The Cracked-pots in the Tea Party Movment

The Tea Party and Extremism

Two weeks ago, I said this:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL O'REILLY: Some of these Tea Party people are nuts. They are. They're crazy. I mean, we sent Jesse Watters down there, and he puts the number at about 10 percent that are just loons, out of their mind. Every group has that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

And that's true. No matter what group you're talking about, you'll find loons.

Enter The New York Times, which is finally taking the Tea Party seriously. In a front-page article Tuesday, they put forth that Tea Party people are primarily extremists. They lump in the John Birch Society, the Patriot movement, Friends for Liberty and other groups that are on the fringe.

The Times also attempts to link Fox News to Tea Party extremists.

"Talking Points" predicted this would happen; that a movement with the potential power of the Tea Party would be attacked by the left-wing media. At first, The Times ignored the Tea Party. Now it's trying to diminish the brand.

But the Tea Party people themselves should be careful. Most Americans are not ideologues. They are just folks who want a fair system and a noble country. Every time a Tea Party person threatens to overthrow the government or other nonsense, the brand gets hammered.

That being said, the Tea Party movement is at a disadvantage. There's no central authority. Every Tea Party group is different. There's no party platform other than disenchantment with big government. With that kind of structure, you can expect chaos and some extremism, which the liberal media will use that to attack the Tea Party.

"Talking Points" has always admired sincere Americans who get involved in trying to improve their country, and that is what most Tea Party people do. They are regular folks who are fed up. [...]

Exactly. Every group has their fringe. Trying to paint all the tea party folks as fringe extremists is just disingenuous partisan obfuscation.

Crackpots always try to hitch their agenda to other peoples wagons. It's something everyone has to watch out for.


Also see:

Tea Party impostors
     

In the MSM: Where have all our Elders gone?

Here is a very thoughtful piece by Peggy Noonan:

Keeping America Safe From the Ranters
As the Elders of the media die, who'll replace them?

When William Safire died the other day, we lost one of the Elders of journalism and the argumentative arts. We've been losing a lot of them lately: Walter Cronkite, Bob Novak, Don Hewitt, Irving Kristol. "The stars seem to be going out one by one," said Howard Stringer at Cronkite's memorial.

[...]

Who are the Elders? They set the standards. They hand down the lore. They're the oldest and wisest. By proceeding through the world each day with dignity and humanity, they show the young what it is that should be emulated. They're the tribal chieftains. This role has probably existed since caveman days, because people need guidance and encouragement, they need to be heartened by examples of endurance. They need to be inspired.

We are in a generational shift in the media, and new Elders are rising. They're running the networks and newspapers, they own the Web sites, they anchor the shows. What is their job?

It's to do what the Elders have always done, but now more than ever.

[...]

A few days ago, I was sent a link to a screed by MSNBC's left-wing anchorman Ed Schultz, in which he explained opposition to the president's health-care reform. "The Republicans lie. They want to see you dead. They'd rather make money off your dead corpse. They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don't have anything for us." Next, a link to the syndicated show of right-wing radio talker Alex Jones, on the subject of the U.S. military, whose security efforts at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh show them to be agents and lackeys of the New World Order. "They are complete enemies of America. . . . Our military's been taken over. . . . This is the end of our country." Later, "They'd love to kill 10,000 Americans," and, "The republic is falling right now."

This, increasingly, is the sound of our political conversation.

It is not new to call this kind of thing destructive, though it is. It is a daily agitating barrage that coarsens and inflames. It tears the national fabric. But it could wind up doing worse than that.

Democracy cannot healthily endure without free and unfettered debate. It's our job to watch, critique and question, and, being us, to do it in colorful terms.

But knowing where the line is, matters. Seeing clearly the lay of the land, knowing the facts of the country and your countrymen, matters.

Which gets us back to Safire and Cronkite and Novak and the rest. They knew where the line was. They were tough guys who got in big fights, but they had a sense of responsibility towards the country, and towards its culture. They, actually, were protective toward it. They made mistakes, but they were solid. [...]

It's worth reading the whole thing. We sure DO need some elders in the media.

I think the far Left, in it's desire to destroy the status quo, have coarsened and polarized political debate as part of their plan to destabilize the existing order. Some on the Right are now buying into it, and playing tit-for-tat. It's a trap set by the Left, that should be resisted.


This November 2008 interview with Peggy Noonan is also interesting:

Grace Will Lead Me Home?
Looking toward the future — conservative and otherwise.

     

Obama, ACORN, Wright & Ayers all tie together

There are various arguments as to why Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers are not important and shouldn't be held against Obama. He is also trying to distance himself from ACORN, which he has strong ties with. But what if these are not all isolated associations, but in fact, all related to each other, forming a much larger picture of the Obama Agenda?

Stanly Kurtz at NRO shows us how the pieces fit together:

Wright 101
Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.

John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign. [...]

Is it any wonder the Obama campaign has tried so hard to block Kurtz's digging, or that Obama's thugs have tried to shut him up?

The rest of the Kurtz article goes into great detail about Obama's associations, and what they mean. The MSM could have reported on this at any time, but chose not to.

John McCain has a lot of material here to use in the debate tonight. But will he?