Letters to the editor, Jan. 19, 2010

Tea Parties have earlier origins

Carol Jensen’s commentary, “Tea Party Patriots angry at impersonators” of Jan. 11 is yet another example of how partisan, and frankly confused, a writer can be when turning fact into fantasy in order to support an incredibly inane  position.

Tea party movements have been around much earlier than 2007 as she avers. For example, in a Tea Party movement originating in Victorville in late 2000, started by a then member of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee to address the corruption and irresponsibility of the California Legislature and governor at the “grassroots” level, teabags were mailed to various state legislators. The movement eventually extended to a national level, but subsequently suffered from lower support due to the overriding emergencies of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The anthrax scare of course precluded the mailing of tea bags to legislators, a great idea nonetheless.

If that movement and its symbol had been able to get off the ground, and elected a larger number of responsible conservatives, California legislators would not have catapulted the state so precipitously into its current economic quandary. We would have been able to reform the spendthrift, irresponsible, overtaxing tendencies of a liberal Democratic legislature. But now — oh, well.

Luckily conservatives — independents, Libertarians, and Republicans alike, hoping beyond hope that a liberal national Congress can transform its free-lunch, tax-the-responsible politics and its tendency toward economically disastrous knee-jerk legislation — have now decided to reinstitute a movement, and an icon, that should never been abandoned, and are using a symbol that is all too familiar to opponents of big-government tyranny as well as average concerned citizens.

Symbols have been used effectively by both major political parties over the years. Democrats usually use the sky-is-falling trope to garner support. Republicans tend to use less threatening avatars like flip-flops, and tea bags. Criticizing those symbols, of course, is a natural thing for a political party who has come to believe that populist, truly democratic government is for the naïve; that their original reason for choosing the donkey as a symbol has outworn its usefulness. Perhaps they need a cash-for-donkeys program?

Bob Vasseur, Newberry Springs