Americans Just Don't Understand the Tea Party, Especially the GOP Establishment Pols

A friend asked me how he could become a voting member of The Tea Party recently and was surprised to learn that there is or was no Tea Party except perhaps the famous Boston Tea Party of seventeen-hundreds fame which really did partake of tea to emphasize its existence.

I added that, though tea no longer had a physical presence in the current political community, its presence was felt by the active participation of conservative persons who practiced and operated with the same ideals and principles as were put forth by the Founding Fathers of this once great country before Socialism and Communism and to a smaller but no less disruptive and destructive degree, Islamists and Muslims. Tea as an identifier has been an acronym for the words, "Taxed Enough Already" or a warning to the tax-loving and ever greedy socialist-communist tenets of wealth distribution. Tea Partiers follow the rule that if you earned it you should be able to keep it or give to others of your choosing and not be directed by some Dictator, Emperor, King or whimsical spend-easy politician who is profligate with other people's money. Democrats follow this latter example of governance where they believe that your money is really their money to spend in their self indulgent social giveaways to whomever they choose; not you. They are often called progressives as it sounds hip and modern, but a greedy pig is a hungry pig whether he or she be progressive or on government welfare.

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The title progressive is on current television screens every day in the form of insurance and the company is owned by, and I'm not kidding here, a progressive socialist named Peter Lewis who is prominently associated with George Soros in communist giveaway circles. Check out this website for information from Truth of Fiction regarding Lewis and Soros' activities in funding socialist, leftist organizations most notably the hard-left organization named American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU. Getting back to the Tea Party Organizations in America with their staunch and legitimately conservative productions for American politics, a website program on PersonalLiberty.com by Bob Livingston dated June 16, 2014, titled, "Further Proof The Establishment Still Doesn't Get The Tea Party." Livingston recounts the historic upset of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, (R-VA) by Dave Brat a relatively unknown from local Virginia politics, saying, "it not only made the GOP establishment go temporarily insane, it showed, once again, that even after seven years, the Washington elites still have no concept of what the Tea Party really is. "Exercising doublethink only a propagandist for the GOP establishment could employ, The Washington Examiner's T. Beckett Adams wrote that Brat was a Tea Party candidate without Tea Party support who won because of a "strong, personalized ground game." The Tea Party, Adams writes, "had nothing to do with Cantor's defeat." "Adams could not be more wrong. While it's true that so-called Tea Party organizations like Club for Growth, Freedom Works, and Tea Party Patriots sat on the sidelines in the Brat/Cantor Virginia primary, the real Tea Party was hard at work. The idea of using the Boston Tea Party as the backdrop for a movement against ever-expanding government got its start in 2007 as a money bomb for Ron Paul on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Held on December 16, it was dubbed Boston Tea Party 07, Livingston said. That Livingston comment is a historical political marker, never heard before by me, and a significant one it is, considering all the usage of Tea Party activities in this modern day of profuse television daily commentary regarding the Tea Party. And I never knew that this new idea to current politics began as a fund raiser for Ron Paul, a libertarian, albeit a mostly conservative one. The research necessary to create this column brought another first for me in finding the information that Bob Livingston provided in his column stating that at that time news coverage was focused on Obama's Federal bailouts and "stimulus" programs and staging "raucous grassroots rebellions against Beltway spending binges," as Michelle Malkin wrote at the time. "The new Boston Tea Party is here, baby," she proclaimed. Livingston added that "No one covered and promoted the local grassroots, mom-and pop-inspired protests more than Malkin. In her column she wrote, "Rebel yell: Taxpayers revolt against gimme-mania." Michelle also wrote about the "motley" sized band of nearly 100 protestors in the demonstrations against "stimulus rip-off" assailing both the substance of the overstuffed stimulus package and the short-circuited, non-transparent process by which it was passed.

"Many, if not most of those attending Tea Party gatherings were owners of small businesses, homemakers, blue collar workers, college students, retirees and veterans who were uniting for a common purpose: To oppose big government, bailouts and increased taxes, Livingston added. "In the after The national Tea Party organizations sprang up out of those grassroots protests when it became obvious the movement was taking off, the national Tea Party organizations began to spring up. "While they share some ideas with the local groups-or at least claim to-they have little else in common with them. For instance, both Club for Growth and Freedom Works long ago promised to sit out the immigration battle. Yet Cantor's pro-amnesty stance is one of the main factors in his defeat. Local Tea Party groups-and most conservatives and rank and file Republicans-staunchly oppose amnesty."

The national Tea party organizations have some members of the GOP establishment and they are typically a little more conservative than the grassroots and they are beholden to crony corporations for funding-hence their decision to sit out the immigration debate being pushed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Also, the national media were premature in announcing the demise of the Tea Party last month after some of the candidates they backed lost their elections. They just don't accept that the Tea Party is only an idea; it is not a political party. The GOP establishment would do well to figure that out sooner rather than later. Bob Livingston completes his assessment of Tea Party saying "rumors of its impending demise are exaggerated; the GOP, a party of mercantilism since its inception, has been gradually moving left for more than 100 years. It's going to take more than seven years to move it far enough right to make it a party of the Constitution.