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