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The Tea Party...The Rise of the New Confederacy
Bentleyspop
Craft Beer Brewery, Colorado Posts: 10,547
This makes a lot of sense....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/colbert-king-the-tea-party-resurrects-the-spirit-of-the-old-confederacy/2013/10/04/95b37f6e-2c7b-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html?hpid=z3
The rise of the New Confederacy
By Colbert I. King,
It took on new force with fears of the federal government in Washington interfering with their cherished way of life. It gathered steam with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And it all came into full flower when shore batteries fired on Fort Sumter. It was the spirit of the Old Confederacy, a state-sponsored rebellion hellbent on protecting its “peace and safety” from the party that took possession of the government on March 4, 1861.
The rebels launched a grisly war against the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln warned the Confederacy: “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”
“Peace and safety” are ideals drawn from South Carolina’s Dec. 24, 1860, declaration of secession from the Union. The expression was designed to encompass all that the Deep South states held dear — chiefly, their existence as sovereign states and their ability to decide the propriety of their domestic institutions, including slavery.
This virulent hostility to the Union led the Old Confederacy to conclude — as expressed by South Carolina — that with Lincoln’s elevation to the presidency, “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”
Federal government as the enemy.
Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.
No shelling of a Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.
The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.
Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”
Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.
The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.
South Carolina wept and wailed as it withdrew from the Union, citing the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision when it noted that states in the North had elevated to citizenship “persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”
Not to worry, Old South, the New Confederacy’s spirit is on the move.
In June, the Supreme Court got rid of fundamental legal protections against racial discrimination in voting.
Legislation aimed at suppressing votes is pending across the country, notably in the Deep South.
Hold on to that Confederate money, y’all. Jim Crow just might rise again.
But it’s here in Washington where the New Confederacy’s firebrands are really holding court. Many of them first appeared after the 2010 midterm elections and when the scope of the president’s economic recovery program was taking form. Unlike their predecessors, however, members of this group hail from Dixie and beyond, though I stress there is no evidence that the New shares the racist views of the Old. The view on race is not the common denominator. The view on government is.
These conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.
They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/colbert-king-the-tea-party-resurrects-the-spirit-of-the-old-confederacy/2013/10/04/95b37f6e-2c7b-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html?hpid=z3
The rise of the New Confederacy
By Colbert I. King,
It took on new force with fears of the federal government in Washington interfering with their cherished way of life. It gathered steam with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And it all came into full flower when shore batteries fired on Fort Sumter. It was the spirit of the Old Confederacy, a state-sponsored rebellion hellbent on protecting its “peace and safety” from the party that took possession of the government on March 4, 1861.
The rebels launched a grisly war against the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln warned the Confederacy: “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”
“Peace and safety” are ideals drawn from South Carolina’s Dec. 24, 1860, declaration of secession from the Union. The expression was designed to encompass all that the Deep South states held dear — chiefly, their existence as sovereign states and their ability to decide the propriety of their domestic institutions, including slavery.
This virulent hostility to the Union led the Old Confederacy to conclude — as expressed by South Carolina — that with Lincoln’s elevation to the presidency, “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”
Federal government as the enemy.
Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.
No shelling of a Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.
The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.
Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”
Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.
The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.
South Carolina wept and wailed as it withdrew from the Union, citing the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision when it noted that states in the North had elevated to citizenship “persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”
Not to worry, Old South, the New Confederacy’s spirit is on the move.
In June, the Supreme Court got rid of fundamental legal protections against racial discrimination in voting.
Legislation aimed at suppressing votes is pending across the country, notably in the Deep South.
Hold on to that Confederate money, y’all. Jim Crow just might rise again.
But it’s here in Washington where the New Confederacy’s firebrands are really holding court. Many of them first appeared after the 2010 midterm elections and when the scope of the president’s economic recovery program was taking form. Unlike their predecessors, however, members of this group hail from Dixie and beyond, though I stress there is no evidence that the New shares the racist views of the Old. The view on race is not the common denominator. The view on government is.
These conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.
They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.
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TED CRUZ: DESTROYING ENTIRE PLANET BEST WAY TO STOP OBAMACARE
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bor ... acare.html
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) raised the ante in the battle over the Affordable Care Act on Sunday, telling CNN’s Candy Crowley that “destroying the entire planet is really the best and only way to stop Obamacare.”
“Look, I’m in favor of shutting down the government and not raising the debt ceiling, but let’s not kid ourselves. Those are only half measures,” he told Crowley. “If we are really serious about stopping Obamacare, we’ll destroy the entire planet.”
Explaining his proposal to a visibly alarmed Crowley, Senator Cruz said, “Obamacare is like a parasite that needs a host to feed on. If you want to kill the parasite you kill the host, and in this case that means killing this planet. As long as there’s a planet Earth, the nightmare of Obamacare could always come screaming back to life.”
While he was not specific about how he would go about destroying the planet, Cruz said, “This is something that my colleagues and I have been working on for some time.”
The Texas senator refused to speculate on whether there were enough votes in Congress to support his proposal of obliterating Earth, but he ended his interview on a personal note: “Candy, I don’t want my children and my children’s children to live in a world with Obamacare. And the best way to guarantee that is by destroying the world.”
Yep, I am sure the author totally didn't want to make any sort of race comparison, I mean citing scott and Jim crow in an article will never allow the readers to jump to that conclusion. I am so glad the author cleared that up convincingly.
For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.
for what it is worth, neither democrats or republicans as groups have ever really tried/wanted to create a more humane society that extends justice to all (there are examples who have tried, they usually end up dead or marginalized...I wonder if this author could explain what justice for all means...
It is terrifying when you are too stupid to know who is dumb
- Joe Rogan
This is an excerpt from the above article, showing how little the right wing has changed very little over the years. The Tea Party is the modern day version of the hard-right John Birch Society from the sixties. I was unaware of the history myself, as I was not yet born at the time of Kennedy's presidency and assassination
"As it happens, I’ve been doing some reading about John Kennedy, and what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely consistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years, from father to son and now, presumably, on to son from father again. The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America. This really is your grandfather’s right, if not, to be sure, your grandfather’s Republican Party. Half a century ago, the type was much more evenly distributed between the die-hard, neo-Confederate wing of the Democratic Party and the Goldwater wing of the Republicans, an equitable division of loonies that would begin to end after J.F.K.’s death....
...Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged. There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate. And fifty years ago, as today, groups with these beliefs, far from being banished to the fringe of political life, were closely entangled and intertwined with Senators and Congressmen and right-wing multi-millionaires.
In their new book, “Dallas 1963,” Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis demonstrate in luxuriant detail just how clotted Dallas was with right-wing types in the period before Kennedy’s fatal visit. The John Birch Society, the paranoid, well-heeled, anti-Communist group, was the engine of the movement then, as the Tea Party is now—and though, to their great credit, the saner conservatives worked hard to keep it out of the official center, the society remained hyper-present. Powerful men, like Ted Dealey, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, sympathized with the Birchers’ ideology, and engaged with General Edwin A. Walker, an extreme right-wing military man (and racist) who had left the Army in protest at Kennedy’s civil-rights and foreign policies—and who had the ear of Senators Strom Thurmond and John Tower. It was Walker who said of the President, “He is worse than a traitor. Kennedy has essentially exiled Americans to doom.” (It should be said that even William F. Buckley’s principled excommunication of the Birchers was unhappily specific: there was nothing wrong with claiming that the international Communist conspiracy had come to be more and more powerful under Eisenhower and Kennedy, he said; the mistake was in thinking that either man really wanted it that way, rather than that they were just feckless dupes of the encirclement.) "
During it's sort-of-hey-day, the John Birch Society was the wing nut faction of the far right- and in a way, it's worst enemy in that they were so far off the scales that any rational person could see how blatantly out of kilter that group was. They were readily dismissed by many. The Tea Party today seems to me to share some of the same characteristics only a little less paranoia and a bit more anger. They are generally a bit more cleaver as well and therefore more accepted. And maybe more dangerous because of that.
they never wanted that.
They SAID that but after their endless bills about abortion, trans-vaginal sonograms, marriage equality, teaching creationism in school, birth certificates and other equally intrusive and absurd topics, it was clear from day one that what we were dealing with was a bunch of racist yokels who didn't like that being white no longer made them special.
The Tea Party certainly was better funded. But that's about to end.
Wall Street poured gallons and gallons of money on Tea Party candidates because they figured that they would support whatever Wall Street wanted them to do. But they found out WAY too late that the Tea Party were on a mission from God... and not the god of money that Wall Street worships, but a god that created America for white, Christian slave owners. A god that didn't give a shit about kindergarteners being mass-murdered but gladly helped Tim Tebow play football.
Wall Street watched in horror as the country inched closer and closer to the brink. Seeing the Frankenstein's Monster they created lumbering towards them, threatening to throw the entire global economy over the cliff if they didn't get their "way."
And that monster was using weapons they created. Terms like 'Debt Ceiling' which were designed to confuse the ill-informed Tea Party members were too effective. As Wall Street saw what was happening, they were powerless to stop the Tea Party members from thinking that "not raising the debt ceiling" meant "we wont' spend any more money and the debt won't go up."
There are still Tea Party members who think that the shutdown "saved" America hundreds of millions of dollars. They refuse to believe that the shutdown actually COST us billions.
Dont' expect the Tea Party to be too well funded any time soon. The sad thing for the Republicans is that many voters will still put Tea Party candidates on the ballots... and Wall Street will now sensibly fund Democrats to try to kill the monster they created.
Oh well.
It was be nice for them to fade away. I agree with all your sentiments here
I disagree. This is a mean spirited rant that makes no sense except for the part that the Tea Party can not be bought. I wish those that are against the Constitution could find a place (country) to live so that they could be Happy.
PODs statements are factual and make lots of sense and not in the least hate filled.
Unless of course you eat, sleep, and breathe the tea party platform.
And yes of course the tea party can be bought. All political factions can be bought and paid for.
I'm curious.
What parts are "mean-spirited?"
What part didn't make sense to you?
What made you think I said they couldn't be bought?
What did I say that made you think I'm "Against The Constitution?"
Because I'm baffled.
Time to take a hard look in the mirror ...
Except it's not. Because President Obama doesn't routinely show up waving a flag with a hammer and sickle.
I have never once seen a Tea Terrorist rally that doesn't feature at least three or usually more yokels lumbering around with their confederate flags, talking about "taking back America" and blathering on about the Kenyan in the White House.
So yes... you may want to look in the mirror.
But I like where you are coming from on stereotypes. At least three, so let it be!
You didn't say "from the super left."
You said "Obama."
The "Super Left" is a rather nebulous but large group, probably consisting of tens of millions of people, depending on your definition of "super left."
However, "Obama" is one man. The President of the United States. Who has never once waved a hammer and sickle flag nor suggested that he is a Marxist.
While I'm sure there are at least 3 people on the "Super Left" who support a redistribution of wealth, I'm going to say that none of those people would support our current president, Barack Obama, because he's not a Marxist and has shown himself to be quite a corporatist. However, the Tea Terrorists have clearly shown their Confederate roots and when someone shows up at a Tea Terrorist rally, they don't get any flack for waving that flag or chanting racist bile since it seems that the majority of the Tea Terrorists are, in fact, confederate-sympathizer racists themselves.
Anyway, I find both side's views amusing and disturbing ... but more amusing then disturbing.
marxists vs. confederates ... would make a good movie. someone get Robert Rodriguezon the blower ...
Uh... yeah... that's kinda the definition of "super left."
First... who are "they" that say that and what does that have to do with our president?
Actually it happened right outside the White House...
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
I wouldn't be caught dead at a rally with an asshole carrying around a Confederate flag. But, as you asserted PoD was incorrect and no such Tea Party rally ever took place, I thought it helpful to provide you with the photographic evidence.
But I'm sure you are correct and the nice man with Confederate flag was saying nice things about our first African American President.
"...I changed by not changing at all..."
While waving the confederate flag, speakers said things like "he needs to take his hand off the Quoran and come out with his hands up."
Don't try to wash that stink off, ariel... you're soaking in it.
:corn:
And your point is?
Few of them would vote for him (their real choice is Ted Cruz, a foreign-born Canadian-Cuban) and they only rally around him because they like a black man who'll tell them what they want to hear, no matter whether it's "poor people don't deserve health care" or "yes, master, I'll bring your dinner now."
Do you have a link to this? Which Tea Party Rally was it? and when?