The attacks on the tea party movement and other citizen activists are continuing. This time, the DNC has unveiled its latest effort to portray tea parties, and Republicans, as radicals and extremists.
This effort, www.republicanteapartycontract.com, is nothing more than a series of misrepresentations of popular ideas like repealing ObamaCare and the financial takeover, eliminating whole departments and agencies in the federal government, keeping taxes low, etc. but it is occurring in a highly charged media climate where the NAACP has accused the movement of being racist.
The DNC is attempting to ride that wave of coverage to discredit the movement once and for all. It has all of the appearances of a coordinated attack, but there is an even wider context than has been widely reported by the mainstream media that shows a clear pattern to sabotage, infiltrate, and to otherwise destroy the movement, which has been chronicled by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin.
For example, there’s the quite obvious effort by http://theteapartyisover.org whose express mission is to portray tea parties as extremists intent on inciting violence. According to the group’s mission statement, the tea parties represent “dangerous extremism that threatens to tear the country apart.” Of course, the group is actually nothing more than a Democrat-labor union front group that operates out of the offices of Joseph Sandler, a longtime general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, as reported by FNC’s Joseph Abrams.
But that’s not all. Michigan Capitol Confidential is reporting that the political director of the Oakland County Democrat Party was behind an effort to register candidates to run under a fake “Tea Party” in Michigan, ostensibly to take away votes from Republican candidates and to confuse voters. It turns out that the petition drive necessary to create the party on the ballot was operated by Progressive Campaigns, Inc. out of California, which has run ballot initiatives supported by left-wing activist-financier George Soros.
This mirrors a prior effort in Nevada by Scott Ashjian to run for Senate against Harry Reid under the banner, “Tea Party of Nevada.” Again, the apparent intent is to siphon votes away from Republican candidates who might benefit from the popular tea party movement.
Then there’s the case of Jason Levin, who ran an effort to actively infiltrate tea party rallies on April 15th to dedicated to “dismantling and demolishing” and to portray them as “racists, morons, and homophobes.” A similar effort was waged by an anarchist group to “[o]rganize counter-protests against the tea party demonstrations, same time, same place.”
Other sabotage and intimidation efforts include the violent assault of activist Kenneth Gladney by SEIU thugs out of a St. Louis town hall meeting, where activists spoke out against ObamaCare. Also, at least one pro-Reid union member attempted to misdirect tea partiers from a large rally that was being held in Searchlight, NV.
All of this, however, is overshadowed by what Democrat congressional leadership has said publicly about the tea parties from almost the very beginning. House Majority Whip James Clyburn’s has claimed that tea parties are a “kind of terrorism.” Others have alleged that activists shouted racial epithets at members of Congress on March 20th at a protest against the health care bill, as reported by the American Thinker. Others have attested that acts of vandalism were linked to the tea parties.
Majority Whip Clyburn’s attack followed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote an oped in USA Today calling opponents “un-American”. Congressman Steve Kagen called opponents “uncivilized,” and Congressman Baron Hill called them “political terrorists.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid proudly called them “evil mongers.”
Congressman Brian Baird called opponents of ObamaCare “Brown Shirts” and compared them to domestic terrorists, “Some of the rhetoric that we’re hearing is… eerily reminiscent of the kind of things that drove Tim McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma.”
See a pattern here? It has all of the appearances of a coordinated smear campaign against tea parties and other citizen activists, which even the leadership of Congress has participated in. But where is the major media coverage of this? It’s so obviously a political theater that to report the NAACP’s smear without taking into account the above facts is dishonest and becomes complicit in the myth’s perpetuation.
The fact is, if there were this many pieces showing Republican efforts to sabotage, infiltrate, and discredit an entire political movement and falsely portray it as extremist, you can bet it would be portrayed as a grand conspiracy.
It’s time to start putting these pieces together. Hundreds of thousands of well-meaning, activist Americans are being besmirched and smeared as part of a contrived political strategy by Democrats to keep Congress. They want nothing more than less government control over the lives of individual Americans, and for that, they are pariahs and must be destroyed.
Bill Wilson is the President of Americans of Limited Government.
