Who are the "libertarian" Tea Party Puppet Masters?

dmcdd wrote: The federal government's interests are not my interests. They're the largest, most power hungry corporation around.

There's truth in that, and it's because the government is more or less owned by corporate interests.

It's totally absurd to talk about "taking back government" while simultaneously supporting the agenda of big business.

You want to take back America? Then cut the monopolies and oligarchies off at the knees first.

They only giggle when the Tea Partiers rattle their rubber swords while at the same time voting in their best advocates.

AV so what is your point? Is it that rich people put their money into causes they believe in? I think we all knew that. Is it that the Koch brothers have been long time consistent libertarians with a history of putting their money into causes they care about? (I read that in the article you linked) Is it maybe the shock that the Tea Party movement is not a GOP sponsored movement but is maybe more libertarian in nature. That’s not to say that the GOP is doing everything it can to co-opt and take control of the Tea Party movement.

AspenValley wrote:

dmcdd wrote: The federal government's interests are not my interests. They're the largest, most power hungry corporation around.

There's truth in that, and it's because the government is more or less owned by corporate interests.

It's totally absurd to talk about "taking back government" while simultaneously supporting the agenda of big business.

You want to take back America? Then cut the monopolies and oligarchies off at the knees first.

They only giggle when the Tea Partiers rattle their rubber swords while at the same time voting in their best advocates.

First, get the government under control. Then use the properly sized and focused government to eliminate the corporate sleezes.

One step at a time, AV, one step at a time.

The last refuge of a liberal

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, August 27, 2010; A21

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the "bitter" people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging "to guns or religion or" -- this part is less remembered -- "antipathy toward people who aren't like them."

That's a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama's social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president's proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays -- particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration's pretense that we are at war with nothing more than "violent extremists" of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" -- blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, "just downright mean"?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 33_pf.html

dmcdd wrote:

AspenValley wrote:

dmcdd wrote: The federal government's interests are not my interests. They're the largest, most power hungry corporation around.

There's truth in that, and it's because the government is more or less owned by corporate interests.

It's totally absurd to talk about "taking back government" while simultaneously supporting the agenda of big business.

You want to take back America? Then cut the monopolies and oligarchies off at the knees first.

They only giggle when the Tea Partiers rattle their rubber swords while at the same time voting in their best advocates.

First, get the government under control. Then use the properly sized and focused government to eliminate the corporate sleezes.

One step at a time, AV, one step at a time.

That's just it. You aren't going to "get the government" under control so long as the monopolies control it. Because they own the media, they can control the message, they influence public opinion to believe they are voting in their own interests when in fact they are voting in the interests of the monopolies. And do not kid yourself that this happens "only" with mainstream candidates or only on the right or only on the left. It is happening ACROSS THE BOARD. The most obvious example, in fact, is the Tea Parties. People aligning themselves with this cause believe they are expressing their own thoughts and picking their own candidates. They need to think again. Unpleasant as it may be to realize you are being cynically manipulated, the alternative is to unwittingly march to the drum of the Puppet Masters.

No one becomes President, no one is being elected to Congress without the puppet strings being pulled by the extremely powerful. And that includes Barack Obama and the current Democratic congress. All the noise about left vs right is just part of the strategy of keeping people off balance enough and focused on the wrong things to see what is really going on.

Ever been to a magic show? They get you to look where they WANT you to look so you don't see how it is done. Same thing here, only multiplied by a million. It isn't even hard to do, not when they have the help of extensive research into manipulation and yes, what you might call brainwashing. They ought to know how to do it - the same methods that have pre-schoolers already "brand conscious" of the clothing they wear, the cereal they demand, work very well indeed in affecting people's political views and voting. WITHOUT THEM EVEN REALIZING THEY HAVE BEEN "SOLD". The real genius of it all is that they make people believe they are thinking their own thoughts, coming to their own conclusions, when in fact they are thinking and doing exactly what they have been conditioned to do.

I know most people will reject this theory outright. No one likes to believe they have been influenced in this way. But I tell you that once you admit the possibility, a heck of a lot of what seems to make no sense about American politics suddenly does make sense.

AV, the TEA Party expert, how many meetings, meet the candidates, etc. have you attended to achieve your lofty expert status? Or is it based solely on leftist blogs? On this and the other site, you have stated the TEA Party was a Republican think tank idea, yet now its a billionaire libertarian brothers function. Please settle on one BS theory, and don't consider that people of more than one ideology are simply fed up with the disconnect between government and the people, the two party system of entrenched politicians and bureaucrats spending faster and faster, without regard to the future of this country. But above all else, don't get involved, just whine about what you know so little of.

AV:

So we are to break the hold of corporate interests!!! So from who do we get jobs, and products we need? It sounds good, but the Right and the Left and the Libertarians, according to you are no good. How do you propose we have a nation without these large wicked corporations you talk about?

To others who have complained about our military costs, how do we protect ourselves and our interests? It seems so easy to lay blame, without solutions.

HEARTLESS wrote: AV, the TEA Party expert, how many meetings, meet the candidates, etc. have you attended to achieve your lofty expert status? Or is it based solely on leftist blogs? On this and the other site, you have stated the TEA Party was a Republican think tank idea, yet now its a billionaire libertarian brothers function. Please settle on one BS theory, and don't consider that people of more than one ideology are simply fed up with the disconnect between government and the people, the two party system of entrenched politicians and bureaucrats spending faster and faster, without regard to the future of this country. But above all else, don't get involved, just whine about what you know so little of.

You've made a pretty reckless assumption there in deciding I've never attended any of these events. In fact, I've probably attended more than some of you who say you are Tea Partiers, because it appears that some of you think that watching accounts of them on Fox News is the same as "being involved".

As to your second fuzzy point....I suppose in your mind it is not possible for an idea to come from one place and funding for it to come from another? Or for the same ideas to be held by two different groups or individuals. Wow, that's funny, because I sure see lots of different groups sponsoring political ads for the same parties/candidates.

I don't doubt for a minute that many of the people actually attending these events come for the reasons you state, but the motives of the organizers and the motives of the attendees and local organizers not only aren't necessarily the same, in this case they almost certainly aren't. I stand by my opinion of this movement, and that is that the people who are showing up are being used by powerful interests AGAINST their own interests. You're free to have your own opinion, but don't expect me to agree with it, particularly if it as poorly thought out as your statements in this post.

Nmysys wrote: AV:

So we are to break the hold of corporate interests!!! So from who do we get jobs, and products we need? It sounds good, but the Right and the Left and the Libertarians, according to you are no good. How do you propose we have a nation without these large wicked corporations you talk about?

To others who have complained about our military costs, how do we protect ourselves and our interests? It seems so easy to lay blame, without solutions.

I'm not anti-corporation (I own one) I'm anti-monopoly and anti-oligarchy. So "where would you get jobs" without them? From companies competing fairly in the open market instead of from the cartels and unaccountable international conglomerates we are at the mercy of now. Perhaps you need to go back and study a little economic history of this country. You would quickly see that huge trusts and monopolies had to be broken up before, and once they were, innovation and prosperity followed. But of course some of our leaders, because of pressure from would-be oligarchs, ignored those earlier lessons and created a climate where the same thing could happen again.

As for the military....we have let it grow too big and we have over reached in too many places. Our job is not policeman of the world, nor can we "protect our interests" solely by military means. If we don't rein it back soon it will eat us alive the way it ate the Soviet Union alive.