonesome Dove? What happened to Jake when he ran with the wrong crowd? He got hung. And that's what I want to do with Patty Murray." -- a speaker, name never disclosed, at Asotin Fairbrounds Tea Party rally.

This could have been said by a plant, by a journalist, by a lone whacko, by anybody. The author doesn't know, and probably doesn't care.

And people say objective journalism is dead.

There are a few quotes mixed in that actually convey a flavor of real Tea Party sentiments, though the author obviously intends them to be damning. For example,

NEW DEAL: On Franklin D. Roosevelt: "His policies stripped the free market system and actually prolonged the Depression." Glenn Beck.

Careful, there, Mr. Connelly. You might encourage someone to look into this and find it's perfectly true.

Most interesting, though, is what's missing from this list of 18 items: there's absolutely no mention of the essentials that characterize nearly every Tea Party organization around the country: the desire for more liberty, an advocacy of limited government constrained by the Constitution, and keeping the government more out of citizen's pocketbooks. As usual, it's what Progressive journalists refuse to talk about that's the most important.

No, it wouldn't do for them to recognize that the Tea Party's leaders are not people, but a set of ideas. If they must reach for leaders, they might look to long-dead men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Those are the leaders whose ideas are driving the Tea Party movement, as is plainly evident by many of the signs carried at actual rallies where Joel Connelly would almost certainly not be caught dead. (That, after all, would require actual investigative journalism.)

Well, one thing is clear. Progressives are running more scared than I've seen them in my entire life. Reagan during his candidacy didn't get this kind of low-life distortions (though some statements were close). You'd have to go back to the Big Lie about Goldwater's wanting to nuke the world to reach this depth.

The author does state at the end one true thing: "Will these folks populate the corridors of power? We'll know in November."

Indeed we will. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."

The NAACP, Wrong From the Start

Andrew Breitbart is a very clever fellow. He's lined up a dozen credentialed commentators of African descent to condemn the NAACP's recent labeling of the Tea Party movement as racist. [Big Government, July 15.] Many of the articles, like Deroy Murdock's, are outstanding. Still, most of the writers make the same mistake. They fall all over themselves to assert something along the lines of "while the NAACP once did great work..."

Nothing could be further from the truth. The NAACP has always been a bunch of collectivists and statists. It's true that some members of the NAACP fought real evils, sometimes risking life and limb. But the name alone is enough to demonstrate that the organization has been collectivist of the racial variety from its beginning.

The organization was founded in 1909 by, among others, W.E.B Du Bois. The communist Du Bois opposed Booker Washington's efforts at social integration of the races. (He also wrote: "Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.") The group soon attracted notable Progressives like Jane Addams and John Dewey.

They might have started an organization to stand up for individual rights for everyone and, if desired, simply focus for a time on Jim Crow laws in the South and the like. They chose otherwise because the leaders of the NAACP were just as collectivistic as their enemies (not surprisingly given the presence of individuals like Dewey). It has always engaged in identity politics.

(In theory, the organization is for all 'colored' people, but has always focused chiefly on blacks. They initially called themselves the National Negro Committee.)

Today, descendants of Africans — many of whose ancestors never saw a moment's slavery or even American prejudice — frequently get preference in hiring and college admission. They often get away with the most outrageous statements simply in virtue of their skin color, words that would see any descendant of a Northern European lose his job in a heartbeat.

It's long been widely recognized — and just as widely ignored — that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a host of other American descendants of Africans have played the race card to fame and riches. It's ignored because three generations of Progressives cleared the way for them to say anything they like without consequences. Such is the inevitable consequence of treating individuals as morally significant solely in virtue of membership in a group, i.e. of collectivism. It is Hegel's legacy.

Well, with the latest NAACP announcement, the hustlers have finally crossed the line and are seeing a backlash. They know there's not a shred of evidence that the Tea Party movement has any appreciable number of, and certainly no sympathy whatever for, racists. If they did, it would be all over the New York Times, CBS, and every other major outlet.

In fact, the evidence in the other direction is stark and overwhelming, and not just in the Tea Parties. Today, almost no one is denied a job, a home, an education, or even friendship on the basis of race. Sure, racists still exist. There will always be a few troglodytes around, even in the best of countries. But there simply is no large-scale, institutionalized racism in America any more, except against the descendants of Europeans (and even that is usually minor).

So, unlike some, I'm pretty happy that the NAACP finally outed itself in an unmistakable way. It's belatedly getting the tongue lashing it has long deserved. Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of racists.



[P.S. Given everything I've written over the years, the following should go without saying. But, being a realist, I know I have to add this clarification.

No racist son of a bitch should now feel free to jump into the comment section and start banging on 'darkies'... or yellowies or brownies or Jews (or Irishmen, Poles, or Italians to cite three more groups who endured a great deal of prejudice in the early 20th century, never reported today).

I am not your ally. I am not your friend. You are just as collectivist as the NAACP and you should go to hell just as fast as they. I hold with a statement imputed to Andrew Klavan: the good thing about racism is it lets you know clearly who the scumbags are.]

Brother, You Said It

"Were the tea partiers rabid left-wing professors instead of patriotic Americans, they would receive tenure and places of honor at highbrow luncheons. Were they veterans of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, they would serve as nostalgic subjects for a Time retrospective.

Were Tea Partiers "demonizing" the American government in the deepest sense -- teaching the young to view the Founding Fathers with patronizing contempt and the documents they wrote as reactionary relics to be replaced by a "living Constitution" -- they would have jobs in the Obama administration."

- George Neumayr, From Woodstock to Civility Commissions, American Spectator, April 22

The 'Real' Obama

William Voegeli, contributing editor for the Claremont Review of Books and author of Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State, has written an interesting essay ostensibly on the Tea Party movement. It's somewhat all over the map, veering often from that theme then coming back, but it contains many interesting thoughts.

One of the side alleys was this:

The question, again, is whether candidate Obama was dim-witted or cold-blooded. Did he really not understand— was there no economist on his campaign staff to help him understand— that all the expensive new things he promised government would do could not possibly be reconciled to his promises to exempt 97% of the population from any new tax increases?

Or was he agnostic all along about his solemn promises, winking in the mirror and chuckling before going out to intone them to the crowds of supporters who stood, cheered, and wept as they beheld, at last, a politician personifying change they could believe in?

Isn't it interesting that three years after Obama's introduction to the public at large, people are still pondering this question? No doubt, that's a tribute to his skills as a politician. However, that hurrah is akin to praising the talent of a superb hit man: one can stand in awe of the ability, but still condemn the actor.

In any case, it occurred to me that there is a way to resolve this question, by asserting both conclusions. It sounds paradoxical but there's a ready resolution to the dilemma: the nearly ever-present modern-day phenomena of what Rand called "the blank out."

Call it rationalization, call it denial, or what you will. It comes down to much the same thing. Many people can say one thing, 'honestly' believe it for a moment, then say the exact opposite and embrace it with equal fervor. I put 'honest' in scare quotes because this is not the mental habit of a person committed to awareness of reality, the basic feature of genuine honesty. At some level, the person knows they're not facing facts, hence the need for rationalization in the first place.

Sadly, this habit is not confined to Progressives, though they practice it with exceptional eagerness. The overwhelming majority of everyone I observe is chin deep in this practice, in former days confined to a much smaller group and indulged in much less often, or at least on less important matters.

That bit of misanthropy aside, it is one of the foremost features of the current occupant of the Oval Office and it's no surprise. Massive evasion is a must when someone as inappropriately arrogant, thoroughly inept, and fully post-modern as Obama has to deal with real problems. The practical problems his job calls for only serve to call forth more, and more glaring, occasions for it.

Just a hypothesis, of course, but it would go far to explain the puzzle that still puzzles many about the man who was supposed to be so different. Turns out, he's pretty ordinary after all, only more so.

Larry Elder Fisks the Tea Party Critics

Larry Elder has a superb rejoinder to those who accuse Tea Partiers of racism.

An MSNBC reporter at another Tea Party rally actually asked a black man whether he "felt uncomfortable." "No," he laughed. "No, these are my people - Americans."
...
I once appeared on a television show where a black pundit accused former President Ronald Reagan of racism. When I asked for proof, he said that Reagan "was uncomfortable around black people." I replied, "I'm uncomfortable around you. What does that make me?"

I guess that doesn't count 'cause, don't you know, Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas, and thousands of unknown men of African ancestry are just so many Uncle Toms.

Progressives never let blazingly obvious facts get in the way of a good smear.

I Control The Vertical

Those in middle age or later should remember the TV series that opened by claiming it had taken control of your set. (At the end, they politely gave it up.) Given my thoughts of late, something like that may have happened in a doctor's office down South.

A Florida urologist has gone Galt in a manner of speaking.

"If you voted for Obama ... seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years."

Weird, in a wonderful way. This is pretty much what I fantasized the other day every hospital, doctor, and insurance company in the country should do after the passage of HR 3590. I hope it catches on.

It is, in fact, the sort of thing I've been advocating on multiple blogs that everyone should do vis-a-vis Progressives in general. (I admit that Ayn Rand thought of it long before me.) Just stop trading with them. Restaurateurs should refuse to serve them. Auto repair shops should decline to fix their cars. Realtors should forego selling them homes.

To be sure, there are many practical difficulties with the idea and, of course, it can't be applied consistently. But it would be a great tool in the toolbox, and send a terrific message.

And I promise you can watch whatever you want Friday through Wednesday, provided only that you tune in to The Mentalist on Thursday nights.


[Hat Tip: Doug Bandow at The American Spectator.]

Tea Party Falling Short? Hardly

A truly idiotic 'news' report in Politico tries to insinuate that the Tea Party movement is dead before it even gets rolling.

In Tuesday’s Texas GOP primary, tea party-inspired contenders found themselves blown out in races across the state. Gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, who closely aligned herself with the grass-roots conservative movement, picked up just 19 percent of the vote.

Wow, fancy that. Already a whole year old and only picked up 19 percent of the vote in a state that has been dominated historically by the well-funded, century-and-a-half old Republican Party. Maybe we should all just pick up and go home, adjusting to living peacefully — or at least passively — under the yoke of our statist masters.

Sheesh. The transparent attempt here to depress those striving for freedom is pathetic.

British Inaugurate UK Tea Party

Daniel Hannan, the journalist and MP who became world famous some months ago for his liberty-loving smackdown of the UK National Health Service, is leading the way.

It's an interesting turn of events since many philosophical, cultural, or political trends that occur in America actually have originated in Great Britain.

Best of luck to our British kinsmen in their struggle for freedom.

The Iranian-D.C. Parallels

Has anyone observed how similar the silence downplaying of the mainstream media on the 9/12-Tea Party protests in D.C. is to the recent Iranian post-election news blackouts?

Just sayin'...


Hey, fellas. Ignore this!

Barbara Espinosa, a volunteer with Freedomworks, reports that the organization’s “metered” count of protestors is “more than 450,000.”

"Michelle Malkin reports that Capitol Police are estimating crowd at 1.2 million."

[Hat Tip: Big Hollywood]

Ed Cline on the Tea Party Movement, Then and Now

Following is a speech to be given by Ed Cline, author of Sparrowhawk and a regular contributor to Rule of Reason. Well worth a read or four.

This is an expanded version of my original New Tea Parties post of July 13, and is the text of an address I will give at the Richmond, Virginia, Liberty 101 Tea Party on July 25.

Ladies, gentlemen, Americans: I am here today to shed some light on parallels between the original Tea Party and ours -- and where the parallels stop.

First, some background. On December 16, 1773, Bostonians and other locals roughly dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded three American merchant vessels in the harbor, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver recently arrived from Britain with 342 chests of tea, and tossed the chests into the harbor. The tea nominally belonged to colonial American consignees, by appointment by the British East India Company (two of them sons of the royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson). The Tea Act of 1773 replaced the repealed Townshend Act duties on other commodities, and gave the East India Company a legal monopoly to hire other merchantmen to take the tea to North America.

The three-pence per pound tax remained on the tea. This tea would have been cheaper than the Dutch tea being smuggled into the colonies, even with the tax, which the colonial American consignees were obliged to pay. Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty put pressure on the consignees to not pay the tax and order the tea back to Britain. Governor Hutchinson, however, persuaded the consignees to stand firm. (His salary was derived from import duties and other taxes.) The customs officer refused to allow the vessels to leave the harbor without paying the duty.

The impasse had to be resolved, one way or another. The Crown or the patriots would need to give in. The Crown’s position was the status quo, and inaction. So the Americans took action, the only action open to them if they were to remain loyal to their convictions: they destroyed the tea as a demonstration that they would not pay the tax or submit to arbitrary Crown authority.

Lord North, prime minister, after receiving news of the Boston Tea Party and the actions of Americans in New York and Philadelphia, was faced with a dilemma linked to that authority: Use it, or lose it. He chose to use it, against the advice of some of his subministers, but in timid concordance with the outrage expressed in Parliament. He endorsed the Coercive Acts; that is, he agreed that reason must be answered with force. Of what use was power, if it were not exercised?

Why did the Americans decide to trespass on the three vessels and destroy their tea cargos when not only would they not have to pay the tax, but have cheaper tea, even when its retail price would have reflected a small percentage of the tax? Was it a matter, as some historians claim, of the legal, taxed tea underselling the illegal, smuggled tea? Did the patriots act on emotion, or on principle? Did they know, as apparently Lord North did not, that such an action would set in motion a course of events that would lead to war and independence?

Because the consignees were American, and because none of the colonies was represented in Parliament, it was a matter of taxation without representation. However, it was more than a matter of political principle. It was the application of a moral principle. If the colonists sanctioned the tea tax by paying it, it would be an acknowledgement that the Crown had a right to tax them on any commodity or service. The tea was merely a symbol. It could just as well have been any other commodity formerly covered by the repealed Townshend duties: glass, nails, or paint. The colonists did not grant that sanction over their lives. If they recognized the Crown’s authority to tax them, as the wisest among the colonists pointed out, that authority could just as well in time be extended over every particular of their lives.

Here the parallels end.

The original Tea Party was a revolt against the power of government to regulate one’s life and dictate how it would be conducted and at what price. It was an affirmation by the colonists that they owned their own lives, and retained the right to delegate necessary political power to their elected representatives. It was an affirmation of the moral principle that no government had a right to dispose of or expropriate one’s property, and, by implication, one’s life. All political principles -- good or bad, pro-freedom, or socialist, or fascist -- are grounded on specific moral principles.

Too many Americans today have forgotten that, or never learned it. They want a government that regulates their lives and ensures their well-being by enslaving others. They believe you have a duty to allow yourself to be enslaved for their sakes. They believe the government has a right or a duty to enslave you and everyone else for their sakes.

Another difference between the original Tea Party and the Tea Parties of 2009 is that while the Americans who took part in the original Tea Party disguised themselves as Indians to prevent identification by the authorities, we, the new Sons of Liberty, do not disguise ourselves to protect our identities. We dare any authority to take action against us for exercising our First Amendment right to free speech, which includes criticizing our government and accusing it of behaving like George III and Parliament.

There are Americans, in and out of political office, who would rather we shut up, or they will silence us. Democrats are reaching into their magic bag of dirty tricks to shut up or sideline our Tea Parties. They do this with the cooperation of most of the mainstream news media. Well, as one national Tea Party organizer noted: The Internet is the new mainstream news media.

The Crown’s response to the Boston Tea Party was to legislate the Coercive or Intolerable Acts as punishment. Today, the current administration, in partnership with Congress, has passed, and continues to pass, a Medusa’s head of acts vastly more extortionate and repressive than the original Coercive Acts. The Tea Parties have been a proper response to them. But remember that this orgy of legislation is only being piled on top of coercive acts passed by Congress over the last one hundred years.

It is time for Americans to understand that it is not merely a political fight they have on their hands, but a moral one. They must reject the moral code, altruism, that asks them to live for the sake of other men -- what else could TARP, or the takeover of General Motors, or of the tobacco industry, or of the energy industry, of the insurance industry, or of the health care business mean, but for you to sacrifice your right to your life and your money and property for the sake of others. Americans must proudly, loudly proclaim the selfish virtue of individual rights, which has been the source of all the wealth and prosperity that we enjoy but which Obama and Congress seek to destroy through socialist redistribution.

Americans must understand that what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence applies no less today than it did in July of 1776. To paraphrase his eternal words: When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object -- which today is complete control of the economy and our lives -- evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is our right to throw off such government -- or to vote its agents out of office, or to raise such a magnitude of protest that they dare not act lest they set in motion a similar train of events.

To further paraphrase Jefferson’s words: A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the president of a free people. Our princely president has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unfit for the office. And he is only the most recent in a long line of presidents who have demonstrated that unfitness.

There is another reason why the parallels divide between the original Tea Party and our own. The Founders did not pretend to have all the answers. They performed an astounding feat of political thought and action based on the received wisdom of the time. They left for future generations the task of correcting their admitted errors and doubts.

We, however, know what those errors and doubts were, and the solution to them. As every statist or totalitarian regime that ever existed was based on Plato’s view that men were just atoms in a collectivist state and who owed their existence to others, a fully consistent philosophy of reason exists that sanctions individual rights and man‘s existence for his own sake. That philosophy is Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. The Founders did not have the benefit of her advice. We have.

Let us not treat this day, or any future Tea Party or any other kind of protest, as just another tea party. Let us solemnly regard it as a chance and a first step to finish the American Revolution, to protest the omnivorous and indiscriminate appetite of federal power to consume everything in its path, to assert the right to our lives and property and futures, to work on a course of action that will ultimately correct the errors present in the Constitution and repeal its freedom-destroying amendments. Americans must think and act to finish the American Revolution -- before Obama and Congress finish this country, as they are determined to do.

Thank you.

Tea Party Slogans I Wish I'd Thought Of

"Obama Economics, Chains You Can Believe In" [Seen on a sign at a protest.]

Update:

"You can't fix stupid, but you can vote it out."
[From Michelle Malkin's fine column on the Tea Party movement.]