A sign of co-option.
"Tea Party fragmented, but still a force; As one faction welcomes Romney, another recoils" September 03, 2011|By Christopher Rowland, Globe Staff
DES MOINES - Even while racking up political successes, the Tea Party’s fractured leadership and increasingly negative public image are stunting its maturation as a cohesive political force within the GOP. News coverage this week focused less on the Tea Party’s goals of shrinking government and cutting taxes and more on internal squabbling....
Thanks, agenda-pushing media.
The quest for attention and money by competing groups is angering some Tea Party grassroots organizers.
“I think these national groups are the ones giving the Tea Party a bad name,’’ said Jeff Leucke, a leader of the Dubuque Tea Party. “They are taking the corporate money. They are shills for the Republican Party.’’
A poll taken after this summer’s credit-ceiling debate in Congress showed that Americans have an increasingly negative view of the Tea Party. About 40 percent of Americans said they had an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, compared with 18 percent in April 2010, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published in August.
The jumbled, hydra-headed nature of the movement is making it easier for opponents to paint it as extreme, even dangerous, and incapable of national leadership, political specialists said.
“They are a nonviolent version of the opposition in Libya,’’ said Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor at Iowa State University....
Yeah, they are "insurgents."
What information does trickle through to voters, he said, tends to be threats by Tea Party activists and like-minded public figures against federal programs that many Americans view as important, such as Medicare and environmental protection....
For 2012, the question remains whether divided Tea Partiers will split their support among the conservative GOP candidates - including Governor Rick Perry of Texas, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, and Representative Ron Paul of Texas - which could help Romney win the nomination.
Now you know the conventional, agenda-pushing lie the corporate media is going to use to deny Ron Paul the Republican nomination.
In the general election, if the influence of Tea Party groups pulls the nominee too far to the right, that could produce the presidential version of Angle or O’Donnell. Angle, the 2010 Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada, and O’Donnell, her counterpart in Delaware, shocked the GOP establishment with upset victories in their primaries but failed in the general election against Democrats, who painted them as extreme.
“The Republican wise men, they are not in control,’’ said Harvard sociology professor Theda Skocpol, whose book on the Tea Party’s motivations and organization is scheduled for publication this fall.
The Tea Party Express political road show is put on by a team of longtime Republican activists and consultants from California with a knack for political stagecraft, marketing, and fund-raising but with no grass-roots organization to speak of....
I am SO SICK of the S*** FOOLEY IMAGERY of POLITICS!
Our Country Deserves Better is led by Howard Kaloogian, a former California state lawmaker and conservative activist who led the effort to effort to recall former California Governor Gray Davis in 2009....
2009? Davis was recalled long before that.
Also vying for a national leadership role in conservative advocacy are, among others, FreedomWorks, led by former House majority leader Dick Armey; Americans for Prosperity, which is backed by billionaire David Koch; and Tea Party Patriots, which has a website listing hundreds of loosely affiliated organizations around the country.
The TRUE TEA PARTY PATRIOTS!
Btw, have you ever noticed how little coverage the Koch brothers receive from the corporate media?
Way down on the food chain are individual organizers like Ryan Rhodes, a 29-year-old with little more in the way of political infrastructure than a beat-up Oldsmobile and an iPad.
Rhodes, a former car salesman who lost his job when Chrysler closed the dealership where he worked, launched the Iowa Tea Party when the movement was still in its brushfire phase....
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Also see:
Tea Party Refuses to Take the Pledge
Tea Party Threatens Pentagon
Thus they must be demonized and destroyed by TPTB and their media mouthpieces.
