24 September 2010 What they should know about American history they slept through

The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party

By RON CHERNOW

Published: September 23, 2010

“LIKE many popular insurgencies in American history, the Tea Party movement has attempted to enlist the founding fathers as fervent adherents to its cause. “

“Many Tea Party candidates and activists have tried to seize the moral high ground by explicitly identifying with the founders. Sharron Angle, who is mounting a spirited run against Harry Reid for a Senate seat from Nevada with Tea Party support, bristled at Mr. Reid’s contention that she is overly conservative. “I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin,” she protested. “And, truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings ... you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative.”

The Tea Party movement has further sought to spruce up its historical bona fides by laying claim to the United States Constitution. Many Tea Party members subscribe to a literal reading of the national charter as a way of bolstering their opposition to deficit spending, bank bailouts and President Obama’s health care plan. A Tea Party manifesto, called the Contract From America, even contains a rigid provision stipulating that all legislation passed by Congress should specify the precise clause in the Constitution giving Congress the power to pass such a law — an idea touted Thursday by the House Republican leadership. “

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/opinion/24chernow.html?th&emc=th



http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/

“(CNN) – Sarah Palin announced the launch of a new website Thursday, aimed at defeating twenty incumbent Democrats who voted for President Obama's health care bill and who are running in districts that swung Republican during the 2008 presidential election.

In the announcement on her Facebook page, entitled "Lies, Damned Lies – Obamacare 6 Months Later," the former GOP vice presidential nominee resurrects her claims that "rationing 'death panels'" are included in the health care bill and promotes the new site, which endorses candidates who support the bill's repeal. “

Cassi Creek

The contention by the GOP and its religious and ant-intellectual arms that the founding fathers were “conservatives is nonsense. Only someone who knows nothing of history could believe that the founders would agree with the “conservatism” offered by religious demagogues and the current GOP. The founders, men who sought only to do away with the colonial status of the American colonies were as far to the political left then as was Trotsky. Our founders challenged the very concept of who governed at the time. They overthrew the concept of divine right rulers and rule by royal decree as well as rule by colonial powers. Nothing conservative about that, then or today. They were ready to die in the effort to do away with those conditions. Some of them did. They raised an armed revolution as surely as did Lenin and friends. At the time they did it, they were considered rabidly secularist and politically off the scale to the left.

To hear the GOP try to pair them with incipient theocracy, with plutocracy, and to hear the use of “states’ rights” to justify racism and xenophobia, is to know that the Tea Party mobsters, the GOP, and the anti-intellectuals slept through any exposure to the Constitution and American history they might have had in schools that failed to teach them anything of the nation’s past. Is it any wonder these are the people who would do away with the Department of Education and favor home schooling?

The habitual half-termer, Sarah Palin, has aptly described her demagoguery on social networking sites once more. “Lies, Damned Lies…” is exactly what issues from the ghost-written comments posted under Palin’s name. The lie about death panels is resurrected by her ghost writers in an effort to raise support for the GOP’s intended plan to repeal Health Care Reform. Given Palin’s history of ethics violations in office, her encouragement of the birther and other GOP-funded lie campaigns directed toward Obama, and her apparent lack of acquaintance with any shred of truth about her use of her family as campaign props, I expect to see these words plaguing her as the real media demands documentation from her as to the location of “death panels” in the health care reform law.

I find it disturbing that so many Americans are willing to let the lies spread by Palin linger as if they were true. Actually, any death panels that do or will exist will be those created by the GOP and insurance companies. The GOP health care plan is simply “be rich or die quickly!” That’s easy to see but apparently we’ve dumbed our population down to the point that prevents any genuine analytical skills, any reading comprehension. That anti-intellectual bias will be the death of millions if the GOP and the TPmobsters have their way.

Palin’s too dumbed down, herself, to recognize that without her celebrity she and her family values surpises would be subject to selection based upon cash value and job-related benefits. Those death panels already exist and they do tend to come down harder on children with pre-existing conditions and adults who have genetic pre-disposition to specific diseases. Palin keeps aiming at her own feet and at her children and grandchildren. Only the immense pool of idiots willing to pay to hear her parrot ghost-written speeches and to buy her ghost-written books keep them off the unemployment lines. The job market for high-school dropout baby-mamas is not that good unless the GOP machine wants to convince the “real America” that “abstinence only” education really does work despite the increasing number of knocked-up teens out there. They could pull in a few girls who haven’t been prepped and pimped by national campaigns; but somehow I don’t see the Tea Party or the religious fanatics getting excited about the “redemption” of a 16 year old with a darker complexion.

Lies, Damned Lies…. The answer is whenever her mouth is moving..