Who are “tea party Republicans”?
Well, the “tea party” movement started out as a grass roots reaction to too much government and too much taxation.
For years it has been attacked by the left as a racist enterprise (no shock there – the left attacks everything to its right as being racist…and against women and warmongering, and….blah blah blah you\’ve heard it all and don\’t need me to remind you).
What it has evolved into is a hard right movement, which tries to nominate and elect the most conservative Republicans available to elective office.
Where it has succeeded in doing so, this has often resulted in disastrous elections (think Todd Akin and Sharron Angle, to name two).
But now it looks like the Democrat Party, from a very different perspective, with very different goals and very different tactics, has its own version of a group which intends to lurch the party to its way of thinking – in this case, the Black activist hard left.
I\’m talking about #blacklivesmatter.
On paper, this is barely even a group. While tea party people are organized and play within the rules, #blacklivesmatter is barely organized and plays by no rules.
But Democrats are scared excrementless of them.
Why? Because if Democrats call out this bunch of loud, often anarchic, agitators for who they are and what they do, the party – justifiably – fears lose a significant percentage of the Black vote on election day – which would either stay home or vote third-party.
How scared are they? Look at what happened in Seattle just yesterday.
Excerpted from Jim Brunner\’s article in the Seattle Times:
The Vermont senator, who has drawn huge crowds around the country, was to be the star attraction and final speaker for a rally at Westlake Park to celebrate the 80th birthday of Social Security and the success of other anti-poverty programs.
But his afternoon plans were scuttled by protesters determined to turn attention instead to Sunday\’s anniversary of the shooting by a white police officer of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo.
At Westlake, Sanders was just starting to address the crowd, thanking Seattle for being “one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America.”
That\’s as far as he got before two women walked onstage and grabbed the microphone.
“If you do not listen … your event will be shut down,” one of the protesters told organizers, who offered to let them speak after Sanders. After a back and forth with the screaming protesters, organizers relented and said the demonstrators could go first.
Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” She cited Seattle\’s own police problems, including an ongoing Justice Department consent decree over use of force.
A U. S. Senator and Presidential candidate\’s speech is interrupted, and then subordinated to, two “protesters”….with the event organizers not only allowing them to speak, but to speak first? How scared do they have to be for that to happen?
And their brilliant message? Something about “White supremacist liberalism” in Seattle? In Seattle? Yeah, ok, sure.
If this were a Republican event and two tea party activists tried to storm the stage and take it over, do you think for a minute they would be deferred to?
The question is ludicrous on two levels: one is that it is an excellent bet that they would be escorted off the stage and told to sit down or leave. The other is that there is no reason to believe this would happen…because, to my knowledge, it has never happened in the years that the tea party movement has existed. You may not agree with their beliefs, but they do play by the rules.
I don\’t envy Democrats the problems that #blacklivesmatter is creating…and will continue to create. But this is what happens when you do not deal honestly with situations. It gets out of hand and eventually can come back to bite you in the backside. Hard.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out between now and the 2016 election.
What happens, for example, if a Hillary Clinton speech is disrupted by #blacklives matter anarchists who grab the mike and attack her as a rich White Wall Street racist? (Do not doubt for a second that they would do so).
Stay tuned….
