Tea Party Activists Are the New GOP
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 7:11 AM
By: Richard A. Viguerie Article Font Size
After withdrawing from the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District, Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, who had been the Republican candidate, threw her support to the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, rather than Doug Hoffman, a Republican running on the Conservative Party ticket.
That was one more example of the “closed tent” mentality of big-government, establishment Republicans who have worked long and hard to keep conservatives out of power at the national, state, and local levels.
The GOP leadership’s backing of Ms. Scozzafava was a slap in the face to tea party activists, town-hall protesters, and conservatives across the country. The Washington GOP establishment’s abandonment of fiscal responsibility led directly to the election of Barack Obama as president, Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House, and Harry Reid as Senate majority leader.
The American people see the GOP leadership and establishment every bit as much a part of the problem as the Democrats.
Doug Hoffman and N.Y.-23 are an earthquake in American politics, the first of many challenges to establishment Republicans that we will see for the 2010 elections and beyond. The Republican leaders' stupid decision to pour $900,000 into the race against a conservative has unleashed a fury that will lead to new GOP leadership.
Conservatives’ anger at Washington-establishment Republicans will cost the national committees tens of millions of dollars, as conservative money will start flowing directly to the tea parties and their candidates.
It’s clear that the main opposition to President Obama and Pelosi’s agenda is not from Republican politicians, but rather conservative talk-show hosts, bloggers, cable TV hosts, tea party activists, town-hall attendees, and other grass-roots conservatives.
Tea party activists and conservatives feel betrayed by Republican leaders: John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Pete Sessions, Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Michael Steele, and Newt Gingrich.
These GOP leaders would rather follow the advice of professional political consultants, who are not small-government conservatives. These people would rather satisfy their friends in the media than win — and win with principle. They are the same people who try to denigrate the tea party and town-hall protesters by calling them “teabaggers.”
That type of thinking, which actively opposes the rise of conservatives and others who challenge the old Washington political establishment, will keep the GOP as a small tent. The tea party movement, like Reaganism, is the real big tent.
Over the last dozen years, Republican Party leaders have broken the bond of trust between them and the base of the party. It will not be restored until the GOP selects new leaders who represent the views and values of grass-roots Americans, not Washington views and values.
© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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4 comments:
The idea that conservatives must "moderate" to be effective is absurd. We ARE a conservative nation (although you wouldn't know it from the MSM) and the Tea Partyists have energized us to get off the couch to protect our country.
It's long hours and hard work for too few people (praise to those that are leading our Tea Parties). Writing emails and letters and calling our legislators is not enough folks. They ignore our pleas....they are laughing at us.
We need more participation from more and more of us. As the title of this site says, we need activism and revolution. We need your help.
For nearly a century, the Anti-Defamation League has stared unflinchingly into the dark corners of America's social psyche -- the places where combustible tendencies such as hatred and paranoia pool and, sometimes, burst into flame.
As a Jewish organization, the ADL's first preoccupation naturally is anti-Semitism, but in the last few decades it has extended its scrutiny to the whole range of bigoted malevolence -- white supremacy, the militia movement, neo-nativism and conspiratorial fantasies in all of their improbable permutations. These days, the organization's research is characterized by the sense of proportion and sobriety that long experience brings.
That makes its recent report on the extremist groups and propagandists that have emerged since President Obama's election -- "Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies" -- particularly notable. For the first time in living memory, the ADL is sounding the alarm about a mainstream media personality: Fox News' Glenn Beck, who also hosts a popular radio show.
The report notes that while "other conservative media hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, routinely attack Obama and his administration, typically on partisan grounds, they have usually dismissed or refused to give a platform to the conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists." By contrast, "Beck and his guests have made a habit of demonizing President Obama and promoting conspiracy theories about his administration. ... Beck has even gone so far as to make comparisons between Hitler and Obama."
What gives all of this nonsense an ominous twist is Beck's announcement that he intends to use his TV and radio shows to promote a mass movement that will involve voter registration drives, training in community organizing and a series of regional conventions that will produce a "100-year plan" for America to be read from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a mass rally Aug. 28.
As Beck wrote on his website, "I know that the bipartisan corruption in Washington that has brought us to this brink and it will not be defeated easily. It will require unconventional thinking and a radical plan to restore our nation to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting. ... All of the above will culminate in The Plan, a book that will provide specific policies, principles and, most importantly, action steps that each of us can take to play a role in this Refounding."
Hard times predictably throw up their demagogues. Still, even allowing for the frenetic pace of our wired world's 24-hour news cycle, it's remarkable how quickly the arc of Beck's career has come to resemble that of the Great Depression's uber-demagogue, Father Charles Coughlin. In the months after the crash of '29, Coughlin turned what had been a conventionally religious weekly radio broadcast into a platform for championing the downtrodden working man. He was an early supporter of the New Deal, coining the slogan "Roosevelt or Ruin," but quickly turned on the president for a variety of complex ideological and personal reasons. Coughlin flirted with Huey Long, launched an unsuccessful political party, published a popular newspaper, Social Justice, and even inspired and supported a kind of militia, the Christian Front, some of whose members were arrested by the FBI and charged with plotting a fascist coup.
As the 1930s dragged on, Coughlin, a longtime admirer of Francisco Franco, became virulently anti-Semitic, isolationist and pro-German. He also was extraordinarily popular. At their height, his weekly broadcasts attracted more than 40 million listeners. Still, after he lashed out at German Jews in the wake of Kristallnacht, many major urban radio stations dropped his program. Influential American prelates, the Vatican and prominent Catholic New Dealers had worked for some time to persuade Coughlin's superior, the archbishop of Detroit, to silence him. Shortly before the U.S. entered World War II, a new bishop was installed, and Coughlin was ordered to cease broadcasting. He accepted the clerical discipline and retired into a long life of bitter silence.
It's hard to imagine any contemporary cable system dropping Fox News simply because Beck is an offensively dangerous demagogue -- not with his ratings at least. His new foray into politics, though, presents Rupert Murdoch's network with a profound challenge. Is it willing to become the platform for an extremist political campaign, or will it draw a line as even the authoritarian Catholic Church of the 1940s did? CNN recently parted ways with its resident ranter, Lou Dobbs -- who now confirms he's weighing a presidential bid.
Does Fox see a similar problem with Beck -- and, if not, why?
How about a citizen's arrest with 2,000 pages of charges that no one is allowed to read followed a rigged jury and life in prison.
Would you think that the SOB'S would get the message?
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