Targeting the Tea Party

posted at 1:18 am on January 8, 2010 by Doctor Zero

The Tea Party movement has grown with astonishing speed. Swaddled in discussion-board posts and nursed with e-mail over the past year, the movement is now a month away from speaking with a unified voice for the first time, at its first national convention in Nashville. The transition from demonstrations to conventions marks an evolution from expressing need to taking action… from describing what is wrong to declaring what would be right.

A concerted attempt to discredit and marginalize the Tea Party movement has developed with equally amazing speed. The dimmer bulbs in this pinball machine of contempt, such as Chris Matthews, have worked hard to make the derogatory, sexually tainted slang term “teabaggers” popular. The term spread to supposedly mainstream, “impartial” journalists with viral efficiency. It’s hard to imagine a comparable grassroots movement, with a racial or collectivist agenda more agreeable to the Left, suffering this kind of crude insult. Mocking nicknames would never be slapped on a group of illegal aliens agitating for greater welfare benefits. That level of elite contempt is reserved for middle-class folks who object to paying for those benefits. The media covers Tea Parties with the same condescension they show to any unseemly spectacle of tax serfs refusing to “pay their fair share.” To those who believe all virtue resides in the compassionate power of the State, resistance always equals greed.

The Tea Parties became impossible to dismiss after the massive demonstration in Washington, following the 9/11 commemoration. It therefore became necessary to slander them. The original strategy was to portray them as violent lunatics, a bit of intellectual crabgrass planted as far back as the infamous Defense Intelligence Estimate released by the politicized Department of Homeland Security last April. Even as Major Nidal Hasan was praising jihad in seminars and peppering al-Qaeda with Facebook friend requests, and the Underwear Bomber was singing the praises of the World Trade Center murderers, Janet Napolitano squeezed her eyes closed and finger-painted “right-wing extremists” as the hot new terrorist threat. The report came out a week before the big Tea Party protests on Tax Day.

The domestic terrorist smear didn’t stick, so the race card was hauled from the bottom of the deck. Once again, MSNBC muppet Chris Matthews served up the fast-food version of this poison, with his deranged insistence that “every single teabagger in America is white.” Remember: Matthews didn’t write this script, he’s just doing a clumsy job of reading it. Someone slipped him instructions to carefully insinuate the Tea Party movement is tinged with racism, and he responded by turning pink and screaming “They’re all white!”

Ignoring this drivel based on the pathetic audience of MSNBC hosts would be a mistake. These cellar dwellers do the ground work for the media slander machine, sending toxic clouds of smoke upstairs for the more “respectable” journalists to notice after a discreet interval. After a few months of Chris Matthews confusing Tea Party footage with “Birth of a Nation,” the NBC anchors who don’t have to suffer wearing the MS Of Shame can start talking about the clouds of controversy swirling around the allegations that Tea Parties are suspected of reportedly harboring racist thoughts. Laughing at Matthews isn’t enough. It’s essential to laugh at anyone who even thinks about taking him seriously.

Not all of the Tea Party’s enemies are on the Left. Some of them are nominally conservative elitists like David Brooks, who haven’t thought elitism all the way through, and realized it leads inevitably to collectivism – because if the “educated class” is so magnificent, it makes sense for them to run the world, and resistance to their brilliant designs is stupid by definition. You can see the first glimmers of this truth in Brooks’ dismissal of the Tea Parties as “a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against.” Being against things is reactionary and blockheaded, you know. Intelligence demands progress!

The Tea Party convention made a bold choice in selecting Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker for their convention. It was also very considerate of them – since the same people hate Palin and the Tea Parties, for the same reasons, their enemies can reduce their carbon footprint by carpooling to Nashville.

It has been suggested that Palin might not have been the most strategic choice for a keynote speaker, since she’s not running for any office in 2010. I think she’s perfect, because the Tea Party is looking for a representative, not a leader. They want a champion they can send into the field, carrying their banner. Some have criticized the Tea Parties as populist in nature, but populism is defined by pandering, rather than persuasion… and a movement that asks the author of America’s best-selling political book to escort it into the American spotlight is definitely interested in persuasion.

The war against the Tea Party is an extension of the long war against the American middle class. The Left believes it will achieve final victory through socialized medicine, which will forever shackle the middle class as dependents of the State, and destroy the independence that makes them dangerous. The Tea Party says it has only begun to fight. Next month, the most sincerely middle-class major party candidate in recent history will take the stage on their behalf, and render two-thirds of David Brooks’ analysis obsolete: the Tea Party will still be large, but it will longer be quite so fractious, or defined only by what it opposes.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org

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