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Tea Partiers Don't Know What They're Talking About 4/28/2011 8:46:00 AM
Obama's showing his birth certificate is instructive
I thought I'd check in on Lawrence O'Donnell (Keih Olbermann's replacement) last night. He was responding to the president's providing his birth certificate. He welcomed a lady onto the show to comment. She was one of the originators of the Birther phenomenon, and he wanted her to apologize. She wouldn't do it. She insisted on talking about Obama's social security number, similar to Trump's insistence that Obama should show his college transcripts.
O'Donnell later introduced a woman who insisted that all of this fuss over nothing was typical of what happened to black men as a matter of course prior to the Civil Rights Act; they were harassed and had to furnish identification to the police.
If the NCAA investigation of the Tea Party leaders has any credence, these people are definitely racists. Five of six leaders of the various Tea Party organizations had ties to White Supremacists. Remarkably this invesitgation got like two or three days of air play, while Glenn Beck's march on Washington got weeks of coverage. More racism? Who do you trust, the NAACP or Fox News?
As a history teacher I'm further bothered by the derivation of the name of their movement. The Boston Tea Party was about taxation without representative. Spoiled rich people have plenty of representation. Furthemore, Sam Adams and the other legitimate tea partiers objected to being forced to buy their tea from the East India Company, a monopoly. Modern Tea Party members are hardly bothered by monopolies. They campaign to cut taxes for corporations and have brought back the "drill, baby, drill" mantra, despite the Gulf oil spill. Then there's the claimn that Obama's health care legislation is unconstitutional. Depends on your frame of reference. Jefferson claimed the same thing about Hamilton's national bank. Hamilton emphasized Article I, Section 8, the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution that gave Congress the power to carry into law its enumerated responsibilities, and this carried the day as it would in the future. Washington also saw the Constitution as a living document. So . . . who are you going to believe, George Washington or Antonin Scalia? The Revolutionary War also provided a cogent argument for a strong Federal government. We almost lost because congress had no power to tax the colonies. The Articles of Confederate sound a whole lot like what Teabaggers suggest. Weak federal government, power to the states. Didn't work then, won't work now. Ask those people who are suffering through the tornadoes in the South. Suddenly they're crying for help from Uncle Sam and FEMA.
The Tea Partiers used aggressive tactics to win seats in Congress, often disrupting debates. Minnesota Congressman James Olberstar lost his seat in Congress to Tea Party candidate Chip Cravaack
despite thirty years of faithful service, most recently as chairman of the Transportation committe. During their debate Olberstar was heckled unrelentingly. Cravaack now belongs to Michelle Bachmann's caucus in Congress. That's Michelle Bachmann whose law degree should be suspect. She graduated from Oral Roberts Law School, which twice lost its accredidation for refusing to admit candidates who were not evangelical. They closed the year after she graduated.
Bachmann and others complained about the bullying tactics used by the unions during the Wisconsin demonstrations in response to Governor Walker's denial of negotiation rights for public service unions. Hypocrisy or what? Furthermore most reporters saw these demonstrations as some of the most peaceful they'd ever seen.
Meanwhile these people are trying to pass some pretty unusual legislation. In Minnesota conservative lawmakers would like to make the sale of raw milk legal and to do away with the bans on smoking in public places. They are sponsoring a constitutional amendment to make a picture I.D. a requirment to vote and to outlaw gay marriage, despite the fact that there already is a law barring gay marriage. In Arizona they would ban background checks at gun shows; in Texas university students would be allowed to carry guns. Michelle Fishback, a state senator from Minnesota, sponsored legislation to make therapeutic cloning a felony. Therapeutic cloning could help cure diabetes and paralysis among other diseases. Religious zealots should not be able to impose their morals on the rest of us. Fishbach may be bothered by the destruction of embryos but she's not bothered by the 30,000 gun deaths every year or the 4,000 plus deaths of our soldiers in a war we didn't have to fight.
Can we tolerate this kind of nonsense much longer without losing our designation as the greatest country in the world?
These people need to read the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Amazon.com, used and new. Please check out the reviews.
