In the recent primaries and elections, the Tea Party has proven itself a political force. I still don’t know what to make of them, though. They’s stated they don’t want to create another political party, but reform the ones we’ve got. I like that. Yet there’s something about their decked out patriot costumes and slogans that shouts Obama Birthers and 9/11 Truthers. What do you think? Is the Tea Party something to support?

Movements can be powerful. A powerful movement is good or dangerous – depending on your politics.

The Tea Party is a unique type of movement for the United States. It’s large and quiet. Most US movements are small and loud, representing specific minority issues, and are often organized and financed by unions and other organizations.

The Tea Party movement represents the general ideas of efficiently small government and personal responsibility, which are ideas held by the majority of working Americans, regardless of past voting habits. And the movement is ‘grass roots,’ meaning it simply sprang up comprising numerous like-minded people throughout society. That’s why Tea Party rallies are held on the weekend, so the whole group doesn’t have to get the day off, unlike the common Hippy-Liberal rallies that appear on weekdays intentionally to be disruptive.

You can tell the Tea Party movement is powerful just by how nervous it makes outspoken Liberals. And the Liberal criticism of the movement is weak at best. Liberals, including Obama, describe the Tea Party like they’re Anarchists, wanting no government – but the Tea Party just wants government to stop growing wildly. They agree government is a good thing.

Liberals describe the Tea Party as hateful and dangerous – but the Tea Party has harmed no one, committed no property damage (unheard of at Liberal rallies), don’t cause disruption, and even pick up after themselves. The favorite Liberalcriticism of the Tea Party, of course, is that Tea Party activists are anti-Obama racists – but the only examples of racist behavior has been by Liberals planting themselves at Tea Party rallies. There’s even a $100,000 reward for evidence of a Tea Partier using a racial slur – unclaimed!

The Tea Party has proven a strong force in the few special elections held since its appearance. And if you believe in its basic principles – not further growing/financing more government bureaucracies – then supporting it is natural. The few goofballs wearing the 1700s gear, birthers, and 9/11 truthers are few at most. As far as political rallies go, you’d expect to see more weirdos. But the average Tea Partier is the average working American. Don’t be fooled by the press and its tendency to show only the most eccentric or dangerous looking members of a protest in its news reports. Yeah, the Tea Party is mostly white, but so is America.

The real question is strategic: What will this movement mean for the direction of the country? Movements like this can be extremely productive in promoting their ideas – but can be equally as destructive to them.

Electing Brown in Massachusetts was an example of a productive direction of power. It stuck a republican into one of the most traditionally Democratic seats in Congress. An example of a possibly destructive direction was the Tea Party induced victory of Rand Paul over Trey Grayson in Kentucky’s Republican primary election for the mid-term Senate race. Grayson was the more electable candidate, the one establishment Republicans were backing. And Rand Paul, somewhat a radical, has since already said a few ‘unelectable’ things…

So we’ll see. If this were a Democrat upsergence I’d predict that the eventual result would be repetition of history: Dems splitting the vote and handing victory to the minority, how Lincoln got elected. But the Tea Party is mostly Republican and Libertarian. The Libertarians worry me, but Republicans are generally a big-picture type of people who will recognize the necessity of electing electable people, rather than ideal people.

And by ‘electable’ I don’t mean moderate. Indeed, America wants a moderate government, one that will provide expert non-ideological solutions. But that would require expert non-ideological people. And those kinds of people rarely run for political office and even more rarely are elected (they’re usually ugly and/or awkward). So we have to settle for electing the most reasonable seeming ideologs in even numbers on each side of the spectrum. Right now we’re dealing with a swinging pendulum in that respect.

Check out this CNN article:

“Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them?”

That author is being cheeky. By his use of words, Regan didn’t support “free markets” or “capitalism”, the USSR was not “socialist” or “Communist”, and the Democrats don’t believe in practicing “democracy”.

Who wrote this – John Blake – a high school kid learning Civics vocabulary? LOL

When people in America say “Socialist” in this way, they’re describing policies that move toward a socialist society in the way Canadian, (pick a country) French or English Socialist or Liberal parties currently govern those countries. They aren’t accusing anyone or anything of being a socialist according to the socialist definition held by Marx or one of the current – we just haven’t done it right yet – hard socialist organizations that want all national border dissolved and replaced by a one-world workers’ democracy. 

Hey, let’s ask hard-and-fast advocates or pure democracy if Obama is a democrat. Or let’s ask an anarchist if Obama supports Liberty. Let’s ask a child pornographer if Obama supports free speech. Let’s ask a fanatical fundamentalist Christian is Obama is ‘saved’. Let’s ask a pot-smoking chains-himself-to-trees-to-stop-green-energy-construction hippy if Obama supports the environment.

Get the picture, mister definition? One more hack attempt at making Obama critics look ignorant instead of facing their logic and math.

I still don’t have much love for the Creationist movement, but this Ben Stein movie is hilarious. It, among other things, follows scientists who were blacklisted for being associated with “intelligent design.” It’s pretty well done. Made me laugh.

This is the standard ‘big tent’ definition of Evangelicalism, using my words:

Evangelicalism is a Christian Protestant movement that began in the 1730s in England and America, led by the likes of Puritanism, Pietism, and Methodism in England, and the likes of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in America. It maintains four essential priorities:

• the primacy of Scripture

• the centrality of Christ’s death as substitutionary atonement for human sins

• the necessity of personal conversion

• the importance of ‘kingdom living’ (actively following Jesus by engaging such efforts as the spiritual devotions, Christian community, deeds of compassion, justice, etc)

Anything else, or anything less, is not Evangelicalism-proper, but someone’s personality or opinions fused in with these four pillars. For instance, Evangelicals did not vote George Bush into office. Political/social conservatives, who also happen to be Evangelicals, voted him in. Further, many political/social liberals, who also happen to be Evangelicals, voted Barrack Obama into office this time around.

As another example, A Christian who says she is an Evangelical because she really has a heart to love the poor is not an Evangelical. She is a Christian who has a passion for a Christian principle which also happens to be one-quarter of the essential priorities of Evangelicalism.