Refusing to understand conservative objections to the president’s economic policies and reluctant to acknowledge the failures of said policies, Democrats  – and their allies in the mainstream media — have been peddling the notion that Republicans are engaged in economic sabotage, obstructing Democratic legislation in order to forestall an economic recovery and so prevent Barack Obama’s reelection.

The New York Times even called the Republican method “economic vandalism.”  Guess they missed all those bills the Republican House passed only to see them die in the Democratic Senate.  Or, maybe the paper’s editors missed the classes in college on free market economics (that is, if said classes were taught at all).

Well, some participants in free market movements aren’t waiting for Times editors to take remedial courses in free market economics.  They, like resilient individuals do in a (mostly) free society tend to do, are taking action on their own to help get the economy moving again:

Liberate Philadelphia/Liberate America, a Tea Party coalition of groups countering the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, are challenging the latest move by Occupy Wall Street protesters to occupy or boycott publicly traded retailers on Black Friday by instead encouraging consumers to shop on Black Friday to help the economy recover.

“At a time when our economy is most fragile and ratings agencies are talking about another downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, it’s completely irresponsible for Occupy Wall Street to attempt to bring the U.S. economy to a halt on the busiest shopping day of the year,” Liberate organizer and a spokesman for the Tea Party, John Sullivan, stated in a press release.

Emphasis added.  (Via Instapundit.)  Wonder if any of those folks who accused Republicans of “economic vandalism” will level the same charge against the #OWS folks.

Looks like the Tea Party coalition had some success, as Glenn reports, “RETAIL SUPPORT BRIGADE SITREP: Black Friday sales up 7 percent over 2010. Some people worried that it had become a “hollow army,” but these magnificent troops rose to the occasion one more time.”

“We can,” Stacy McCain contends with examples abundant, “no longer tolerate media assertions that this is a non-violent movement.”  Media cluck-clucking and left-wing blogging notwithstanding, he’s not talking about the Tea Party.  In this case, he’s referencing violence instigated by the “Occupy” movement outside the “Defending the American Dream Summit” hosted by Americans for Prosperity where a 78-year woman was knocked down cement stairs.

And it’s not just in Washington, D.C. where the various Occupy movements — and their various members acting individually — have engaged in violence — just as many in the chattering classes, in highest dudgeon, warned us about the Tea Party.

Well, those in the chattering classes did exult in the rise of the left-wing movement, seeing it as the left-wing Tea Party!  Does seem like the Occupy movement has become just like the Tea Party of the left-wing narrative.

UPDATE: Calling this “The Worst Media Double Standard in Recent History“, Ed Driscoll writes:

In 2009 and 2010, the media trashed the Tea Party, using the crazied, hyperbolic language possible — and yet were envious of their success at the polls last November, and wanted a Tea Party of their own. Hence, Occupy Wall Street. Richard Fernandez asks a great question at the Belmont Club. Did the MSM’s intensely negative reporting cause them (directly or indirectly) to amp up the craziness at OWS to waaaay past 11 on Nigel Tufnel’s Marshall stack, or is that simply what happens when a mass of people with an ill-defined cause co-habituate in an urban Burning Man festival for months on end?

But regarding the MSM’s coverage, since so much of what passes for “liberalism” boils down to “It’s Different When We Do It,” the amount of double-standards in the MSM is bottomless.

Read the whole thing.

Seeing “videos of youths burning things in Oakland,” Victor Davis Hanson . . .

. . . was told that it “was a small minority” and atypical of the protest. Not long ago I saw no clips of anyone spitting at black congresspeople wading into the Tea-Party demonstration, but was told they did and that it was typical of tens of thousands of racialists on the Mall.

(Via Instapundit.) A Democratic president faults Republicans vying for his job because they failed to condemn an isolated boor at a candidates’ debate.  A self-important (and self-righteous) Democratic Congressman insists that his GOP colleagues need to “‘differentiate themselves’ from the hateful speech” of their supporters.  A lunatic with no apparent political agenda attacks a Congresswoman, murdering a number of people with her, and conservative rhetoric is held accountable.

Why is it that, in the eyes of Democratic politicians, liberal pundits and the mainstream media, a small, often fictional, fringe minority speaks for conservative/libertarian movements and the Republican Paty, but radical, often violent, extremists don’t speak for liberal/left-wing movements or the Democratic Party?

UPDATE:  Over at Reason, A. Barton Hinkle builds on this point:

So consider the disparity in coverage of OWS and the Tea Party. A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin’ cousin of the KKK. But that “Google Wall Street Jews” guy? A lone nut. As for the signs calling for the “death of capitalism” and telling Wall Street bankers to “Jump, you [expletives]” and declaring “capitalism can’t be fixed—we need revolution”? Unrepresentative, surely. Ditto the 5:30 Oakland seminar on Marxism 101, and the dude in the Lenin T-shirt, and. . . .

Don’t feel bad if you missed such tidbits on the nightly news. Every movement has its whack jobs, but those on the left get politely overlooked.

FROM THE COMMENTS: Budding Economist reminds us of how one Tea Party critic was treated by the #Occupy Movement.

“A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin’ cousin of the KKK.”

And the entire General Assembly of Occupy Atlanta isn’t accused of anything when they refused to allow Rep. John Lewis to voice his solidarity.

UP-UPDATE: Allahapundit offers:

This can’t be repeated enough: With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It’s not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it’s that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets — like, say, Occupy Oakland just did.

Via Instapundit.

Remember how when just one protester at a Tea Party rally hoists a sign with a comment that appears racist or a handful call out a mean-spirited epithet or one boor behaves rudely at a Republican debate, the media (and even leading Democrats) in the highest of dudgeon remind us of the racism, bigoted and hateful attitudes on the right, demanding that Republicans, “differentiate themselves” from such language lest it define them.

Heck, even an organizer of OccupyLA refused to say whether the “occupation movement” (at 3:20 in video linked) disavowed a protester’s anti-Semitic rant.  The violence that was supposedly an integral part of the Tea Parties appears to become increasingly manifest in the #OWS movement, with one protester threatening to stab a Fox reporter as a nervous police union warned “the Occupiers in Zuccotti Park that any assaults on police officers — or at least sergeants — will result in lawsuits.”

The police wouldn’t be issuing such warnings if they weren’t worried.  Now, you could saw that that threat isn’t legitimate as the police union is issuing the warning, but a flier at OccupyPhoenix asked, “When Should You Shoot A Cop?”  Alerting us to this flier, Ed Morrissey is

. . . curious to see how the media in Arizona and the rest of the nation approach this development.  They went into convulsions retroactive to the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that killed six other people because Sarah Palin used crosshairs on a map once (as had Democrats on a number of occasions), which the media used to paint the Tea Party and conservatives as somehow responsible for the massacre conducted by a madman with no discernibly rational political posture.  Will they hold the Occupy movement to the same ridiculous standard?  I’m betting …. no.

So the question of the day is, if Democrats fail, to borrow the expression of one of their number, to “differentiate themselves” from the violent threats at these rallies, does this mean they favor assaults on members of the press and law enforcement?  (Particularly when said Democrats have explicitly endorsed — or otherwise praised — the gatherings.)

It’s always fascinating to see how liberals perceive conservatives.  They tend to define us not by our ideas or our most accomplished or eloquent leaders, but by the fringe extremists who cling onto our movement hoping to mean some meaning there.

Yesterday on his eponymous CNN show, Piers Morgan suggested that Tea Party folk harbor some pretty extreme views:

When you see tea party candidates and they are against evolution, climate change, and resolutely so, they think gay marriage is a sin and so on and so on . . . .

Huh? I thought they were primarily concerned about the size of government. If Tea Party critics paid more attention to this phenomenon as it is and not as they imagine it to be, they might realize how diverse are members of the dynamic grassroots movement.

One tea party favorite, U.S. Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.), announced “this weekend that she opposes a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state“:

Ellmers said that while she opposes same-sex marriages, she believes the proposed amendment goes too far because it would also ban civil unions.

“Congresswoman Ellmers has always believed that marriage is a sacred institution and is defined as the union between one man and one woman,” Ellmers spokesman Tom Doheny wrote in an email to the Raleigh News & Observer. “That is why she has and will continue to protect and defend marriage at the federal level.

“When asked about civil unions, which are different than marriage, she said that she finds nothing wrong with people being granted them, but at the same time, it is currently a state issue and up to the voters to decide,” Doheny said. (more…)

With a sample, as Ed Morrissey reports, “tilted toward Democrats at 32/25/37,”  the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll finds President Obama and the Tea Party enjoying identical favorable ratings, with “42 percent” approving the job the president is doing while 42 percent support the Tea Party.

Interesting, 47% support the grassroots political movement while “54 percent disapprove” of the incumbent Democratic president.

In a piece on Roseanne Barr, Ed Morrissey explains:

Just remember that when conservatives organize into grassroots movements, it’s almost always about protecting their own property and individual liberty.  When leftists decide to start grassroots movements, like OccupyWallStreet or Barr’s example of leftist populism, it almost always involves seizure of property, threats of violence, and eventually re-education camps and the guillotine.

And yet it’s those conservatives protests which our friends in the mainstream media most often accuse of violence.

SOMEWHAT RELATED:  James Taranto observes:

No matter how these guys try to hype it, a left-wing political mob is a dog-bites-man story. For at least 40 years lefties have routinely mounted protests for fun and profit–rallying for a nuclear freeze, against various and sundry wars, against the World Trade Organization and other international financial agencies, against the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. On the right, by contrast, with the exception of the antiabortion movement, there is no permanent protest culture or infrastructure. That’s why the Tea Party was important and newsworthy.

If you haven’t seen Jamie Farr cum Larry King wannabe Piers Morgan getting into it with Christine O’Donnell, here is that video:

(apologies for the adverts at the beginning of the clip…apparently going on a quasi-news interview show to whore for a new book is matched dearly by a ‘news’ network playing commercials before even online videos)

I have no beef with Morgan being a tough interviewer, and I never really followed O’Donnell’s run for the Senate from Delaware. I realize she’s a social conservative and had run as such.

That being said, Morgan’s insistence on discussing not the debt problem, not the out-of-control runaway spending, not the unconstitutional interference of the current ruling class that led to historic turnover on Capital Hill in last year’s midterm elections; but rather topics such as DADT and gay marriage is a perfect example of why the Left keeps losing elections.

While controversy and drama are good for ratings, there’s also a seriousness in Leftists in the media like Morgan and others insisting on painting the Tea Party with an intolerant brush.

It’s the Alinskyite drubbing and constant drone about Tea Partiers being anti-gay, racist knuckle-dragging Bible-thumping social conservatives that the Left and the media (pardon my redundancy) are hoping to use to discredit their opponents rather than engage in the real argument that they know they’d lose: Is our government too bloated, is it doing things it shouldn’t be doing, and is it impeding our recovery?; or is it not big enough, not spending enough, and not regulating sufficiently?

The Left knows it can’t win that argument in a center-right nation, so they will search for social conservatives within the Tea Party movement (which, unquestionably it can easily find), and then generalize such positions broadly to paint us all as intolerant neanderthals hoping to cast homosexuals into prison.

Can anybody relate an experience at a Tea Party rally or other such event that even addressed social issues? Were gay marriage and DADT even topics of conversation (other than the court’s overreaching in many big cases, and the lack of 10th Amendment appreciation by the ruling class, that is)? I search and search Rick Santelli’s original rant on CNBC but can’t find either of these topics (nor religion, abortion, or race issues) having anything to do with his anger.

I, for one, am completely tired of hearing about social issues. Totally and completely. I can’t believe that with $14,000,000,000,000+ in debt and a new credit line of another $2,000,000,000,000 recently added on, three wars, 9.1% unemployment, GDP growth rate out of a recession at only 1.5%, housing failing, hiring failing, a credit downgrade, that to some morons, the issue of gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is actually pertinent.

As I had admonished them a couple weeks ago, the Social Left in America is ruining our Nation because they care more about their social issues than they do about the fiscal and economic strength of our country.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

Mocking those in the MSM who malign the Tea Party, Ed Driscoll explains:

Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party “Totalitarian.” This has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.

Via Instapundit.

So, to those who can’t understand why a gay man could support the Tea Party, there it is in Ed Driscoll’s italics.  I want the state to leave us alone to live our lives as we please.

Remember, many in the Tea Party have adopted the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden Flag as the movement’s symbol.  Shouldn’t gay people whose fellows have suffered severely throughout history from state meddling in people’s private lives welcome a movement designed to put limits on government?

“Clearly, Jefferson’s own conception of individual freedom,” Joseph J. Ellis wrote in his study of the Virginian, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson in the decade after Ronald Reagan’s presidency and before the rise of the New American Tea Party, “was more restricted than modern day notions”:

His vision was essentially negative:  freedom from encroachments by either church or state.  It was all a piece with his antig0vernment and therefore incompatible with our* contemporary conviction about personal entitlements, whether it be for a decent standard of living, a comfortable retirement or adequate health care, all of which depend on precisely the kind of government sponsorship he would have found intrusive.  His was the freedom to be left alone, which has more in common with twentieth-century claims to privacy rights than more aggressive claims to political or economic power.

That vision closely parallels my own — and I would daresay that of many conservatives today, including a certain Mr. R. Reagan and many who join the various Tea Party protests.

* (more…)

Rudy Giuliani, my guy for 2008, reminds Republicans where our focus should be:

“I think the Republican Party would be well advised to get the heck out of people’s bedrooms and let these things [e.g., gay marriage] get decided by states,” Giuliani said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We’d be a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots.”

It does seem that the one upside of Obama’s big-government ways is that it has kept the GOP, by and large, centered on the small-government ideas that have defined the American conservative movement at least since the ascendancy of Barry Goldwater in 1964.

The Tea Party has certainly helped out*.

My only quibble with the former NYC Mayor’s comment is his use of the conditional, “We’d be,” he said, “a much more successful political party if we stuck to our economic, conservative roots.” (Emphasis added.)  I’d use either the present or past tense her, to note how the GOP has been more successful when it sticks to those roots, as many Republicans were in the 2010 elections.

*RELATED: Gay marriage not priority to NH Tea Party Protesters

At the capital area Pride festivities last month, a gay libertarian wanting to see some symbol to remind us that not all gay people toe the statist agenda of the national gay groups, that some of us value freedom and just want the state to leave us alone to live our lives as we choose.  To that end, he wants to craete a Gadsden Pride flag those free-loving homosexuals like us to hoist.

You can buy just such a T-shirt now at Cafe Press. If you’re interested in helping support this enterprising individual in his plan to produce such flags, please e-mail him. The greater the order he makes, the less cost it will be for each individual flag.

According to Gallup, nearly “half of Americans, 47%, now have an unfavorable image of the Tea Party movement, the highest since it emerged on the national scene.”  That contrasts with 33% who have a favorable view.  This represents an increase of 5% in the grassroots movement’s unfavorable rating and a decrease of 6 points in its favorables, a pretty significant shift that.

At the same time, as Americans’ negative views of the movement are on the upswing, they continue to embrace its underlying ideal:

The large majority of Americans say spending too much money on unneeded or wasteful federal programs is to blame for the federal budget deficit, while 22% say the deficit is a consequence of not raising enough in taxes to pay for needed programs.

This movement gained momentum two years ago, largely because of the vast increases in federal spending passed by the then-Democratic Congress and signed by President Obama.  In line with Tea Party protestors, “Americans generally favor spending cuts rather than tax increases as the way for Congress to reduce the deficit going forward”:

Given a choice, Americans of all political persuasions are more likely to say that too much wasteful and unneeded government spending is the cause of the federal budget deficit, rather than too little tax revenue. Americans of all political persuasions also say cutting back on federal spending should be a major focus of efforts to reduce the deficit going forward.

Via Washington Examiner.  Do hope the president is looking at this poll.  And that Republican leaders don’t lose sight of it.

On Tuesday, a left-wing blog reported something that our readers have been noticing now for at least since the dawn of the Tea Party movement two years ago, that those joining these grassroots protests against excessive government spending are, by and large, not concerned with gay issues:

During a recent trip to Concord, New Hampshire, to cover a Tax Day Tea Party sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, I [Igor Volsky] asked attendees how the state’s 2009 same-sex marriage law has affected the state or their private lives. New Hampshire Republicans have promised to repeal the law next year and conservatives in the state have promised to turn the marriage issue into a litmus test for potential 2012 presidential contenders.

But at Friday’s event, not a single Tea Party activist told me that expanding marriage to gays and lesbians has undermined their relationships or in any way changed the state. In fact, everyone I spoke to insisted that changing the marriage law was not a priority

A number of the participants said that gay marriage just wasn’t a “priority” for them.  They’re more concerned with “bigger problems.”  Nice to see a left-wing blog helping debunk the (false) narrative of Tea Parties being a socially conservative movement where gays are unwelcome.

(H/t Memeorandum.)

If you watch nothing else on the Interwebs today, make it THIS!

Great work from Caleb Howe and Benjamin Howe!!!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Conservative blogs yesterday were all over a story the Daily Caller broke early in the day about a video apparently capturing “National Public Radio [NPR] senior executive, Ron Schiller . . . on camera savaging conservatives and the Tea Party movement”:

“The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian – I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move,” declared Schiller, who runs NPR’s foundation.

That a senior executive for a news organization could say such a thing helps prove the conservative point about media biased against us.  Anyone who thinks that the Tea Party is not just involved, but “fanatically” involved in “people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian” hasn’t been paying much attention to the actual issues motivating so many people to participate in their protests.

It seems Schiller has a standard template for all conservative movements, that these folks want to run people’s lives, a template he likely derives not from actual reporting on actual Tea Parties, but from a prejudiced view of the right.

It’s one thing for such a man to be part of a supposedly non-partisan news organization.  It’s quite another when that organization takes federal money.  With federal budget deficits of over one trillion dollars, the solution is simple:  the federal government should defund NPR and let it fend for itself in the marketplace.

As does FoxNews.

UPDATE:  Commenting on this case, Michael Barone reaches a similar conclusion:

. . . with a new large Republican majority in the House of Representatives, NPR leaders could hardly have done a better job of persuading Congress to zero out public radio funding. (more…)

Glenn reminds us that “TODAY IS BEING CALLED THE TWO-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE TEA PARTY.”  And indeed, when I went back to check our archives, realized that it was two years ago today that I first attended a Tea Party and blogged about it —  here and here.

May this anniversary remind us that while we’ve come a long way in two years, we still have a tough rough ahead of us.  We may have helped moved popular opinion (or some might see it as helped disgruntled citizens organize and articulate their long-simmering grievances), but we still need to do the hard work of dismantling the unnecessary parts of the federal leviathan, many put into place since the first Tea Party protest.

Still, if our progress in the next two years continues as it has in the past,  when, two years hence, we celebrate the fourth anniversary of these grassroots protests for freedom, former President Obama will be wondering at how quickly a Republican Congress working in tandem with his successor worked to dismantle the bureaucracies he created while helping fulfilling his 2008 promise of a “net spending cut“.

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

If our elected leaders were responsible guardians of the public treasury, those officials proposing budget cuts more drastic than some dubbed “draconian” would be seen not skinflints, but as skinflints.  These cuts barely scratch the surface of our fiscal problems.  With deficits like those we’ve been running, a $100 billion-dollar cut is little more than a rounding error.

That said, I’m pleased the Tea Party has scored a major victory in pushing House Republicans to cut at least that amount  ”in spending this fiscal year“, but that still leaves us with a deficit larger than any in the Bush years (when that good man’s detractors, including your humble bloggers, were faulting congressional Republicans for their big-spending ways).

(Hill article via Instapundit.)

Indeed, the deficit this year will be at least twice that of any comparable period when we had a Republican president and Congress.  To be sure, these cuts represent a step in the right direction, but given the size of the deficit, they amount to little more than a few drops in a very, big bucket.

*and then some.

2010, Bob Cusack reports at the Hill, “was the year of the Tea Party“:

. . . the Tea Party was in many ways a net asset for the GOP as Republicans grabbed control of the House and cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate. 

However, there was collateral damage as Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) and other Senate GOP hopefuls seen as the party’s best chance of winning general-election races were ousted in primaries. Some blamed Tea Party candidates for costing Republicans a Senate majority to go with their new majority in the House.

Now, the question will be whether 2011 becomes the year where the Republican House, consistent with Tea Party principles, rejects big-government programs and passes legislation repealing the statist initiatives passed in the 111th Congress while scaling back those federal programs which helped create the financial mess of 2008 and the ongoing economic downturn.

Let us hope that the powers that be in Washington, including some who held significant sway over Republicans like Castle, do not hold the influence they once did over elected Republicans.  And that instead Tea Party principles, nearly identical to those of a great man whose centennial we celebrate this year, guide those election officials.

2010 was indeed the year when the Tea Party helped transform the electoral landscape.  Maybe 2011 be the year when it transforms the legislative landscape. (more…)

From a letter to the editor in the Washington Post, “The Tea Party’s brew includes gays and lesbians“:

Mr. Meyerson assumes that gay Americans are politically myopic. National exit polls for the November election showed that 31 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay voted for Republican candidates in House races.

Liberals would like to believe they own the gay vote, as if gays were a monolithic voting bloc whose sole, overriding concern is gay marriage and the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Gays are heads of families, professionals and business owners, and issues such as national security, sane economic policy and halting the rapid growth and overreach of government rank far ahead of gay issues for many, though the importance of gay issues can’t be discounted.

The Tea Party movement has three core principles: Fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets. While individual Tea Partyers may embrace a wide range of views on social issues, the movement has risen to power because it has formed around this very narrow range of principles most critical to the survival of our nation at this precise moment in history.

The letter’s author Doug Mainwaring may not be a GayPatriot reader, but he sure does sound like one!  :-)

Sees more and more of us freedom-loving gay folk are speaking out!

(H/t:  Instapundit.)