Of course if you talk directly to rank and file Tea Party members they will promise you, they are the true believers. They love their country more than any of the rest of us could even imagine possible and they are not simply about destruction, hatred, violence, cruelty or unfairness. Which is why their various members so frequently call for all liberals, all foreigners, all minorities and all Democrats to be rounded up and exterminated "like vermin" [hyperbole theirs]. That is, in deed, one way to make peace, to kill all your opposition. As biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand (1894-1977) once noted, "Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god." And if you are god, you get to set the rules and no dissent is possible: the people can't argue with god. They can only be sacrificed for his will, or, if heretics, sacrificed to his wrath.
And, boy howdy, has the Tea Party been doing their damndest to kill off the legacy this quartet of presidents, men most Americans had loved with a near religious fervor. If only the rest of us understood the treason and treachery of villains we once thought heroes. So, let's recap:
First, curiously, was Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most successful Republican presidents ever, in terms of contemporary and lasting popularity and success in accomplishing his political agenda. Among Roosevelt's many sins were: his creating the National Park system, building the Panama Canal, and winning a Nobel Peace Prize. We all know what Tea Partiers think of peace and especially of Americans who are Nobel Peace Prize winners: take for example King, Carter, Wilson, and now Obama.
What else? Well, Roosevelt was also guilty of the shameful heresies of caring about the struggles of the working man, restraining corporate abuses, insisting that companies stop lying to their customers in their advertising and create products that were not hazardous to their health. He established safety standards for workers and players. (He created the NCAA and, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Association, "Roosevelt convinced them that the rules needed to be changed to eliminate the foul play and brutality.")
Clearly the work of a villain, obviously a liberal, and for a party that claims to be all about liberty, the worst thing one can be is a liberal. Worth noting, from Wikipedia: "Liberalism (from the Latin liberalis, "of freedom") is the belief in the importance of liberty and equality." Though of course, if you can dictate the only acceptable visions of governments and gods, then I guess you can rewrite the definitions of words as well.
Even worse Roosevelt eventually left the Republican party (like Tea Partiers appear to be doing) and took a good deal of the GOP with him to create the Progressive Party. Of course there are a couple of differences between the Tea Party and the Progressive Party of Roosevelt. For one, the Tea Party hates progress almost as much as taxes. They long for a purer vision of America before all those liberals and their damnable progress started mucking things up.
You know back in the day when black were for slaving or raping, women were for abusing and misusing, and brown people were for target practice. Back when most of society had no idea of the daily news, and religions were burning people at the stake for questioning the exact count of angels astride a pin. When the wealth and direction of the nation were controlled by the privileged few, when less than 8% of the population was allowed to vote, and your life expectancy was that you would die young, poor, and in debt. Sound like the Tea Party vision of America to a tee.
Another difference, according to historian Ted Van Dyk on Crosscut.com, was that Roosevelt's radical Republicans, left the party "rebelling against what they saw as their party's too-close association with big financial and industrial interests." But Tea Partier leaders are all about the Benjamins. For example, though appalling mildly liberal by today's standards, Roosevelt's intervention the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 did improve miner's lives. In comparison, Tea Party boasts Massey Energy's own Don Blankenship who has ended at least 29 miners' lives and laughed at over 3000 safety violations and $50,000,000 in fines because worrying about miner safety is "as silly as global warming."
But Blankenship is just one example: Their movement's organizers and many of the materials are paid for through a lobbying group called Freedom Works, run by health industry lobbyist, former TX rep. Dick Armey, who receives the majority of his funding from big health care and oil interests. The fabulous Koch brothers, bilious billionaire right-wingers, have pumped over fifty million alone into conservative causes and the list just starts there. With donations from big Pharma and big oil to grease their wheels Tea Partiers can now roll roughshod over any non-believer who questions their crude message of absolute liberty to screw everyone over in business and absolute restriction of personal behaviors. Using these kinds of standards, everyone's an enemy. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a man generally ranked by most liberals and most conservatives as the 5th best president of all time, or as Glen Beck referred to him in his CPAC speech, "a cancer."
Then there's Thomas Jefferson whom, as many historians know, could be seen as a comparatively easy target compared Roosevelt. Chronically in debt, famously a slob, an opium poppy grower and probably admirer, a slave owner who kept his dead wife's black half-sister as his lifelong concubine, and an apparent serial philanderer--there is much to question about the man from Monticello; but most of us tolerate such mischief due to his impressive presidency, his founding of the University of Virginia, and an incidental essay or two.
Their purported near monomaniacal devotion to Declaration of Independence be damned, Jefferson is still a blasphemer as far as the Tea Party is concerned, the Texas Tea Party that is, and needed to be banished not just from their hallowed halls, but from the very pages of American History. Thanks their position as the nation's leading textbook buyer and thus market taste setter, the Texas school book mullahs may have marginalized Jefferson nation-wide for the next ten years. That's right, as the New York Times' Russell Shorto reported from the Texas state textbook approval process:
"Thomas Jefferson [is] no longer included among writers influencing the nation's intellectual origins ". Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson's place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone."
And it's not as if they are revolted with the list of typically outrageous behavior described above. But if raping your dead wife's sister whom you'd imprisoned as a sex toy for a couple of dozen years was not offensive enough for them, then just what was Jefferson's crime? Well, as Shorto quipped, "Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board's judgment." And instead, "Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs." The Texas Tea Partiers have thrown Thomas Jefferson, the author of our national founding document completely out of our national history for committing their ultimate sin: not being Christian enough.
Like many of the famous founding fathers (Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and George Washington--to be downright alphabetical about it), Thomas Jefferson was not in fact a Christian and worked hard to end the reign of terror the religions of his time imposed upon the citizenry. At the time of the revolution as oppressive as King George was, he had nothing on the various state sanctioned religions in the various colonies. The King's men could only torture and kill you. The sanctimonious church leaders could do all that AND THEN condemn you to burn in Hell for all eternity.
Jefferson was so proud of his efforts at thwarting the power the church had claimed over the state that on his tombstone, of the three accomplishments he had listed, besides the Declaration and the university already mentioned, he included his authorship of "The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom," omitting the Louisiana Purchase and, in fact, his presidency entirely.
Of course, Jefferson was not the only devil desiring to separate church from state. While it is widely discussed that the Writers of the Constitution gave the issue top billing when they drafted the Bill of Rights; earlier and more profoundly, in Article VI, Madison makes clear that the government of men in America shall not be a tied to anyone's vision of any one's god when he concludes by saying, "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
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