Let’s get one thing clear. The Tea Party has nothing to
offer. It wants power only.
Ample evidence of this can be found in a current Tea
Party video that can be found on Alternet at http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/slick-paranoid-tea-party-video-aims-violent-insurrection.
There you will find a none too subtle solicitation to overthrow the United
States government.
Some of you may recall Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch
hunt of the 1950’s in which he accused the government of harboring communists.
One consequence of this Right Wing movement was the loyalty oath that every
government worker, federal, state and local, was required to sign as a
condition of employment. Thus in the 1950’s, Republican Right Wingers demanded
that government employees swear that they did not advocate the overthrow of the
government, which this Tea Party now advocates. The video argues that the government has stolen the citizen’s
freedom by making them dependent upon government through social services such
as Social Security and Medicare and that violent revolution is needed to
recover it. The video implies that the “stealing” began with the acceptance of
government benefits.
The real story, of course, is that we began to lose the
Constitutional guarantees of freedom in consequence of the wars launched in the
Middle East by a G. W. Bush Far Right Republican administration. Why Democrats
have tolerated the Obama administration’s continuance of and enhancements to
this democracy-destroying process is a matter of deep concern to those who
actually do care about freedom.
This form of deception demonstrates that the Republicans,
as now constituted, have nothing to offer the American people but lies and deceptions.
This pernicious vacuity of public purpose and benefit and the lust for power it
betrays, should find a large and continuous response from those who care about
humanity’s future, especially progressives who demand the addressing of real human
problems.
The emptiness of the Tea Party’s agenda is not only
destructive by the distraction it engenders, but is a genuine threat to
democracy and human freedom. Where there is power, especially in a country the
size of the United States, this kind of functional vacuity can easily breed a
raw lust for power, all too frequently playing out as necessary to protect the
country from those who protest the power grab. As I have previously mentioned,
such a coup d'etat was in the works
against FDR until it was revealed.
In the midst of the Great Recession in which large
numbers of people are losing their jobs and their homes, the Tea Party makes a
major issue of a loss of freedom. This is analogous to the Nazis in Germany who
in the midst of the Great Depression, far worse in Germany than in the United
States, tapped into German bigotry by blaming the Jews for that depression.
When people are desperate, a scapegoat for their suffering can usually be found
and used for political purposes by the unscrupulous. In Germany it was the Jews,
in today’s America it is the government.
Why the government? It’s because government is the only
institution that can prevent corporate takeover of this country. Ever since
Ronald Reagan, government has been portrayed as the enemy of the people by the Republican
Party. They have now gone so far as to advocate its overthrow, which the
Republican Joe McCarthy accused the communists of plotting.
Lest anyone take the Republicans seriously in their
concern for freedom, notice how quickly and thoroughly they began to destroy
freedom with the advent of the Near East invasions. In short order we had the
Republican-appointed majority of the Supreme Court nullifying our vote by
appointing the President, the Patriot Act, and the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security in order to funnel military equipment and training into
local police departments. The fact that the Democratic Party under Obama has
continued and enhanced many of these anti-democratic acts draws attention to
the fact that it is in much the same employ of the rich as the Republicans have
traditionally been.
Underneath all of the turmoil this country has gone
through in last decade is a massive exercise in fear, which has seen everything
from color-coded threats from terrorists to the loss of homes and jobs. Pervasive
fear is the playground of tyrants and tyranny is what we will get unless we, as
a nation, get a grip and face up to the gross deceptions, ranging from
unjustified wars to the connivance of the wealthy and the denial of ecological
destruction. There are few greater political contrasts than the fear mongering
of G. W. Bush and the fear challenging of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. May we
find an FDR for our time.
Bob Newhard
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