
 |
|
May 22, 2013
John Thorne:
They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman
May 20, 2013
Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?
Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Jews Inducted into Rock Hall of Fame; Anton Yelchin co-stars in New "Trek" film; Kutcher (but not Kunis) visits Israel; Jewish TV Star Praises Jewish Rap Star
The Kosher Gourmet by Cathy Pollak: WARNING: This WALNUT CAKE WITH PRALINE FROSTING, perfect for afternoon coffee, is addicting
May 13, 2013
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
|
| |
Jewish World Review
April 17, 2009
/ 23 Nisan 5769
Hail the tea bag, weapon of terror
By
Wesley Pruden
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
These are not your granny's tea parties. One tea party even panicked Secret Service bodyguards when a foolish tea-sipper threw a harmless tea bag over the White House fence.
"Tea-bag parties" erupted and "erupted" is the correct verb across the country on April 15, celebrated by joyous "progressive" taxpayers and loathed by everybody else as the day to report the intimate details of your life, along with cash, to the Internal Revenue Bureau (which the bureau insists that we call not a bureau but a "service"). Bureau or service, it's run by bureaucrats, not servants, and always the target of April ire.
More than 300, perhaps even 500 such tea parties broke out, at least one in every state, as demonstrations in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. These were eruptions not only against high taxes but against the way the Obama administration is determined to plunder the nation's wealth in behalf of mismanaged banks, bankrupt automobile manufacturers, greedy states and cities looking for handouts and anyone else who can think up a reason to tap the public till.
Benjamin Franklin, among others of the founding fathers, warned that the republic would survive until ordinary citizens learned to tap that public till. It looks like we're there.
The actual numbers are not big enough to frighten most politicians, certainly not a president or even a governor, but what scares the politicians is how the phenomenon seemed to come out of nowhere, with neither sponsoring organizations nor central command that makes tightly scripted demonstrations look spontaneous. Given time to steep, who knows how strong the brew might be.
The tea-baggers seem to be authentically nonpartisan; several tea parties pointedly declined offers by Republican officials, notably Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, to speak at rallies. "We've heard enough already from politicians," one California tea-bagger said. The lowly tea bag threatens to become a weapon of righteous terror.
"So what's behind the Tax Day tea parties?" asks Glenn Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal. "Ordinary folks, who are using the power of the Internet to organize. For a number of years, techno-geeks have been organizing 'flash crowds' groups of people, co-ordinated by texting or cell phone, who converge on a particular location and then do something silly, like the pillow fights that popped up in 50 cities earlier this month."
But tea parties are serious, constructive rages against how the government confiscates wealth and, after the bureaucrats take a big bite, regurgitates it back to towns, cities and states with specific and harshly enforced instructions on when and how to spend it.
Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, one of the first governors who "gets it," calls the tea parties a result of "the genuine frustration, the genuine concern, the genuine angst erupting all across the country" a revolt against federal arrogance to take it all, spend it all and do it all the government's way. The tea-baggers are persuaded that "printing money you don't have" is the recipe for disaster employed by Argentina and the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s, even in Zimbabwe this year. That should be a caution for everyone.
Most of the coverage in the mainstream media has been snarky and contemptuous, particularly by the cable-TV networks. The big mainstream newspapers have tried to ignore the tea parties: the Boston Globe finally found a small hole on an inside page to run a wire story about a tea party in Kentucky, ignoring a larger eruption in Boston. The intended implication was that the tea parties are merely the social life of unwashed Bible Belt bumpkins and hayseeds in the nation's backwoods. CNN's reporters complain that the tea parties are even "anti-CNN," though it's not clear why. CNN's disappearing audience suggests that being "anti-CNN" is no distinction, since nearly everybody is.
Carefully planned or not, the organizers of the tea parties are learning to focus rage for maximum effect. A thousand or even five thousand demonstrators can get lost on the Mall in Washington, but five hundred angry tea-baggers can terrorize easily frightened aldermen, even in big cities.
Organizers in Tucson, for example, intend to concentrate this fall on city council elections, and officials with edifice complexes in several cities have backed down from grandiose schemes to waste money in the face of angry taxpayers overwhelming council chambers. These are voters who so far constitute no recognizable "movement," but a popular uprising of people who actually took seriously a certain promise of hope and change.
They believed it, even if no one now in Washington did.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
Wesley Pruden Archives
© 2007 Wesley Pruden
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman

Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|