Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

ANDREW BREITBART ADDRESSING TEA PARTY FAITHFUL PROTESTING TEACHER UNION DEMANDS IN MADISON, WI

Updates 2/20/11 - #1  Amazing!  Medical doctor mingles among Madison union crowd handing out sick leave excuses  (Video)  #2 Jonathan Martin & Ben Smith - Why the showdown is so consequential.

Breitbart's short talk is well worth viewing.

“America is going to be community-organized no more,” Breitbart pledged, to cheers. “This is an existential battle; it’s the battle of our times.”    “This is history,” he said. “We are going to let the American people know, in every single state, that we have every governor and every legislators’ back.” (HT: Robert Costa at the Corner)

Addressing the demonstrating teachers he said, "So many people homeschool in this country because they don't trust your moral compass any more.  If this were such a sacrosanct argument, "workers' rights," who do you think these people are [Tea Party faithful]?  These are workers, too!  And they are taxpayers!

EUROPEAN REPORTING ON AMERICAN TEA PARTY FARCICALLY INACCURATE

The leftist European press does a terrible job reporting on the American political scene.  Tea Party reporting is so bad as to be scandalous.   British writer Daniel Hannan says Tea Partiers

are generally portrayed either as a gaggle of stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men or as a KKK lynchmob.  A typical column in Britain's Guardian newspaper last month described them as 'a movement most of whose emergent stars would appear to be better suited to prison or lunatic asylums.'

Who of us doesn't find that disgusting?  Hannan says further,

At the annual Conservative Party conference last week, I discovered that several delegates had no idea that the tea party was campaigning for smaller government. Such is the media coverage that even many Tories believe that it is essentially a fringe of irreconcilables who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge a mixed-race president.

Germany's Der Spiegel is no better.  (HT: Drudge)  Journalist Klaus Brinkbaumer writes of

America's hate-mongers, gun freaks and Tea Party demagogues who first compare Obama to Hitler and then minutes later to Stalin. They are people so filled with vitriol they can no longer think straight -- people like television presenter Glenn Beck, who says that putting the common good first is "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany." Beck has millions of followers, and appears in public with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, the darling of the Tea Party movement, who gleefully pronounces Obama's middle name Hussein as if it were a naughty, menacing word.

Me: Don't expect Europeans to understand America or the Tea Party movement.  With reporting like this, it's no wonder they remain deceived and clueless.   

WHAT KEEPS THE LEFT FROM UNDERSTANDING THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT?

Education.  Or the lack thereof.  Peter Berkowitz makes important points:

[...]  "Leading history departments have emphasized social history and issues of race, class and gender at the expense of constitutional history, diplomatic history and military history.

Neither professors of political science nor of history have made a priority of instructing students in the founding principles of American constitutional government. Nor have they taught about the contest between the progressive vision and the conservative vision that has characterized American politics since Woodrow Wilson (then a political scientist at Princeton) helped launch the progressive movement in the late 19th century by arguing that the Constitution had become obsolete and hindered democratic reform.

Then there are the proliferating classes in practical ethics and moral reasoning. These expose students to hypothetical conundrums involving individuals in surreal circumstances suddenly facing life and death decisions, or present contentious public policy questions and explore the range of respectable progressive opinions for resolving them. Such exercises may sharpen students' ability to argue. They do little to teach about self-government.

They certainly do not teach about the virtues, or qualities of mind and character, that enable citizens to shoulder their political responsibilities and prosper amidst the opportunities and uncertainties that freedom brings. Nor do they teach the beliefs, practices and associations that foster such virtues and those that endanger them.

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

Me:  The failure of higher education is mind-bending.  If anyone sought to strategize on how to destroy a nation, one could hardly produce a more negative effect than the teaching of the past two generations.  I'll have to return to this subject another time.

HOW TEA PARTY ORGANIZES WITHOUT LEADERS

Jonathan Rauch has written a fascinating account.   Tea party activists utilize a truly radical decentralized approach to political organizing.  Rauch's article carries a short video explanation as well.  Excerpt:

From Washington's who's-in-charge-here perspective, the tea party model seems, to use Wildman's word, bizarre. Perplexed journalists keep looking for the movement's leaders, which is like asking to meet the boss of the Internet. Baffled politicians and lobbyists can't find anyone to negotiate with. "We can be hard to work with, because we're confusing," Meckler acknowledges. "We're constantly fighting against the traditional societal pressure to become a top-down organization." So why would anyone want to form this kind of group, or network, or hive, or starfish, or lava flow, or whatever it is?

QUICK TAKES

Daniel Pipes - "In Europe, Remorse Has Turned to Masochism"  - On the perversity of self-hatred.  Good analysis!

Dennis Prager - "Why We Hear about "White" Tea Parties."  The Left sees the world through the prism of race, gender, and class, rather than through the moral prism of right and wrong.

Thomas Sowell - "Misusing History."   Poisonous distortions in the selective filtering of facts.

EUROPEAN READERS NEED TO READ DR. ZERO TO UNDERSTAND THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT IN THE USA

Read Dr. Zero's article and you will grimace to see how European writers (at least many of them), don't have a clue what the Tea Party movement in the USA is all about.  Consequently, European readers will be hopelessly mislead by trusting such reporters.  Dr. Zero's article, on the other hand, offers accurate and insightful analysis.

9/12 TAXPAYER TEA PARTY MARCH ON WASHINGTON, D.C.

Update 9/13/09 - London's Daily Mail offers lots of pictures and good coverage.

(Original Post) - Mark Henninger has great coverage with terrific photos.  Michelle Malkin has  excellent coverage as well.  And check out this site which is replete with many good links, including a video of Tea Partyers drowning out a CNN reporter.

All in all a stunning turn out!  Here's coverage from the Washington Post.  (Better than I expected).

TAX DAY BECOMES PROTEST DAY: HOW THE TEA PARTIES COULD CHANGE AMERICAN POLITICS

Update 4/17/09 - Jonah Goldberg answers the complaints of liberals.

Update:  Click the "continue reading" line below for photos from Asheville, NC

Glenn Reynolds wrote a great article about the Tea Parties being staged in communities across America today.

Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies -- dubbed "tea parties" -- to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending. There is no political party behind these rallies, no grand right-wing conspiracy, not even a 501(c) group like MoveOn.org.

So who's behind the Tax Day tea parties? Ordinary folks who are using the power of the Internet to organize.  [more . . ]

See also Michelle Malkin for scores of photos.