Strong Wind To Starboard

Some still don’t take the Tea Party seriously, even after they’ve gathered over and over, all around the country, in huge numbers, and protested big government’s unconstitutional expansion. Mostly they’re smug liberals who consider themselves to be intellectuals. They think they know what’s best for the rest of us and they’re running the country - right into the ground. Bernie Marcus, one of the guys who founded Home Depot, thinks they’re tenured academics and “They don’t have a clue of what they’re talking about.”

“They come out of Harvard,” he said. “They come out of Yale. They’re all on tenure. Tenure means they get paid whether they work or not. Tenure means they’re on insurance for the rest of their lives. Tenure means they don’t ever have to worry about anything because they were there for a number of years, but America is not that way . . . If the president got out of the White House and started moving among the peasants, which is everybody else in the world except for Washington. Washington has their own insurance plan. They got their own pensions. They don’t abide by the rules everyone else abides by . . . When I talk to people who are creating jobs today - these are not villains. These are not monsters.”

“And you think they’re being portrayed that way [by the White House]?” asked the host.

“Oh, there’s no question about it. Yeah, we’re monsters and we are disgusting human beings . . . for creating 300,000 jobs
. . .”

Marcus is pissed. So is the Tea Party. The elitists still don’t get it. They will after November 2nd though.

These tenured liberals have lived all their lives in academic echo chambers and think they know how to run the world - its health care and its economy. They’re still predicting an economic recovery to follow the $800 billion stimulus that spent $2 million for each job it created. But ordinary Americans understand that no recovery is going to happen that way. They know Obama, Pelosi and Reid only made things worse by putting us $800 billion further into debt. They know our health care system was much better before that triumvirate “fixed” it by making it more complicated, more expensive, and less effective. They know we won’t have a recovery until they take back their government - and they will.

Senator John Kerry, for whom I used to work when I was a young and foolish liberal, made some nasty remarks about Tea Party victories in last week’s primaries. “The news from Delaware is crystal clear: It’s Sarah Palin’s party now. We [must] defeat the Tea Party extremists.”

Extremists? The Tea Party is extremist? Not smug elitists like himself who tripled our deficit and turned recession to depression? Tenured elitists think Republicans are being hijacked by the Tea Party and they’re right. The Tea Party wants to pull the Constitution out of mothballs, dust it off, and apply it the way the founding fathers intended. That’s extremist to Ivy League elitists like Kerry, who think they’re much smarter than Jefferson and Madison. They don’t want government to be hampered by the Constitution. They know better how to create jobs better than people like Bernie Marcus too, even though he’s actually done it and they haven’t.

They’re right that the Tea Party has been concentrating on Republicans - to clean liberals like Castle, Murkowski and Crist out, because there’s no point having two liberal parties. That makes other RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) like Maine Senator Olympia Snowe nervous. If Mike Castle can lose a primary in a liberal state like Delaware, Snowe can lose one in liberal Maine too - and she’s up in 2012. Some expect her to come out of the closet as a Democrat soon. Will Susan Collins be far behind? She’s up in 2014.

Now that the primaries are over, the Tea Party will focus on defeating liberal Democrats in November. How many will drop? Hard to tell. I happened to be passing through Portland, Maine last Monday when Lady Gaga showed up to pressure our two Lady RINO senators into breaking ranks and repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The pierced and tattooed turned out to cheer their liberal Democrat heroes who warmed up the crowd with speeches - like 1st District Congresswoman and Pelosi Pet, Chellie Pingree. The contrast between that crowd and a Tea Party crowd in nearby Westbrook where Pingree’s opponent, conservative Republican Dean Scontras, spoke the day before could not be more profound. Pingree’s web site pledges to “Stop the Tea Party,” but which constituency will prevail in Maine and America on November 2nd? Maine’s 1st district is the bluest part of a very blue state in the azure northeast - a sanctuary state with generous welfare benefits for illegal immigrants and a homosexual haven. Pingree is ahead in opinion polls 48% to Scontras’s 37%, but 15% are undecided. Scontras is a tireless campaigner and Pingree is worried. She looked pretty haggard when I saw her Monday. She knows that 15% is likely to break for Scontras and sink her.

If Scontras beats her November 2nd, our two Lady RINOs will probably start tacking to starboard as John McCain has in Arizona. In spite of Lady Gaga’s pressure, they didn’t break ranks when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” came up in the US Senate on Tuesday. They have their fingers in the wind - which will become a gale in about five weeks.

With Carol Shea Porter (D-NH) on one side of me and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) on the other, it’s been difficult, but both may well go down in only forty days. I can’t wait.