Bizarre, Congress, Politics, Society

Tea Party: “We Are Not Terrorists!”

Submitted By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

The wrath from the right has been scortching ever since VP Joe Biden commented that certain freshman tea party congressmen were acting “like terrorists” in negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. There was equally no love lost when John McClain commented that the tea party freshman were acting as “deceivers” and their ideas were “bizarro.”

Now Tea Party freshman Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) (No, not the one with the Maserati that goes 185) has produced his own video decrying the incivility and telling us that “Vice President Biden, I’m not a terrorist. Terrorists target and kill people.” You can watch the lament here.

While the language employed by the VP was quite over the top, and especially so given Biden’s challenge to introduce more civility into public discourse, our freshman congressman fails to see the irony of his words.  No one suggests the Tea Partiers are calling for mass extinction of liberals or undocumented aliens, or gays or the poor. But what do they want? 

Here’s Nevada GOP Senate Tea Party candidate Sharon Angle on  the frustration of her comrades:

“I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”

Some Tea Party candidates are a tad less discrete in their call for violence. Here’s Texas Tea Party candidate Stephen Broden, “Our nation was founded on violence. The option is on the table. I don’t think that we should ever remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.”

Alaska Tea Party candidate Joe Miller found a lot to like in East Germany’s “checkpoint Charlie” system of stemming the tide of freedom-seekers “immigrating” to West Berlin during the Cold War:

“The first thing that has to be done is secure the border … East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.”

And the Tea Party has a thing or two to say to liberals about the notion of any separation between church and state:

 “Do you know, where does this phrase ‘separation of church and state’ come from? It was not in Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists. … The exact phrase ‘separation of Church and State’ came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth, that’s where it comes from. So the next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State, ask them why they’re Nazis.” —Glen Urquhart, the Tea Party-backed Republican nominee for the Delaware House seat. You can even watch him here. 

And then there’s that “witchy woman,” Delaware’s own Christine O’Donnell,  who, when questioned about whether the Constitution calls for separation of church and state during a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School delightfully noted, “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”  Ahems were heard around the world on that one.

New York Tea Party darling Carl Paladino had this suggestion for the poor:

“Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene … the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes. These (prisons) are beautiful properties with basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities. Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities. You have to teach them basic things — taking care of themselves, physical fitness. In their dysfunctional environment, they never learned these things.”

Then there’s the First Lady of the Tea Party, Michele Bachmann, sharing all the inside dope on what it really means to be gay (no husband jokes, please):

“If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.” — then Minn. state senator Michele Bachmann

There’s scores more and they deal with all manner of insensitivity to the poor, immigrants, the 45000 Americans who die every year from inadequate health care, and just about everyone else the right likes to pillory.

Now most of these quotes were from losers in their electoral races and maybe they represent only the most extreme dunces the Tea Party has produced, but that’s not really the point is it? The point is that while the far-out Right might be justly indignant for the rhetorical excesses of the Left, they can’t seem to find the words to decry the excesses of their own camp. 

There’s a word for that.

Source: Huffington Post

~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

359 thoughts on “Tea Party: “We Are Not Terrorists!””

  2. Selectively begin shutting down the air traffic control system, and air transportation beginning with the Air Traffic Control Centers (those radar control functions that monitor and control all aircraft at all altitudes in their geographic region) beginning with Houston Center, Fort Worth Center, Indianapolis Center, Memphis Center. Simultaneosly shut down the control towers at the airports serving Republican members of Congress.

  3. I read that some of the airlines are making out like bandits during the FAA partial shutdown. This impasse would be brought to a halt quickly if the President ordered the FAA to shut down altogether, as much as it pains me to say that.

    Close flight operations except for lifeguard emergency and military flights. Use only military air traffic controllers. Thousands of wide-body jets sitting on the ramp would generate a hue and cry from the airlines and flying public the likes of which have never been seen before.

    To paraphrase Larry the Cable Guy, “Shut ‘er down.”

  4. mespo,

    Thanks for the Federalist 10 quote … it soothes the troubled mind and guides one into a proper thought process.

    I like Joe Biden … always have, but that was pure theater … stoking the backlash which Obama plans to ride all the way to victory in 2012.

  5. Blouise,
    I agree. The Tea Party is doing everything that they can to blow up the government. No matter the cost.

  6. lottakatz,

    Thanks for bringing the FAA’s situation into this discussion. I posted a link to a story about it on a different thread. The situation is appalling.

  7. The mere fact that Joe Walsh loans his campaign $35K, pays himself back $14K and at the same time, won’t pay his $117K in child support, makes him a de facto terrorist,

    Children need to feel secure in their home and environment and his neglect of them must be scary for them. He is damaging to his own children. Imagine the damage he has in store for the country.

    The crap the Baggers are pulling with the FAA is mind blowing. Another example of their terrorist actions.

  8. On one of the talking head shows tonight they had their panel discussion and the conservative started decrying that the Republicans were called terrorists, she was just shocked and outraged but it was a talking point, no passion. The liberal on the panel though got hot and cut her off with the sentiment ‘When you stop calling the President a ‘tar baby’ and ‘boy’ maybe you’ll be treated more courtesely, when are you going to stop doing that’ and he was genuinely angry. It was a refreshing exchange. The word “hypocrisy” did come to mind. 🙂

  9. Mitch McConnell speaking of the Bagger Caucus:

    “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” … “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

    So maybe not terrorists…just a group united in their threats of hostility in order to achieve their way politically and ideologically. Hey wait…

  10. Great article Mark. If you hold the country hostage for your own personal political gain, you are a terrorist in my book. If you hold people’s jobs and paychecks hostage like the Teapublicans are doing right now with the FAA, you are a terrorist. When you try to cut government spending to the bone when it will cause jobs to be lost, people will die when they lose their insurance and will lose their houses. Therefore, you are a domestic terrorist.

  11. Defining “Terrorism”

    Nonetheless, [Bruce] Hoffman himself believes it is possible to identify some key characteristics of terrorism. He proposes that:

    By distinguishing terrorists from other types of criminals and terrorism from other forms of crime, we come to appreciate that terrorism is :

    ineluctably political in aims and motives
    violent – or, equally important, threatens violence
    designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target
    conducted by an organization with an identifiable chain of command or conspiratorial cell structure (whose members wear no uniform or identifying insignia) and
    perpetrated by a subnational group or non-state entity.[22]

    A definition proposed by Carsten Bockstette at the George C. Marshall Center for European Security Studies, underlines the psychological and tactical aspects of terrorism:

    Terrorism is defined as political violence in an asymmetrical conflict that is designed to induce terror and psychic fear (sometimes indiscriminate) through the violent victimization and destruction of noncombatant targets (sometimes iconic symbols). Such acts are meant to send a message from an illicit clandestine organization. The purpose of terrorism is to exploit the media in order to achieve maximum attainable publicity as an amplifying force multiplier in order to influence the targeted audience(s) in order to reach short- and midterm political goals and/or desired long-term end states.”[23]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism#Definition

    ———

    The FAA is still not funded and operating in a semi shutdown. People aren’t being paid, some are laid off but those that are retained as core workers can’t refuse to work in ‘core’ jobs even if they don’t get paid. Whatever job related expenses normally paid by the employer they incur are on them until the funding comes back on line. Congress is gone for a month.

    If you use the Brocktette definition the Republicans seem to be a bona fide terrorist organization lately.

  13. OS,

    I have my reasons for wanting KD to blawg….It is purely revelation….I would not guest for my own reasons…But it would be nice to be able to pin the sucker down on some issue….

  14. If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

    By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

    From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

    A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.

    ~Madison, Federalist 10

  15. AY, how many times do we have to tell you to lay off that stuff.

    Ummm……If we can get some for less than $200 an ounce, let me know…..

  16. No really, I think we should have Kdponzi as a guest blogger….That would be a treat…Come on, Who all wants KD to blog for us….

  18. Terrorists are not just people who physically kill other people, they also act to cause chaos.and disrupt civil life. The Tea party people showed themselves willing to use terrorist tactics when they disrupted the town hall meetings on health care via shouting down and attempted to intimidate speakers with no regard for the actual arguments. This whole budget deficit fiasco was a perfect example of how the Tea Party uses terrorist tactics to control the political dialogue. I see no difference between their behavior and that of thuggery.

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