Here's a bit of thoughtful 'red meat' for the noncognoscenti Birkenstock'd babies who are the 'apparatchik' (and wanna-be 'nomenklatura') class of inveterate whiners about why America is so terrible ... This outlines things they'll never understand - and things that Tea Party activists can't forget ...

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http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/where-did-the-teaparty-anger-come-from/

Works And Days » Where Did The Tea-Party Anger Come From?

Why is the Angry Public so Angry?

I think we all know why the Tea Party movement arose — and why even the polls do not quite reflect the growing generic anger at incumbents in general, and our elites in particular.

Anger at Everything?

There is a growing sense that government is what I would call a new sort of Versailles — a vast cadre of royal state and federal workers that apparently assumes immunity from the laws of economics that affect everyone else.

In the olden days, we the public sort of expected that the L.A. Unified School District paid the best and got the worst results. We knew that you didn’t show up at the DMV if you could help it. A trip to the emergency room was to descend into Dante’s Inferno. We accepted all that in other words, and went on with our business.

But at some point — perhaps triggered by the radical increase in the public sector under Obama, the militancy of the SEIU, or the staggering debts — the public snapped and has had it with whining union officials and their political enablers who always threaten to cut off police and fire protection if we object that there are too many unproductive, unnecessary, but too highly paid employees at the Social Service office. In short, sometime in the last ten years public employees were directly identified with most of what is now unsustainable in the U.S. The old idea that a public servant gave up a competitive salary for job security was redefined as hitting the jackpot.

The Tea Party is not over

There is another Tea Party theme that those who play by the rules are being had, from both the top and bottom. The Wall Street bailouts and financial help to the big banks smelled of cronyism, made worse by the notion that liberal “reformers” like Obama got more from Big Money than did the usual insider Republican aristocrats. (The continual left-wing trend of wealthy elites is an untold story, but it suggests a sort of noble disdain: “We make so much that we are immune from the hurt of higher taxes, but like expanded entitlements as a sort of penance for our privilege.”)

Emblematic of the anger at both top and bottom was the 2008 meltdown: those who had not played by the rules still got their mortgages, then defaulted, and left the taxpayer with their bills; those who made the loans and profited without risk took the bailout money, and left us with the cleanup. Those in between with underwater mortgages and higher taxes pay the tab.

We are not 19th-century poor

Somehow we forget that we are in the 21st century with our multitude of cell-phones, laptops, no-down-payment new car leases, big-screen TVs, cheap food, and accessible rent that have permeated all society and given the proverbial underclass appurtenances that only the very rich of the 1960s could have dreamed of. Yet the Dickensian rhetoric has only intensified. There is rarely any acknowledgment of the public’s investment in anti-poverty programs or of its efforts to promote social equality. Instead, an overtaxed electorate is constantly reminded of its unfairness and its moral shortcomings. (I just left a multimillion dollar ICU unit in Fresno, where I was visiting a relative. Over a third of the visitors there did not seem to speak English, and so I was impressed by the public generosity that extends such sophisticated care to those who that day seemed largely to have arrived here recently from Mexico. The notion that a visitor to Mexico could walk into such a unit in Mexico City and get instant, free — and quality — care is, well, inconceivable. Yet politicians talk of our heartlessness, not our generosity.)

Existential Blues

There is a sense of futility: new higher taxes won’t lower the deficit and won’t improve infrastructure or public service. Much of it will go to redistributive plans that, the middle believes, will only, fairly or not, [b[exacerbate social problems. In California there is a sense (born out by statistics) that we lack a civil and humane public culture brought on by two often neglected facts: a small cadre of overpaid public employees ensures that we don’t have the money for continuance of basic public services; and, second, we feel our tax money is going to redistributive entitlements rather than focused on improving a collapsing infrastructure of dams, canals, freeways, airports, and trains. The idea that a California could ever again build its share of the transcontinental railroad, recreate its Sierra network of dams, copy the Central Valley Water Project, or match the 1960s standards of the UC and CSU university systems is laughable. (But we surely could write a position paper on why the above are either ecologically unsound or in fact counterproductive.) In short, our intent now is not achievement, but equality by any means necessary.

Law — what law?

There is an anger that the law is now malleable. Creditors are bumped at Chrysler, violating contractual agreements. We hear of rumors that cap and trade and amnesty can be accomplished by administrative fiat rather than by law. Of course, BP is demonic in its Gulf performance, but where does Obama obtain the legal right to demand $20 billion in confiscated capital (why then not $50,100, or 200 billion?).

Federal immigration law — as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis recently demonstrated — is not to be enforced, since it is now a race/class/gender issue, or rather a question of demography as seen in purely political terms. Most accept that “government” goes after the misdemeanors of the law-biding citizen to justify its existence, while ignoring the felonies of the lawbreaker, whose enforcement requires expense, and occasional danger. (Why else would the federal government declare some border spots as “no-go” areas in the style of Sadr City?). Are we in Jacobin times, when revolutionary fervor determines which laws are enforced and which not, as if their validity is a political matter alone?

Where's all the cry's of racism we usually hear?

Give her time ... ummm, I mean 'Give 'em time' ...

isn't a tea party something that little girls have?

Confused, are we ... ?

Almost 24 hours and no racist cries. She errrr ummm they mucst be losing their touch.

Nah. It's an event where people throw tea into Boston Harbor to protest the crimes of the British Monarchy.

I guess they forgot that the British stopped coming hence FIREWORKS pyromania at its finest....WOOHOOO

This is making me think of a part in the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, you go down on him and when your done I want you to say oh what a lovely tea party.

then you don't think the 20 billion is a good thing? all the people that are losing their houses and lives and everything else because of a company that should or shouldn't be drilling there in the first place shouldn't be compensated? i disagree, i think they should be compensated, and any drilling off our coasts should be done by us, not a foreign company good job obama, let bp pay for their own mess.

No, I DON'T think the $20BN is a 'good thing'. If you can tell me precisely HOW the 'Obama Shakedown' differs from the 'Sharpton / Jackson Shakedown', I'll listen ... but it's THUG POLITICS. There are political methods by which private firms can legally be made to comply with existing laws of the country in which they're doing business, but this 'Obamacide' approach is completely EXTRA-LEGAL and UNCONSTITUTIONAL. His action has NO Constitutional authority upon which to base it. It is CORRUPT. It is WRONG. Is the difference really that hard to see ... ?

As for having familiarity with 'compensation', yes, I have that. I've been flooded 2.5 times (twice by hurricane, once by training rain) during my 61 years in New Orleans. I am not a stranger to this. Yes, I want to see the people in my state get compensation. NO, I do NOT want to see THUG POLITICS and EXTRA-CONSTITUTIONAL methods used in tin-pot socialist dictatorships used to accomplish that. I also want to see ALL foreign drilling rigs doing business in OUR waters forced to be American-flagged, American-crewed, and subject to US Coast Guard inspections.

i can't see where it's illegal... BP did it without griping too much... if bush did it, would that of made you happy? just wondering

You either didn't read or didn't understand the distinctions I pointed out. Pity ...

maybe i didn't... but i do see you attacking a supposed "good thing" and then only naming black politicians that are trying to help...

" If you can tell me precisely HOW the 'Obama Shakedown' differs from the 'Sharpton / Jackson Shakedown',"

Holy crap! Almost four days now and no Racist calls...... I think im gonna faint from shock.

No, you've about saw the extent of our resident neocon chess piece's schtick. He pretty much only moves backwards and 10 spaces to the Far Right. He'll then assume the role of Mad Hatter at the Tea Party, trying to Sphinx you out with Tricky Dick Nixon commie talk.

What's really rich is the fact that the Tea Partiers have managed to get the one person on the planet who Harry Reid _can_ beat on the ticket in Nevada. In a lot of ways, the Tea Party is like those Sunday morning Get-Rich-Quick infomercials-- they have these pie-in-the-sky plans To Save Uh-merica(!) that won't work while their elite line their pockets at the expense of the rubes.


-Kerry O.

Gee. It's so nice to see people of the same mind come together to ignore reality ...

Y'all ever consider goin' all 'WWF' and doin' 'tag team' matches ... ?

It's really great to see how every point in the post EXCEPT the THUG SHAKEDOWN of a PRIVATE BUSINESS is ignored. 'S okay, tho' ... some folks just can't focus.