PrintOctober 25, 2010
Why President Obama Can't Stand Tea
Public education has been controlled by Progressives for eighty years; if education is truly the goal, it appears a likely candidate for the biggest, longest-lasting, most expensive and clearest utter public failure any American political group has ever brought about. If education isn't the true goal, it may represent instead a major political success -- but if so, it makes the Progressives in charge gigantic criminals and hypocrites, appropriating public resources and mal-educating children under false pretenses. Either way, that's the signature model for Progressive principles in action...and the U.S. spends more per pupil than any other developed country.
The Progressives disapproved of older styles of educating that had worked for hundreds of years; they threw them out and succeeded in bringing inarguable change to public education. The claim was that older teaching was too fact-centered and authoritarian; they got rid of the facts well enough, but the politically correct regime they imposed is past authoritarian, approaching totalitarian. The Obamacrats are extending that Progressive program over the rest of the U.S.
The Tea Party folk are pretty unorganized and include various views. They are Republicans, independents, and Democrats who share some things: they haven't been stirred up enough to be very politically active until recently, and they disapprove of big tax, big spend, big government, and bailouts. They tend to approve of the Constitution and American exceptionalism and don't want a government that controls their lives. You could say they represent traditional Americans, which helps explain why they flourish more in the middle than on the coasts. They like and are proud of America; they oppose makeovers.
Obama and his Progressives don't like America; they are ashamed of it. They disapprove of the country just as the Progressives disapproved of public education when they took it over. Why else would they want to impose change? Like the thought control imposed via political correctness in the schools, they use government power to impose their changes whether wanted or not, as the recent passage of ObamaCare demonstrated. That demonstration of political arrogance explains, too, why Obamacrats despise the Tea Party folk for clinging to everything the superior Progressives want tossed.
No way can a front man for Progressivism drink tea with the ignorant. The president versus the Tea Parties is an existential battle between those who aim to expand beyond the primitive, overly restrictive Constitution and those who seek to reimpose the Founders' vision; there's no room for compromise in such fundamental oppositions.
The president cannot long suffer the Tea Parties; they expose him too much. The Tea Parties are empowered by Obama; he's their best advertisement. But Obama has anti-Tea Party allies in the generally Progressive media to help demonize and dismiss the Tea Parties and more subversive help yet in the Republican leadership, who, though opposing Obama, are more sympathetic to his goals than to those of the Founders.
As though these conflicts were not complex enough, they are playing out in an economy gasping on deficit-financed life support, with both Democrats and Republicans terrified of being nailed as the next Herbert Hoover when reality sinks into the public mind or the money runs out. Neither party is willing to mention the existence, let alone the extent, of the remainder of the economic collapse still waiting, such leadership responsibilities as preparing the public for what it faces be damned, and the public along with them.
The Obamacrats and the Republicans have both tried to prop up the unaffordable social safety net and hide the resulting canyon of debt by papering it over with yet more borrowing plus Federal Reserve Fun Dollars; too many Tea Party balance-the-damn-budget stalwarts elected threatens to expose the Ponzi scheme and bring down the house before the current perpetrators have safely bailed. Both parties' leaders view the Tea Parties the way a vampire might examine a sharp stake.
President Obama is the Progressive's pride. He and the folk named for an action taken 237 years ago in Boston can't see each other; they aren't even looking in the same direction.
The president must be pleased (though that is not what he says) with the results the Progressives have achieved in public education since he is continuing to apply the same principles to the rest of the country. The Tea Parties exist not only to stop, but to reverse that. The president can't stand Tea; one of the two has to fail.
