The American Spectator

Ken (Old Texican)| 2.7.10 @ 10:05AM

WHOO Boy!
I just watched Sarah's speech on C-Span/youtube.

I've tried to get the link right here, but you can find it at Breitbart "Big Government" website if I failed.
I hope each of you will watch something very special, and we can cuss and discuss over the next few days.
I have enjoyed wathing the MSM exploding heads this morning. Watch the speech yourselves and make the call.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....r_embedded

Nick| 2.7.10 @ 11:05AM

Ken,

Agreed!

I watched the speech last night. It was great.

I'll have to start setting aside some time so I can attend some local GOP meetings, so that I may do my part to infect the party with the Tea Party ethic.

If Michigan, and other states, don't restrict their respective primaries to only Republicans, the democrats are going to give us another McLame as out candidate.

Oldefarte| 2.7.10 @ 11:33AM

Republican politicians just need to KEEP IT IN THEIR PANTS, and to simply DO THEIR JOBS going forward. Bush made two huge mistakes----fighting convential warfare against foreign terrorists, and promoting a welfaric Medicare drug welfare benefit [although for the benefit of deserving seniors, it still increased the deficit/debt]. He should have Hiroshimoed the middle east [or threatened to] post 9/11/01, and should have done more to reduce the governmental expenses for deficit/debt reduction purposes. Reagan's problem was that, while instituting useful tax cuts like Bush, he didn't reduce the government's expenses [ built up the military, but added to the deficit/debt by doing so]. Republicans need to institute a type of contract with America and being implementing same. Government has gotten way to large/expensive, and the American people are faced with the financial tax bill for same. Just like ordinary Americans are now doing, government needs to go on a financial diet!!!!!

Margie| 2.7.10 @ 12:40PM

Hey folks,
Just watched Sarah. Wow~ did she look especially beautiful today! What a wonderful lady she truly is. She speaks for me. Thank you, Sarah for being the person that you are, and a comitted Christian woman.
All I have to say is, that 12% of undecideds that Mr. Bandow talks about, above.. guess which way they're gonna vote? The Left is losing, losing, losing! Thank God for conservatives like Sarah Palin. I love what she said about not letting any one "leader" try and co-opt the Tea Party movement. Great point. The Tea Party movement is US. We the People, the grass roots conservatives.

JR| 2.7.10 @ 7:22PM

The "Progressives" have finally brought us to the Tea Party movement. Both Republican and Democrat parties have both had presidents and countless foot soldiers in Congress that subscribed to the Progressive platform.

The Founders spent considerable time moderating democracy and limiting government to just several well defined responsiblities. The govt has grown so large now that decisions left to elected legislators are now delegated to faceless bureaucrats. Their rules/regs have the power of laws passed by congress, buth they are unelected and unaccountable.

This, I'm afraid, is what really needs to be overcome before anyone of Sarah's persuasion will be able to actually effect changes (other than trying to block particularly odious rules, etc.) that will restore our Constitution to its rightful place in America.

Deborah D| 2.8.10 @ 10:37AM

JR -- I believe you are correct. Let's hope the Republican Party takes heed of the Tea Parties and what their main thing is: get back to the Constitution.

You're absolutely right about the progressives as well. For those in need of a little background in what the progressive movement is all about, here's a good place to start: http://politicallyempowered.wo.....-founders/

S.L. Toddard| 2.7.10 @ 9:53PM

I'm marveling at the intellectual firepower in this comments section. It's like peeking in on the Philadelphia Convention, or a Senate debate during the time of the Great Triumvirate.

Breathtaking.

Troll Watch| 2.7.10 @ 11:01PM

Breathtaking. We have heard from the prime illustration of impotence. Somebody give him a mirror so he can entertain himself.

Margie| 2.7.10 @ 11:04PM

Hey genius, we'd invite you to refresh us with some of your blame America first clap-trap, but we're not interested in hearing how America is the AGGRESSOR, and the terrorists are terrorists because of the United States of America, or about your utter hatred for Israel.
Your despicable "intellect" isn't needed, so go crawl back under your slimy rock. Thankfully you and the few friends you have can't win elections.
Cheerio!

Nick| 2.7.10 @ 11:26PM

Mr. Toddard,

What would you know about "intellectual firepower"?

I'm still teaching you remedial English and history (both American and European).

Which reminds me, go find out how wrong you are about Mussolini and try to learn something, would 'ya?

Ret. Marine| 2.8.10 @ 3:17AM

Well the lamestream though they had the corner and the thugs to maintain it. Turns out if you tell a lie long enough, it's still a lie. Poll's by their very nature are nothing in the grand scheme, just one man's opinion with a phone call. (sometimes I think they are all made up, who on this site has ever been polled and for what)
As for the GOP, well if they decide to say no for all the right reasons, who could blame them. I don't think the media will ever admit they are the ones on the wrong side of most issues concerning American's, not their favorite illegals, gays, liars, thieves, CONgress critters of the demonrat party, or anyother protected class of terrorist. THe more the party of no, says NO, the better this country will be, it seems that even their messiah can't tell the same story two days in a row without his protruding arrogance and down right misrepresentation of truths. Most decent folks do not like or respect anyone who would blatently lie with a straight face to boot.

Ken (Old Texican)| 2.8.10 @ 8:47AM

Well AM SPEC has been notably silent this morning regarding the Tea-Party convention, but over at American Thinker this morning they actually have their eye on the ball.

Two splendid articles there. I hope each of you will visit.

S.L. Toddard| 2.8.10 @ 9:33AM

Beginning Of The End: Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.

The people we saw on the steps of Legislative Plaza and county courthouses across the state last year weren’t “movement conservatives.” Certainly the movement conservatives were there at those protests but the tea parties were much bigger in size, scope and concept than just traditional modern conservatism reheated. Last night, the professional conservatives fixed that for good.

For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.

Sarah Palin.

Palin, while explicitly saying the movement had no leader, implicitly offered herself up as one. After this speech, which was widely covered on the internet and carried on television, the tea party movement and Sarah Palin will be inextricably intertwined.

So with the spotlight on her and the attention of the curious media surrounding her what did she present as a tea party agenda? What did she discuss?

Ronald Reagan, national defense and superficial deficiencies of the current democratic occupant of the White House. Wow. In all honesty, the speech could have just as easily been given in 1994 as in 2010 which, of course, was the last time Republican operatives and professional conservatives sought to exploit an authentic populist movement of the center-right.

Ronald Reagan? Are you serious? Three times the name was invoked during the speech. Sure, it was his birthday but it serves to remind us what kind of crowd this was in front of those C-Span cameras.

These weren’t the people who were out protesting. This weren’t regular folks. This was the same old network of conservative hacks, flacks, publicists and hangers-on. This was Conservative Inc.

Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the tea party movement. Nothing. Ronald Reagan is the past. The GOP’s past, no less. The tea party movement was supposed to be the future.

The fact that Palin even has the temerity to position herself as a leader in the movement (and despite her protests that’s exactly what she was doing) is offensive to any student of very, very recent political history. Palin, as mavericky and rogue as she likes to paint herself, was the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 2008. She ran with John McCain and defended the Bush legacy. A project she continued last night in front of a faux-tea party audience.

In her remarks, Palin praised the Senator from Arizona and chastised the current President for blaming the past one for his problems. Now, I don’t know every tea partier out there but I do know a few and I don’t remember any of them having a whole lot of good to say about President Bush or John McCain. While they don’t have much positive to say about Barack Obama there no love for George Bush either.

And when did the tea party movement get a foreign policy? I didn’t put a clock on it but the first portion of Palin’s speech seemed very heavy on the neoconservatism.

Palin expressed dismay about the fact that President Obama spent only “9 percent” of the State of the Union on foreign policy and stated that Americans “deserve to know the truth about the threats we face and what the administration is or isn’t doing about them.”

She talked about “homicide” Bombers and the slammed the administration of its handling of the man who plotted to take down a Detroit airliner on Christmas Day.

“Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she told the assembled at Opryland. “They know we’re at war. And to win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

Palin talked about standing up to Iran, defending Israel and making the world safe for Democracy. All noble goals, I suppose, but what was she doing justifying and perpetuating the foreign policy of George Bush at a tea party convention?

The tea party I’m familiar with was concerned more about the collusion of big business and big government than the War in Iraq. The tea party I’m familiar with was more concerned about rejecting the bailout of Wall Street while looking for ways reinvigorate the economy of Main Street than looking for Al-Qaeda. The tea party I’m familiar with seemed more concerned about restoring the Republic at home than Democracy abroad.

Almost from start finish, Sarah Palin outlined an agenda that either ignored or de-emphasized the issues and the spirit that the tea parties were founded on.

Sure, there was some of the old school tea party rhetoric in there for flavor but, for a keynote address to a movement that at its inception was very radical, there was nothing radical about Sarah Palin’s speech. It was derivative circa 2004 neoconservatism as far as I could tell.

But the media now have their definition of what it means to be Tea Party. This convention gave them simplistic nativism, birtherism, media bashing, homophobia, and a heavy does of neoconservative foreign policy.

That is the image of tea partydom that Judson Phillips poured out to the eager media this weekend and is now percolating through the many channels of mass and new media.

By Monday afternoon, it will begin to harden and the tea party movement will be Sarah Palin’s movement.

And that is no tea party at all.

http://politics.nashvillepost......-movement/

Ken (Old Texican)| 2.8.10 @ 11:26AM

SCROLL BUTTON ALERT!
SCROLL BUTTON ALERT!
SCROLL BUTTON ALERT!

Warm up that scroll button finger, folks. You are going to need it. heh

Nick| 2.8.10 @ 1:42PM

Mr. Toddard,

You're hiding again.

S.L. Toddard| 2.8.10 @ 6:23PM

Do you think there is an argument somewhere in that? I see two wisecracks, both of them lacking even the saving grace of sincerity. This is what you always do after you've been embarrassed - start flailing wildly about, barely making sense, and writing things you can't possibly believe.

I will be happy to respond to any argument you make, but you have to make one first. I may be the Intellectual Giant of the Age, thrice as handsome as I am brilliant, and possessed of the roguish charm of down-and-out private detective Jim Rockford, but even I cannot see into the future, Nicholas.

Nick| 2.8.10 @ 7:39PM

Mr. Toddard,

Actually there were three wisecracks.

And, I think you're projecting again. I prove you didn't read the full Mussolini quotes you cited, and you don't make any rebuttal, you just make accusations.

Since you're projecting, this means you're "embarrassed" and "flailing wildly about."

I don't quite understand the "[...] cannot see into the future [...]" claim.

S.L. Toddard| 2.9.10 @ 8:14AM

Yeah that didn't make much sense, did it? I was goofing around anyway. I just meant that I can't anticipate what arguments you're going to make.

Also, not a one of those quotes contradicts anything I'd written. There is no need to respond, since they support my argument and not yours.

Nick| 2.9.10 @ 12:59PM

Of coarse! Why didn't I think of that?

The question still remains. Why didn't you use the "[...] century of the right." quote?

Also, you wrote Mussolini REJECTED socialism. But the paper you quoted from clearly states he took the best of socialism, the parts that worked in the real world, and put it in fascism. Like I argued, a new and improved socialism.

He wasn't trying to woo monarchists and aristocrats with this doctrine.

Margie| 2.8.10 @ 8:54PM

Poor hot Toddy actually believes himself when he talks! LOL!!