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!””

  1. Otteray Scribe1, August 4, 2011 at 11:54 pm

    “Sockpuppetry is designed to mislead. That is a diplomatic way of saying “lying.” If there is another reason for creating a sockpuppet, feel free to enlighten me.”
    ———————————–
    protection of self and loved ones whilst not kowtowing to intimidation, threats and general nasty, incivil behaviors…it’s also why I don’t borrow money from gangstas

  2. gbk That is true but the downgrade is probably going to come because the US no longer has the ability to raise revenue thanks to the make-up of congress.

  3. @ Swarthmore mom

    A substantial cut to our “never on the table” defense budget might help too, so might eliminating all the no-bid contracts the DoD is so fond of now.

  7. what is wrong w/Maggie Simian?

    what has happened to this blog?

    Slarti are you going off to a private room with your glass of scotch and a pipe or something?

  8. @Elaine

    I’ve been waiting for the thread to settle down before extending my congratulations to you for becoming a grandmother. I wish you a happy and rewarding future with your grandchild.

  9. SwM,

    The back lash is going to be huge …

    Made more so if pension funds etc. have to dump a large percentage of their T-bills

    “We are not terrorist” … oh, really?

  10. Rafflaw you mentioned

    puzzling,
    I have been sitting on the sideline during this childish concern that you and others have on Gene’s alleged alter egos,

    I haven’t commented on the Gene / BIL controversy.

    You mentioned that I described the post The New Debt Deal May Cost Up To 1.8 Million Jobs! as partisan, when in fact there was bipartisan consensus on the bill. That’s a fair criticism, it probably should not have been on the list. I stand corrected.

  12. NoWay:

    I have never committed such a breach, intentionally or unintentionally. If you nonetheless have such concerns, perhaps you should post on a different site. I am not about to be suckered into attempting to prove a negative.

  13. What the tea party did to unemployed people in Washington last week and has done in Wisconsin to the unions in prior months has politicized more people. Refusing to raise revenue will cost millions of jobs. There is a ripple effect.

  14. NoWay,

    “Please don’t try to play me as a fool. I am not.

    It’s pretty obvious that whomever posted as Buddha Is Laughing used his email address.”

    I told you how the program works. If you have an issue with that, take it up with the WordPress people. The facts are as I told you: I was already signed into WordPress for other reasons. WordPress does comment indexing. It has quite a few tools for content and comment management. If you doubt this, then the only fool here is you and my playing you for one is not required to facilitate the matter.

    What is pretty obvious is that you don’t know what you are talking about as that address you just provided was neither the address used in the fake Buddha Is Laughing post done on this thread nor is it the e-mail address shown by WordPress for the 10 or 20 most recent posts that I looked at for comparison purposes (which are consistent) instead of some post from two years ago. In addition, what Otteray Scribe says about cloning an avatar is true. It’s quite easy. I also didn’t rely upon e-mail information alone, but both e-mail and IP comparison. The IP addresses did not match either. On the issue of Buddha Is Laughing, you seem to know a lot more about his identity than I do if you’re tracking him as long ago as 2009.

    2009. Seriously? You really do have too much time on your hands.

    Might I suggest that if you want to continue your “Who is Buddha” rants, then your friends have set up a blog where you can rant and speculate to your heart’s content. Personally, I’m more interested in Maggie’s question: “who helped dee dee moore bury mr shakespeare?” It’s just as irrelevant as your apparent obsession, but a far more interesting question. I’m also going to suggest that you learn a lesson from what has already transpired here. There are far more relevant and pressing topics of discussion than your vendetta to be had here.

  15. puzzling,
    I have been sitting on the sideline during this childish concern that you and others have on Gene’s alleged alter egos, but I was taken back by your listing at 2:33pm lists my posting about the debt deal might cost the economy 1.8 million jobs. Please explain to me how a debt deal that was agreed to by both Dems and Republicans and discussing it is partisan? Every Rep. or Senator that voted for that bill will be responsible for the negative impact on the economy and any loss of jobs. Listing articles does not prove any point of partisanship. I try very hard on my articles, to refrain from being partisan. I will respond to others articles and posts without restraint, but I try to keep my articles as non-partisan as possible. If you are so upset at the alleged partisanship of this site, you can do something about it.

  18. “When I make a contribution, I enter the site, click on “new comment,” type my comment and click on “publish.” I am grateful when I am able to accomplish that without a problem. I then exit the site. I have no interest in nosing around for personal information about anyone else and frankly, I wouldn’t know how to go about it even were I so inclined.”

    Mike Appleton,

    It makes no difference what you do or do not do after logging on using Professor Turley’s credentials. What matters is what you have been given access to. An untentional breach in security is still a breach in security. Don’t you agree?

Comments are closed.