Which represents your values?

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By Bob Webster 

While progressives from Obama on down readily embrace the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement as if they were noble and deserving of praise, these same people spew vitriolic venom at the Tea Party movement. To listen to a progressive, there is nothing more horrible to our political system than a Tea Party endorsed politician. At the same time, progressives fawn over the Occupy Wall Street movement, while being deferential to just about every kind of uncivil behavior the OWS crowd exhibits.

What is the reality?

As is typical with progressives, they have their head in the sand when it comes to facing and dealing with reality, preferring the make-believe land they dream up while their heads are firmly buried in sand to protect them from harsh reality.

The Tea Party

The Tea Party, unlike the fiction spewed by progressives, is a group of patriotic Americans who are fed up with politicians in Washington who govern unconstitutionally for the sole purpose of extending and maintaining their own personal position of power in Washington. The Tea Party abhors politicians who are spending our future into oblivion with unsustainable programs and a "soak the rich" mentality designed to buy votes from lower and middle income Americans.

In its essence, the Tea Party stands for two noble objectives:

1. Restoring constitutionally-limited federal governance.
    
2. Eliminating deficit-financed governance and eliminating the national debt.

The Tea Party is a decentralized, loosely organized collection of independent groups of ordinary patriotic Americans who share these noble objectives. They are composed of Independents, dissatisfied Democrats, and Republicans who recognize that failure to achieve these noble objectives will lead to certain financial collapse of the United States into massive insolvency.

For these noble objectives, the Tea Party is assailed, almost daily, by progressive politicians and their media allies, with slanderous lies.

Occupy Wall Street

I can think of no better description of the OWS movement than that provided by Thomas Sowell in a November 2011 commentary:

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths' inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. It is common, for example, to hear in the media how some “protesters” were arrested. But anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I protest against all sorts of things — and don't get arrested.

The difference is that I don't block traffic, join mobs sleeping overnight in parks or urinate in the street. If the media cannot distinguish between protesting and disturbing the peace, then their education may also have wasted a lot of taxpayers' money.

The major difference between the OWS and Tea Party movements is that OWS want already unconstitutional government to get bigger, taxing the rich to redistribute to the OWS crowd, and spending as if the bill will never come due; whereas the Tea Party wants much smaller constitutional government that spends within its means without taxing the economy to death....

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OWS vs. Tea Party