LTC Allen West on Washington, D.C., illegal immigration

Florida congressional candidate retired Lt. Col. Allen West:

VDH: Where did the Tea-Party anger come from?

The latest from Victor Davis Hanson:

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.) ...

Read the rest here.

Smith: A Meditation on the Tea Party

Charles Hugh Smith gives us his thoughts on the Tea Party movement. A snippet:

The status quo political powers are mystified by the Tea Party; we're giving them unemployment, tax credits and healthcare/sickcare coverage; we're buying them off with the same entitlements we offer our other constituencies; why aren't they silent and complicit like everyone else? Why don't they just take the swag and shut up like everyone else?

Lost in their moral rot, the status quo "leadership" cannot understand the Tea Party's anger. The Elites do not understand why the Tea Party rebels don't have the self-serving sense to just take the swag and go back to watching TV. What fires their enthusiasm for rebellion?

The British Parliament was equally confounded in 1773. The Colonists are well-off, and protected by the Empire; what is their problem? ...

Read it here.

Will you stand with the Constitution, or with tyranny?

So asks Nate, a black conservative (or as the nutballs over at MSNBC might say, "a differently colored racist"):

It's the Constitution, stupid: What the Tea Partiers really want

From Ron Futrell at Big Journalism:

... Saturday on CNN, Don Lemon had political consultant David Gergen on and they wrestled over whether the movement was racist because they only saw one black person in the crowd at the Sarah Palin speech before the Tea Party Convention. They should’ve invited Kenneth Gladney on the show and asked him. Gladney was the man who was smacked around by SEIU thugs at a Tea Party rally in St. Louis. The activist old media doesn’t know Gladney’s story because he’s a conservative minority Tea Party participant and they don’t want that story. I met Gladney at a Tea Party rally in Las Vegas and found him to be a fine man with a fascinating story. I bought a couple flags from him that I proudly hang in my office. The activist old media might want to ask him what this movement is about – warning – be prepared, he will give you the right answer, but it will not be the answer you want to hear. I know, I asked him.

With that, let me tell you what the Tea Party movement wants. I will make it simple and straightforward and easy for all to understand — I will put it in all CAPS and type slowly:

THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT WANTS AMERICA TO RETURN TO CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLES.

There it is. I said it, one simple sentence.

The Democrats and its activist old media want to find “leaders” for the Tea Party movement. They feel that the only worthwhile political movement must have direction from a man (or woman—but mainly men). They saw the movements led by Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini and feel that there must be a dynamic personality for people to follow in order for it to be significant. That same game plan was followed in the 2008 presidential election: find a dynamic leader who fits with the values of larger, more intrusive government, and follow him.

They also want a “leader” of the Tea Party movement so that they can destroy that person. ...

Read it here. The political classes and their media lackeys have been desperately trying to discredit the Tea Party movement. Key to that strategy is identifying and destroying its leaders. Once those leaders are identified, will anyone be surprised if SWAT teams of "investigative reporters" are deployed to rummage though their trash in hopes of finding some salacious detail around which to wrap a campaign of disinformation and deceit to destroy that person and his or her family? If you doubt that will be the old time media approach, just ask Sarah Palin.

The key to the Tea Party's resiliency will be its ability to remain distributed, hydra-like -- cut off one head and two will take its place. Centralization in this case will likely be a death sentence to the movement, because centralization is susceptible to an effective decapitation strategy. Distributed organizational structures, with elements capable of autonomous action towards their strategic objectives, have an innate resiliency to this type of attack.