Sticks and Stones

At a recent Tea Party meeting, a former political candidate lamented the viciousness of the press, particularly a local newspaper editorial which had labeled him, despite having an advanced degree, “stupid.”

The Liberals are adept at psychological warfare, weaned on Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays and Bertrand Russell, they’ve honed their viciousness to a fine, though low-brow art. Sitting behind shelves of books, they label anyone who dissents from their opinion as “stupid.”

The candidate should not have taken it too much to heart, though he would have been right to take exception to the derogatory language. Even the newspaper couldn’t deny his credentials; but he was still “stupid.”

The comment was not an insult directed at him but what we could call a “talking point” to its readers, many of whom attend the large, local university. Not quite mature, in fact still in the throes of approval-craving adolescence, still clinging to their high school mentality, attitudes, and culture, and being gently nurtured by their Liberal professors, “stupid” is an all-purpose pointer for dismissing the person without having to bother thinking about what they have to say. In other words, ignore this guy; he’s “stupid.”

The Tea Party is undergoing a virtual, verbal barrage. We’ve been called many things since our first rallies in early 2009. We were: tea-baggers, nut-jobs, sheeple, racists, homophobes, crazies. We were told we were stupid, ignorant, uninformed. The Liberals made fun of our signs, our occasional costumes, our age (mostly older).

Still, we’ve withstood every verbal attack. In the early days, Tea Partiers were told they had to be non-partisan, that they should be moderate, not Conservative. They claimed we were trying to form a third party. If anything, we were – and are – trying to reform the Republican Party.

The current propaganda is that we’re “extremists,” an argument calculated to frighten moderate Republican voters, who are deathly afraid of offending their Liberal Democrat friends. “We’ve got to try to say something nice about Obama” in order to be fair-minded. Says who? The Liberals? What nice things did they say about Pres. Bush? Not many.

What’s truly funny is how the Liberals – especially Obama – is trying to channel Ronald Reagan. To those of who were old enough to remember, the Media was unrelenting in their criticism of Pres. Reagan. He was the butt of every comedian’s lame jokes. They accused of him being senile, they made fun of his acting career, they called him a war-monger for calling out the Russians at the Berlin Wall. They hated him. If my friend, the former candidate, and the Tea Partiers feel slighted, they’re in excellent company.

Today, Obama accused the Republicans of being Tea Party “lackeys.” Imagine that; politicians listening to their constituents.

Walter Lippmann, in his book Public Opinion, groused, “They [the Founding Fathers] did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance every interest so that government would be in a perpetual deadlock. They intended to deadlock local and class interest to prevent these from obstructing government.”

Lippman quotes James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 51, “’In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,’ wrote Madison, ‘the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable to government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.’”

However, the Founding Fathers only meant that the republican leaders were only to have decisions of national import, that affected the nation as a whole, not over the individual lives of men – and women. The Constitution provided a system of checks and balances, a three-part government, with an executive, judicial, and legislative wing. Originally, the House of Representatives was created to represent small groups of communities within a state. The Senate was originally designed to represent the State as a whole, selected by the State legislatures, not the people themselves.

Amendment XVII of the Constitution, ratified in 1913 under Pres. Wilson, upset that balance of power. To the average person, it might not seem to matter; they’re still elected by the popular vote. However, the popular vote makes no account of representation and actually favors the more populated, poorer cities over the tax-paying suburbs. What’s more, the amendment effectively excluded states from national decisions made in the U.S. Senate, such as impeachments and the appointment of Federal judges.

Of the two houses of Congress, Senators are considered to be the more prestigious, better educated, and more experienced. They’re more likely to win their party’s nomination for president. Since the 1913 law, however, they’re also more likely to be Democrats or liberalized Repubicans since their elections depend mainly upon poor constituents in crowded cities. Since the 1960s, they can also depended upon higher educated, but also immature, more highly-brainwashed college graduates in both parties.

Still, we common-sense hobbits must carry on. Never mind their arguments about the Constitution and its principles being old-fashioned. They’re no more old-fashioned than the socialist arguments of Jean Jacques Rousseau. There’s nothing newer about the progressive socialist democrat’s ideas than those of republicans. Pure democracy doesn’t work. That’s what the Founding Father’s learned with the Articles of Confederation.  Tyranny doesn’t work; that’s what the colonists learned. Communism doesn’t work; that’s what the Puritans who landed in Plymouth learned, the hard way.

Socialists like Lippmann made a great psychological study of groups of people, propaganda, and how to manipulate the emotions and weaken the minds of those people. The first thing they have to do is assume the high-ground. The second is to start hurling psychological stones to convince their prey to yield, sort of like the cat who terrifies the mouse with its hypnotizing rings around its green eyes.

They’re just words. The good thing about words is that anyone can use them. Anyone can pick up a book or newspaper and read it. The Liberals are terrified of the idea that the common man might take up the habit of reading for himself. That would make the common man uncommon, and the uncommon man is a danger to the Progressive. A mass of uncommon men and women educating themselves would be a thing unheard-of in the entire history of the world: a people who could think for themselves.

Luckily, the Liberals think such a thing is, at best, a fantasy. They think it’s “stupid.”