TEA and Toast

By Julian Krasta

There is a statue in Concord, Massachusetts, named The Minute Man. It was created by Daniel Chester French and was erected in 1875 in honor of the men who gave their lives at onset of the American Revolutionary War. At the base of the statue is inscribed the first stanza of the Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which includes this line:

"And fired the shot heard around the world."

This sentence (since shortened to, and is more familiar as, The shot heard around the world) has been used to describe life-changing events, e.g., the battle of Lexington and Concord, which set the American Revolution in motion; the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which plunged Europe, and later America, into “the war to end all wars”; the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King—to name a few.

With pride and appreciation we now can include a remarkable event: the rescue operation executed by the sharpshooters onboard the U.S. Navy Destroyer Bainbridge that took down the Somali pirates, freeing Capt. Richard Phillips unharmed.

Three days later, on April 15th, more shots rang out. Those, however, were not fired from a Barrett .50-cal. They were the voices of over one million Americans who had come together at TEA—Taxed Enough, Already—Parties in cities across the country.

Politicians were welcome but not encouraged to attend. The gatherings comprised American citizens, and were not meant as platforms for the theatrics of public officials, which is why they were a success.

TEA parties began as reactions to Obama’s record spending, soon to be followed by a multi-trillion dollar national sales tax and socialized medicine, all of which is, and will be, hitting us like a swarm of F‑5 Texas twisters.

There were placards that displayed passionate messages, aimed mostly at the White House. Those messages, created under our right of free speech, were as harsh as it got. No smoke bombs or attack dogs were needed to disperse unruly crowds. States’ National Guards were not in siege mode; and no rocks, bottles, or verbal missives were hurled at police.

Each assembly was nonviolent and under control, which might explain why the mainstream media were noticeably absent; no heads were bashed and no effigies were burned, ergo, nothing the MSM considered imperative to report. Okay, there was one arrest (out of the one million): an over-exuberant partygoer blocked traffic as she cheerily waved her homemade sign. Was she dragged off in chains? No. The lady was peaceably, and without incident, escorted away by the local gendarmes.

The gatherings are proof of Newton’s Third Law: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Case in point: You bombed Pearl Harbor without provocation? You’re toast. Or: You attacked our country without provocation on 9/11 and killed 3,000-plus innocent civilians up and down our eastern seaboard? Toast again.

Liberals and our liberal left-wing president (all of whom are more concerned with defending such offenders) would probably view my illustrations as over-the-top. But you get the point.

TEA parties serve to openly and peacefully object to Barack Obama and his flawed actions. Rather than go down that list, I’m linking one article in this paragraph, dated April 23, 2009, which is a report at WSJ.com about Obama’s intention to allow the indictment of Bush officials. The piece is entitled “Presidential Poison” – appropriate, I think, in the circumstances.

The gatherings “evolved” (the MSM’s favorite word) into protests against Obama’s dressing down of our country while recently in Europe. Most appalling, from my point of view, was during the same excursion when Obama greeted King Abdullah. Instead of offering a manly handshake or a respectful tilt of his head, he bowed and kissed the hand of that potentate. No other U.S. president, including President George W. Bush, has ever made such a transparent gesture of submission.

TEA partygoers protested Obama’s lack of control over his appointees, particularly Janet Napolitano. In the DHS Intelligence Assessment, titled “Rightwing Extremism,” she suggested that military vets should be viewed as a danger to America: She cited Timothy McVeigh to draw on in order to make such an irresponsible statement. In Napolitano’s own words, which I’m borrowing from an April 23 article at the New York Post, “I was the United States attorney for Arizona in the ‘90s when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrow [sic] building in Oklahoma City and unfortunately he was a vet – that’s where he got his training.”

But Janet failed to cite other examples, such as John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Beltway snipers, who were black and Muslim. Or did she forget? Or was she ordered to refer to heinous crimes committed only by white men?

Her lack of correctness has prompted a call by conservative organizations to demand Napolitano resign from her post at the Department of Homeland Security. In other words: You accuse our veterans of being right-wing extremists because of their military training? You’re toast.

Comes now Nancy Pelosi. On April 23, the Speaker of the House went before the press and funfeh’d (Yiddish for stumbled and mumbled) yet another myth: she denied having any knowledge that our Central Intelligence Agency used the method called “waterboarding” on captured terrorists to extract from them vital information advantageous to national security.

I guess Nancy dozed off during the 2002 briefing in which GOP operatives explained the “enhanced interrogation techniques in graphic detail.” And this comes on the heels of her uproarious statements about the Catholic Church and abortion.

On July 4th, Newton’s Third Law will again come into play when the bell rings for Round Three of the TEA Parties. I expect they will be even bigger, more unified, and just as in-control.

Capitol Hill fears these gatherings. They’re using words like “racist” and “national security threat” against the gatherers—like the schoolyard bully who cowers and cries foul when his object of ridicule has had enough and slugs back.

“We, the People”—the participants at TEA Parties—are the target of the bullies on Capitol Hill, and we have had enough. We have reached the end of our tether over the dismal and reckless performance on the part of members of the House and Senate.

We are equally at our wits’ end over this Administration playing robber baron with the American way of life, our livelihoods, our industries, our freedoms, and our children’s future. And we reject its efforts to infuse socialism in our country and thereby cause its implosion.

To those few who are trying to steer this country off a cliff, I have four brand new words for you:

LiberTEA … EqualiTEA … FraterniTEA … ProsperiTEA

I’m confident that majority control will swing back to the Republican Party after next year’s congressional elections. Thereafter, we will rebuild our lives and re-fortify our nation. And we can then offer a “toast” to the return of our inalienable rights, and pick up where we left off in our pursuit of happiness.