Monte Kuligowski
What explains the left's affinity for OWS and abhorrence for the Tea Party?
By Monte Kuligowski
The 99ers, which more accurately are 22ers, have no coalescing message other than a desire for a central command-and-control government, whether nationally or globally. In other words, they share a kindred spirit of redistributive fairness with our puerile president. Initially we saw the Muslim Brotherhood uprising and now with the Wall Street Spring, Barack Obama is causing democracy to break out everywhere!
First, Barack Obama said the Wall Street Occupiers express "the frustration of the American people." Then, while honoring MLK at the dedication of the new memorial in Washington Obama channeled the late civil rights leader in support of the protesters: "Dr. King would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there."
That's interesting because I cannot seem to remember Obama proclaiming that the Tea Party protesters express the frustration of the American people. I do remember Obama leaving town to campaign for Obamacare in Minnesota on the day several hundred thousand Tea Party protesters descended on Washington in 2009 to make their voices heard. (They left the grounds so clean, maybe Obama never knew they were there.)
And, so far as I can recall Obama has never argued that Dr. King would want us to challenge the excesses of the federal government without demonizing those who work there.
Maybe that's because Obama was complicit in trying to demonize the Tea Party, leading the way in the immature art of vile name calling. Reporting for the Atlantic Wire, Jared Keller writes:
[Jake] Tapper comes across a November 30, 2009 interview in which Obama declared that the unanimous vote of House Republicans against the stimulus bills "set the tenor for the whole year ... That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans." Obama's use of the term "tea-bagger," often deployed mockingly by news outlets, surprises Tapper. "Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations," he reports.
In light of that, maybe it's not surprising that Barack Obama has never denounced or apologized for the revolting words of union boss, Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., which were directed at the Tea Party:
We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war.
President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march... Everybody here's got a vote...Let's take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.
Those words were from Obama's recent Labor Day Speech in Detroit. Hoffa Jr. warmed up the crowd before Obama took over the podium. There is little doubt that when Obama addressed the same crowd he was aware of Hoffa's hate rhetoric; yet Hoffa got a free pass and gets one to this day.
Tellingly, Obama views Tea Party citizens as his "enemies." Of course, so do the rest of the far left and its media.
We've heard from the left that the Tea Party consists of an angry mob of racially motivated bigots who are the equivalent of al Qaida terrorists. Running with the baseless narrative, the president himself asserted that race is a "key component" of the Tea Party protests. The vice president likened Tea Party participants to "terrorists."
During the debt ceiling debate, Bloomberg's Margret Carlson said the Tea Party people effectively "strapped explosives to the Capitol" wanting to "burn the place down."
Maxine Waters (D-CA), an intellectual giant of the Democrat Party succinctly sums up how the Obama Left really feels about the patriotic movement: "The Tea Party can go straight to hell."
One cannot help but noticing the disparity between the irrational animus of the left and what the Tea Party actually stands for.
The Tea Party represents vintage America's time-tested principles on fiscal responsibility. The Tea Party consists of Republicans, Independents and even old-style Democrats. It arose spontaneously in response to the spending madness of Obama, Reid and Pelosi; in the midst of Obama's frenzied rush to pass trillion dollar bills with thousands of unread pages. Its message to Washington was and is: get back to the Constitution, cut spending and let's live within our means.
What's to hate about that? In a sane America, there would be absolutely nothing controversial about the Tea Party. Its message would be celebrated — even by the Democrat Party.
In his exceptional piece explaining the spirit behind the left's assault on traditional culture, David Kupelian describes the Tea Party:
When I see a tea party scene with a patriot dressed up as George Washington, or a soccer mom with her kids holding homemade signs saying "God bless America," or a grandmother thoughtfully picking up litter after the rally so the city's maintenance crew won't have much to do, I like to think of these good folks as characters right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Of course, many residing in the parallel universe of our country's Left Nation don't exactly wax nostalgic over Rockwell's portrayal of traditional America. Kupelian notes that there "is a growing and highly influential segment of our society that thinks normal, 'Ozzie and Harriet,' traditional-minded Americans are evil."
"The irrational hatred toward Sarah Palin," writes Kupelian, "cannot be explained in the usual terms of politics and ideology. The traditional divide of 'liberal versus conservative' or 'Democrat versus Republican' cannot explain such dark, almost other-worldly expressions as 'I hope she dies gnashing her teeth' or death threats against the Palins' children."
We are not witnessing the politics of your father's (or depending on age, your grandfather's) Democrat Party.
Kupelian observes that those who are given to the new morality shriek like vampires from the light of traditional morality. They are repelled because the light exposes what they have become.
Still, on its face, good versus evil doesn't explain the left's base hatred of the Tea Party. It may explain, for example, the left's abhorrence of Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council. Many on the left hate Christianity and its moral absolutes, but why harbor irrational hatred over fiscal responsibility?
If the Tea Party preached a religious-based message the dichotomy would make sense. But, the Tea Party is about fiscal conservatism not religious conservatism (there are religious conservatives in the movement, of course, but so far its message has been limited to debt and spending issues).
Even with that being the case, we have to understand that the left's repulsion of the Tea Party is nevertheless based on morality.
Titanic spending and taxing initiatives of the federal government are the fundamentals of the new collective morality of the left. The centralized federal government is looked to as the savior of the masses. Part of the moral construct of the new secular religion involves the federal government taking from the "rich" and spreading the wealth to the poor. To the new left, it's a matter of morality for the government to share the earnings of private citizens in a way that is "fair."
An apostle of the left, George Lakoff, provided some clues in early 2009 in his piece, "The Obama Code," as to what the election of Obama would produce. As a linguistics professor Lakoff informed that on the campaign trail Obama communicated his "moral vision" in code. Tellingly:
The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.
Obama's moral system and statism (or what our founders would call tyranny) are interdependent concepts.
At the heart of the problem is the very foundation of modern and postmodern liberalism: A confusion of jurisdiction between government and private enterprise. Almost everyone agrees that religious teaching says we should help the poor among us. Traditionalists believe we have an individual responsibility which has nothing to do with government. In spite of the Constitution, progressives believe we have a collective responsibility which can only be met by government.
Consequently, the left hates the Tea Party and loves the Wall Street Occupiers.
© Monte Kuligowski
October 24, 2011
The 99ers, which more accurately are 22ers, have no coalescing message other than a desire for a central command-and-control government, whether nationally or globally. In other words, they share a kindred spirit of redistributive fairness with our puerile president. Initially we saw the Muslim Brotherhood uprising and now with the Wall Street Spring, Barack Obama is causing democracy to break out everywhere!
First, Barack Obama said the Wall Street Occupiers express "the frustration of the American people." Then, while honoring MLK at the dedication of the new memorial in Washington Obama channeled the late civil rights leader in support of the protesters: "Dr. King would want us to challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing those who work there."
That's interesting because I cannot seem to remember Obama proclaiming that the Tea Party protesters express the frustration of the American people. I do remember Obama leaving town to campaign for Obamacare in Minnesota on the day several hundred thousand Tea Party protesters descended on Washington in 2009 to make their voices heard. (They left the grounds so clean, maybe Obama never knew they were there.)
And, so far as I can recall Obama has never argued that Dr. King would want us to challenge the excesses of the federal government without demonizing those who work there.
Maybe that's because Obama was complicit in trying to demonize the Tea Party, leading the way in the immature art of vile name calling. Reporting for the Atlantic Wire, Jared Keller writes:
[Jake] Tapper comes across a November 30, 2009 interview in which Obama declared that the unanimous vote of House Republicans against the stimulus bills "set the tenor for the whole year ... That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans." Obama's use of the term "tea-bagger," often deployed mockingly by news outlets, surprises Tapper. "Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations," he reports.
In light of that, maybe it's not surprising that Barack Obama has never denounced or apologized for the revolting words of union boss, Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., which were directed at the Tea Party:
We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war.
President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march... Everybody here's got a vote...Let's take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.
Those words were from Obama's recent Labor Day Speech in Detroit. Hoffa Jr. warmed up the crowd before Obama took over the podium. There is little doubt that when Obama addressed the same crowd he was aware of Hoffa's hate rhetoric; yet Hoffa got a free pass and gets one to this day.
Tellingly, Obama views Tea Party citizens as his "enemies." Of course, so do the rest of the far left and its media.
We've heard from the left that the Tea Party consists of an angry mob of racially motivated bigots who are the equivalent of al Qaida terrorists. Running with the baseless narrative, the president himself asserted that race is a "key component" of the Tea Party protests. The vice president likened Tea Party participants to "terrorists."
During the debt ceiling debate, Bloomberg's Margret Carlson said the Tea Party people effectively "strapped explosives to the Capitol" wanting to "burn the place down."
Maxine Waters (D-CA), an intellectual giant of the Democrat Party succinctly sums up how the Obama Left really feels about the patriotic movement: "The Tea Party can go straight to hell."
One cannot help but noticing the disparity between the irrational animus of the left and what the Tea Party actually stands for.
The Tea Party represents vintage America's time-tested principles on fiscal responsibility. The Tea Party consists of Republicans, Independents and even old-style Democrats. It arose spontaneously in response to the spending madness of Obama, Reid and Pelosi; in the midst of Obama's frenzied rush to pass trillion dollar bills with thousands of unread pages. Its message to Washington was and is: get back to the Constitution, cut spending and let's live within our means.
What's to hate about that? In a sane America, there would be absolutely nothing controversial about the Tea Party. Its message would be celebrated — even by the Democrat Party.
In his exceptional piece explaining the spirit behind the left's assault on traditional culture, David Kupelian describes the Tea Party:
When I see a tea party scene with a patriot dressed up as George Washington, or a soccer mom with her kids holding homemade signs saying "God bless America," or a grandmother thoughtfully picking up litter after the rally so the city's maintenance crew won't have much to do, I like to think of these good folks as characters right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Of course, many residing in the parallel universe of our country's Left Nation don't exactly wax nostalgic over Rockwell's portrayal of traditional America. Kupelian notes that there "is a growing and highly influential segment of our society that thinks normal, 'Ozzie and Harriet,' traditional-minded Americans are evil."
"The irrational hatred toward Sarah Palin," writes Kupelian, "cannot be explained in the usual terms of politics and ideology. The traditional divide of 'liberal versus conservative' or 'Democrat versus Republican' cannot explain such dark, almost other-worldly expressions as 'I hope she dies gnashing her teeth' or death threats against the Palins' children."
We are not witnessing the politics of your father's (or depending on age, your grandfather's) Democrat Party.
Kupelian observes that those who are given to the new morality shriek like vampires from the light of traditional morality. They are repelled because the light exposes what they have become.
Still, on its face, good versus evil doesn't explain the left's base hatred of the Tea Party. It may explain, for example, the left's abhorrence of Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council. Many on the left hate Christianity and its moral absolutes, but why harbor irrational hatred over fiscal responsibility?
If the Tea Party preached a religious-based message the dichotomy would make sense. But, the Tea Party is about fiscal conservatism not religious conservatism (there are religious conservatives in the movement, of course, but so far its message has been limited to debt and spending issues).
Even with that being the case, we have to understand that the left's repulsion of the Tea Party is nevertheless based on morality.
Titanic spending and taxing initiatives of the federal government are the fundamentals of the new collective morality of the left. The centralized federal government is looked to as the savior of the masses. Part of the moral construct of the new secular religion involves the federal government taking from the "rich" and spreading the wealth to the poor. To the new left, it's a matter of morality for the government to share the earnings of private citizens in a way that is "fair."
An apostle of the left, George Lakoff, provided some clues in early 2009 in his piece, "The Obama Code," as to what the election of Obama would produce. As a linguistics professor Lakoff informed that on the campaign trail Obama communicated his "moral vision" in code. Tellingly:
The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.
Obama's moral system and statism (or what our founders would call tyranny) are interdependent concepts.
At the heart of the problem is the very foundation of modern and postmodern liberalism: A confusion of jurisdiction between government and private enterprise. Almost everyone agrees that religious teaching says we should help the poor among us. Traditionalists believe we have an individual responsibility which has nothing to do with government. In spite of the Constitution, progressives believe we have a collective responsibility which can only be met by government.
Consequently, the left hates the Tea Party and loves the Wall Street Occupiers.
© Monte Kuligowski
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