Monday, April 5, 2010

What We Already Knew

I don't think any of us needed a Gallup Poll to tell us what we already knew; that  Tea Partiers are fairly mainstream.  Shocker, huh?  Here are some of the findings:







My husband and I are both registered Independents, and have been for years.   I've talked to Democrats and Greenies at our local Tea Party gatherings.  I've noticed (locally) a lot of older military veterans participating.

There are more charts at the link.  Gallup states:


Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large.

Why yes, we are! 

9 comments:

  1. I couldn't resist the pitchfork. :)

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  2. Fay and Matt, I LOVE the "read more" code. It really cleans up our front page. You two rock!

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  3. CNN: Disgruntled Democrats join the Tea Party.

    Nota Bene - this is CNN reporting this!

    I've followed some links from the Zero Hedge blog to HuffPo... there is a bunch of anger against the financial establishment that mirrors the sentiments of the Tea Partiers.

    Now Ariana is widely assumed to be a Soros mouthpiece, and Soros is part of the Powers That Be (PTB), so what's he doing attacking the financiers? I'm sensing (through this and a bunch of other reading) that there is a bit of a civil war going on amongst the PTB.

    It's interesting to plot the overlaps and the fault lines between the different populist groups:

    - the uber progressive HuffPo crowd, for example, seems OK with government intervention on lots of levels, but hates the big banks...

    - Tea Partiers generally hate the big banks, and also tend to disparage free trade as having weakened the US... but they hate many types of government intervention (Health Care, small business red tape, "hate crime" bs, etc)

    - There is a libertarian / "Austrian economics" crowd (exemplified by the Zero Hedge community) which can run very liberal on social issues, yields to nobody in their contempt for the big banks and the Treasury and the Fed, is convinced the middle class is being scammed, and (in some substantial numbers) is also very much in favor of free trade, seeing tariffs as yet more government distortion which will backfire and create cronyism.

    Here's the thing: Obama will likely adopt the following strategy: co-opt and triangulate.

    - He'll co-opt the populist anger against the banks by doing "something". His enablers in the mainstream media will applaud his "courage". It will mostly be smoke-screen.

    - He'll triangulate the rest of the agenda to set the various factions who oppose him to attack each other instead. Again the MSM will be tossing bits of red meat / brown tofu out there to cause confusion.

    I don't want to see this happen. I want to see Obama defeated in 2012 by a Liberty-oriented (NOT doctrinaire "Libertarian"), commons sense kind of candidate committed to real fiscal recovery and financial reform, and whose other views I'm prepared to disagree on.

    I'll lay my own cards on the table. Personally I've never been so conservative, and less interested in what constitutes "True Conservatism".

    I really think there is an opportunity to work across all kinds of divides here. The folks who are scared sh*tless by the debt and the deficit and who are mad has hell that "things are back to normal in the markets" (ROFL), and outraged that the banks got away with their looting, constitute a substantial majority.

    Obama's pivot on this issue is coming. Friends won't let friends be fooled by this.

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  4. blogger is wigging - testing - will this post?

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  5. Don't you just get sick of all the mainstream media (and the folks who believe everything they hear from it - I'm sure y'all know some of that breed) who insist that those who attend Tea Parties are just all a bunch of Republicans? (and/or racists)
    I can't watch the government propaganda on network or cable news anymore, and I have no respect for the gullible/socialists who buy into it and propagate it. They'd sell their country for a personal benefit, many of them.

    None of the media faithful who think this way have attended a Tea Party (but they somehow KNOW, right?), and the MSM government shills refuse to tell the truth about what the whole Tea Party movement is about.
    The fact is, if the Tea Party movement is co-opted by Republican Party headquarters, it's gonna die. By design it will die.
    They sure are trying to align themselves with this movement (or align the movement to the Party), but so far most people just aren't buying it. Thank God.
    Try telling that to an MSM believer though. Too invested in their invented reality to see it.

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  6. Your post is right on the money, monkeyweather.

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  7. Excellent comment, MW. You really nailed it.

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  8. mw - I agree, and it's been infuriating, but that MSM message about the Tea Party is crumbling. See the CNN link I posted above.

    I have no problem if the Republican Party chases after the Tea Party parade - just don't let them make it to the head of the column; keep them chasing.

    E.g. there's a Republican candidate for Governor here in Oregon, Chris Dudley. If he disavows the Tea Party, I won't support him. If he suddenly claims to be a Tea Party "leader", I'll be very, very skeptical. If he makes substantial rhetorical gestures in our general direction, I'll be happy, look closer and maybe donate.

    (It's funny - in terms of rhetorical gestures - a while back a certain Oregon resident, known to us all, relayed in private conversation that folks in Beaverton and Hillsboro speak in a kind of code about what's happening with gangs and cultural displacement etc - "things moving in the wrong direction". I noticed Dudley used this phrase verbatim in a recent interview. He lives in Beaverton.)

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  9. We have a friend I'll call Harry who is from small town Ohio. I don't think you could get any more "middle American" than Harry; he was a gym teacher for years, knows more trivia about local high school, college and professional baseball than anyone could possibly imagine, volunteers with international students at the local university, and is all around just about the nicest guy you could imagine. He's conservative, but not remotely an agitator by any stretch of the imagination.

    When Harry said that he'd attended a couple of local Tea Party meetings and intended to get more involved, well, I began to think that there's a lot more to it than the PTB (thanks, lewy!) want to be.

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