Tea Party - Good or Bad?

The Tea Party – Good or Bad?

By Leon Howard

On Sunday, October 23^rd, 2011, a professor, Mark Mansperger, wrote a ‘hatchet job’ on the Tea Party movement; being careful to say that the Tri-Cities Tea Party wasn’t like the national movement. I consider that a political move to ward off rebuttal by us.  Wrong!!!

When he attacks the national movement, he attacks us! The independent Tea Parties around the country make up the national movement! There is no ‘national leader’ or one spokesperson, so when he calls the movement being made up of neoconservatives and that we “ … are ‘hijacking’ the nation’s core values: the Constitution, freedom, liberty, Christianity and capitalism.”, he attacks us!

The ‘good’ professor and his leftist minions have ignored our founding documents for 100 years or sought ways around them and we are ‘hijacking’ them? Notice he didn’t claim we ‘hijacked’ the Declaration of Independence – For good reason – The left refuses to link our founding documents because together, they refute his entire premise!

These charges come from a member of academia; someone living in a cocoon and no real life experiences to relate to. He studies, he reads, and he expounds on what others have observed, regardless of source; therefore his ‘conclusions’ are more than ‘suspect’, they are only one side and not the side of Freedom! Beyond that, he quotes no sources for his conclusions but I can see by his conclusions, his ‘news’ is garnered from MSNBC! (I wonder if he gets a shiver up his leg when ‘the chosen one’ speaks?)

Mansperger  wonders “ … where were they during the Bush years?” Again, when you rely on one news source (MSNBC) you don’t know what’s going on! Many of us were screaming at our TV’s, writing letters to our Congress, writing letters to the President, and demanding they stop the madness; the clincher for me was TARP – What stupidity! Mansperger finds it more expedient to say we are xenophobic – Don’t you just love those big $50.00 words? I had to look it up, which is good to learn every day: Xenophobia: An exaggerated or abnormal fear of strangers or foreigners. A strong antipathy or aversion to strangers or foreigners.

I find that term very troubling! Does Mansperger know something we don’t? Are the rumors true that Obama was born in Kenya and, therefore, not eligible to be President? But, again, no explanation to using the term – Maybe he was afraid to call us ‘racists’ because that’s been debunked too many times to count, so he used a term nobody knows in hopes of hanging a new handle to an old shovel.

Most of his article was drivel and off-point; first I was angry that the Herald would publish such a blatant fabrication of mistruths, innuendoes, and ‘balderdash’ but, as I re-read his drivel and started writing this rebuttal, I calmed down – Kinda!

What Mansperger conveniently forgets is Santilli didn’t utter those famous words: “It’s time for a Tea Party!” from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile until February, 2009, after the Obama administration announced they were going to start bailing out folks buried in mortgages! Most Tea Party members had never protested anything in public but this was perfect for us! Another thing Mansperger ignored was to mention that every one of our events is left cleaner than when we arrived, including the 1.2 million who protested in Washington, D.C., on September 12, 2009 – You do not see that kind of respect for public and private property from the union thugs and the Occupy Wall Street crowd!

Then he has the audacity to state “ … goal of the Founding Fathers was to establish a viable federal government and a prosperous Republic in which people have religious, political, and economic freedom.” As quoted here, that is true but then he continues with “ … capitalism is not of our national charter, for it is not mentioned in our Constitution.” If economic freedom isn’t capitalism, what is? One of the founding principles of our Constitution was private property – That certainly isn’t socialism, communism, or any of the other ‘isms’ except capitalism!

And speaking of the other ‘isms’, capitalism is the only ‘ism’ Liberty can exist in! Under the other ‘isms’, your ‘rights’ are granted by the government and therefore, are very limited and can be taken away at any time. Our rights are granted by God, not government and, therefore, cannot be revoked by man!

It would take more pages than I care to write to refute the inane drivel of Mansperger but, being 69, I don’t know if I would have time enough before I leave this earth to write it all.

But I will extend an invitation to the good professor, if he really wants to understand the Tea Party movement, to attend a Tea Party rally, one of our Open Board Meetings, and/or really read our founding documents and the thought going into the creation of our Republic (they are called the Federalist Papers) before you accuse me of ‘hijacking’ the Constitution!

Afterthought: How does a person ‘hijack’ Christianity? Again, very troublesome thought process from someone so learned.