The left wing kook fringe has issued a
fatwa against Dick Armey, Chairman of FreedomWorks and one of the most recognizable promoters of the tea party crusade. Armey has recently called for a hostile tea party takeover of the Republican Party, and perhaps concerned that such a takeover might succeed, thereby completely transforming our decrepit two-party system, the left has decided to initiate hostilities of its own. FreedomWorks has determined that the threats issued against it are credible enough to justify a move to more secure headquarters.
These death threats, like the previous vulgarities thrown at them by politicians and the media, are testaments to the tea party's growing success, influence and populist appeal. The tea party has become an irresistible force in American politics, and the unseating of Alaskan RINO Senator Murkowsi by tea party favorite Joe Miller is the most frightening proof to the established parties that the tea party is not simply an angry protest movement, but a national, cleansing wave of political reformation.
When pollsters start covering a movement, its moment has arrived. It seems that
Scott Rasmussen, our most able independent pollster, was among the first high profile figures to grasp the tea party's vitality and importance in our current tattered political environment: "Understanding the tea party is essential to predicting what the country's political scene will look like."
For Rasmussen the tea party is a reflection of our national divide, which he describes as the battle between "the Mainstream Public and the Political Class." Rasmussen notes in his recent Wall Street Journal interview with John Fund, that while 67% of the political class believes that the country is heading in the right direction, 84% of mainstream voters believe we're headed in the wrong direction.
Clearly, the divide between a ruling elite and the average American has grown into a chasm, with too many maddening examples of government arrogance running roughshod over the clearly expressed desires of citizens.
The federal government is suing Arizona, though polls continue to show that Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration is supported by 60-70% of Americans. Indeed, executives and legislatures from nearly two-dozen other states are using Arizona's bill as a template for their own attempts at building protective moats against a flood of illegals.
A massive federal healthcare bureaucracy is being assembled while Obamacare is more unpopular now than at the time of its corrupt passage. Over 60% of Americans support its repeal, and in stunning results from the recent monthly an IBD/TIPP poll, only 27% of independents support the legislation.
And in the most recent example of the visceral disconnect between government and governed, both the mayor of New York and the president fully support the construction of a ground zero mosque that is opposed by over 70% of the country.
It will never be possible for our country to cohere if its popular will is so regularly and blatantly thwarted and its citizens' preferences so routinely held in contempt. Personified by the tea parties, protestors against these and many other examples of obscene government overreach are typically intense and energetic but also highly principled, knowledgeable and non-violent. Tea partiers are not anarchists; they simply clamor for lower taxes, and an end to bailouts and deficits. They want a much smaller government footprint.
Even if the occasional Obama-with-Hitler-moustache posters at tea party gatherings are authentic, they're much less common than were Bush-with-Hitler-moustache posters at the left's Iraq war protests. Indeed, it is much more typical for tea partiers to attend rallies brandishing copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and to hoist inoffensive homemade (not union-manufactured) posters and banners. And these posters more often refer to Madison and other founders, than to Nazis.
The caricatures of tea party members as yokels and (of course) racists have been refuted so effectively by now that it seems hard to imagine that opponents would continue to publish them. But the ridicule continues, and it now extends to tea party candidates, who are labeled "off-beat" especially after they win their primaries and become real electoral threats.
Of all the traits to admire about the tea partiers, their restraint is particularly noteworthy, because they are being provoked by abusive, smug contempt almost constantly. The left is profoundly indignant that a grassroots, truly egalitarian, democratic movement has emerged to compete with their perennial and self-declared monopoly on popular, street level protest. The left has remained dumbfounded that the right has been able to amass an organic, populist and effective anti-establishment insurgency with no dominant figurehead for the left to isolate and attack.
An endless array of anointed politicians in the senate and the house seems to believe as Pete Stark (CA-13) does that "The federal government can do most anything in this country." The tea party believes otherwise.
Once upon a time when Obama was still somewhat popular, he remarked that he was the only thing standing between Wall Street CEO's and bankers, and average Americans ready to rush them with pitchforks. As in most matters, Obama was largely clueless about the true source of the country's dark mood. He was right about the level of popular anger, but missed its true target. It wasn't Wall Street, but their enablers, the authors of America's breathtaking decline, the entire elite and suffocating governing establishment.
