This is a draft of the speech I gave to the Kingman chapter of Federation of Democratic Women, Wednesday January 8th, 2014. Actual results may vary:
Hello, welcome everybody.
My name is
Mikel Weisser; I am a Democratic candidate for US House of Representatives here
in Congressional District Four. As you can see from the map, Congressional
District Four includes most of the Western half of the state, the central
highlands and the rural area around metropolitan PHX. That’s portions of 7
counties and/or 9 or 10 legislative districts. It runs from Yuma to Utah,
Parker to Payson. I affectionately call it the Left Coast of Arizona. When I
moved here on January First, 2001 to start the new millennia, my late wife
& I actually lived right on the coast, well, our balcony was above the
Colorado shoreline in Bullhead City. Instead having chickens, cats and dogs, we
had a school of carp.
Of course, I
wouldn’t be up here talking if I was just a chicken farmer from So-Hi, so
here’s some bonafides: I am a vice chair in the Arizona Democratic Party’s
progressive caucus, Mohave County Party Secretary and on the state board of
Democracy for America, AZNORML and the state poetry society. I serve as the
legislative liaison for AZ’s cannabis community, working w Safer AZ, the folks
behind a couple of reform bills the AZ statehouse will be dealing w this
January. In fact I am leaving here at 1 for a meeting w Rep. Mark Cardenas who
is sponsoring a bill I spent all summer and fall shopping to the legislature.
(But more on that later.) I am a longtime political writer, retired teacher,
former plumber, teen runaway, carnie, until recently a touring poet (which is
actually a lot like being homeless), an artist/entertainer of sorts and I have
a couple of Masters Degrees.
But beyond
that mention of my campaign, I came here today to speak you as a political
writer. One who has been following the Right since the late 80s. I ought to
warn you, most of that writing has been political humor. So if I should say
something that seems oddly stated or downright weird and you’re wondering if I
thought that was supposed to be funny? Yes.
Good, w that
settled, I wanted to start this off by showing you something, but I need to
explain a few things first. Like, starting with why I called this presentation:
“Addressing Tea Party Lies and Rescuing the
Future.”
When I say I
intend to address a political party’s record of lies, I need to be sure I start
by showing you an example of how a whole party can be lying. So many times in
politics we are asked to consider this and/or that, and give the person the
benefit of a doubt, maybe you misheard or maybe they were innocently mistaken.
So I want to be sure there is no doubt of intention: when I tell you that the
Tea Party leadership of America, working within the GOP, are consciously lying
to the public and protecting the very people who wrecked our economy just
recently and on their way to do it again, I want to be sure you understand, I
am not engaging in political gamesmanship, or hyperbole. I am not cooking up a
typical Democratic talking point or even off my meds. I am not even letting you
guys in on a secret. It is widely known that the GOP make a practice of lying
and they have a whole cottage industry of pollsters & marketers, whose
whole job is to help them lie to us better.
Now when I say
widely known, I mean that millions of Americans are familiar w this problem;
but not enough millions it seems or we would already have made them stop. &
we Americans very much need the Tea Party to stop lying. And understand, this
is not just little white lies we are talking about, or even full-size white
lies, not merely the fudging of figures and rounding off of inconvenient
decimal points, the accepted exaggeration people to expect in a hyperbolic
tirade. Oh, there’s plenty of that going on. But what I am talking about is the
dedicated misrepresentation of reality to deceive the public for personal
interest, ultimately leading to deadly enslavement of our economy and society
to guys on Wall Street exactly like Mitt Romney. Selling off the country and
citizens’ entire lives to the big banks at pennies a share. I kid you not, as I
billed this lecture:
“Tea Party policies and the rhetoric of their
leaders are willfully damaging America’s economy and social fabric and threaten
our future. Endless ACA attacks, Benghazi boondoggles, debt ceiling showdowns,
government shutdowns, gutting education, cutting unemployment and food stamps,
while protecting Wall St wolves; these acts verge on treason. If America is to
have a future, the Tea Party must be stopped.”
So,
That’s a really big statement:
The GOP are
lying to us and it will destroy our country. Ya can’t get any more direct than that.
I better have some proof for you guys in
black N white, right? Well, there’s lots of different through-lines we could
follow to end up at this same conclusion, but today I am going to focus on the
financial sector as much as my ADD brain will allow. So, here we go:
Anyone here
ever heard of Frank Luntz? Right? That’s right, Frank Luntz is the Republican
strategist/marketer who consults on and creates GOP language messaging. He’s
been at it 20+ years and apparently makes a whale of a living at it. He most
famously consulted for New Gingrich back when they were obstructing Congress to
impeach Clinton over a DNA spill. He helped shape much of the Bush
administration’s language such as naming a bill that increased factory pollution
limits as a “clean air initiative” and one for clear-cutting national forest
land the “healthy forests initiative.” Yeah, that guy.
Of course,
merely linking him to the Bush admin doesn’t prove anything. The guy was famous
for lying and he’s a figure from the past, right? Surely I can’t condemn an
entire political party for that’s guy’s mischief. I am sure we recall how many
of George W. Bush’s policies were
obvious and roundly refuted lies (945 documented instances of overt lying or
deceptive references about WMDs alone); but to hear how the GOP talk about him
these days, you’d think nobody even knew the guy. So, surely anybody close to
the Bush admin. is kept at arms’ length by these fresh faced Tea Party leaders,
right? Wrong.
So, here’s what I was wanting to show you:
I was reading
this 2013 book, Act of Congress by
Robert G. Kaiser, about the Dodd-Frank Bill about Congress’ efforts to regulate
the financial industry following the 2008 crash. A little background: While the
GOP were raking Clinton over the coals on the main-stage, behind the curtains
the GOP were quietly dismantling New Deal regulations designed to limit the
types of reckless banking and financial practices that led to the Great
Depression and also preventing regulating derivatives, so basically allowing
banks to gamble w pensions, mortgages and what all. Bush first lowered upper
bracket tax rates giving them even more money to gamble w and then changed the
rules they operated under which caused them to start trying to call in all the
markers they had out and –WHAM!—The 2008 Great Recession. Millions of folks lose
their homes, trillions of dollars in wealth evaporate (much of it somehow
ending up in the big banks deep pockets); and, for a long moment, it looked
like the whole world was going to collapse: Iceland, Greece, Portugal, AIG,
Lehman Brothers, Bear-Stearns. Bankruptcy everywhere, panic among the people
thrown out in the streets, pensions, mortgages, life’s savings all snatched
away in an instant; and, before our very eyes, Wall St. big-shots were handing
each other fat bonuses on our bailout money while families were sleeping in
their cars.
Dodd-Frank was
supposed to address that and the Kaiser book, Act of Congress, follows the efforts of Chris Dodd in the Senate
and Barney Frank in the House to create a bill to catch and punish the guilty
parties and protect Americans from ever having it happen again. The book also
details the mountain of work the GOP leaders of Congress put into crippling and
hobbling the project at nearly every turn. It gets to be a rhythm in the book,
Dodd or Frank start to get somewhere w reform and the GOP keep coming along and
scuttling the process. And, long about page 235, after chronicling a couple of
years of rolling economic disaster and Congress’s confusingly turgid reaction
to it (a whole lot of motion, but not much action), Robert Kaiser includes this
widely reported episode from January 2010 of our man Frank Luntz showing up on
the scene, once again aiding his party leaders with “language messaging,”
because the GOP did not want to punish the guilty or find justice for the
suffering. They wanted the problem to go away so they could get back to paying
attention to their donors. So they trotted out Luntz and he wrote up a 17 page
memorandum for the GOP on how they could torpedo financial reform. Luntz’s
document, quote, “suggested ways to oppose financial regulatory reform without
incurring political liabilities …. It’s clear purpose was to rationalize
opposition, even as it [warned] Republican members of Congress, they need to
acknowledge the need for reform,” even as he instructed them to later
indignantly claim, “We don’t need more laws.”
Luntz assured
the GOP this strategy would work because of the “voters’ distrust of all
government programs and officials.” Quote: “Never [mention] Wall Street, banks,
or mortgage brokers.” Quote: “Washington incompetence is the common ground on
which you can build support.” Luntz then encouraged the GOP to link the bill to
bailout and link Obama to the Bush bailout of 2008 and presto, Dodd-Frank takes
two years to fight an unduly difficult uphill battle to emerge a chopped up
compromised piece of legislative weightlifting, that has just enough teeth to
appear to slow down a few financial predators from their next assault on the
communal cookie jar, but not really. Rest assured the next crash is coming. But
even more frustratingly, the whole two year display of legislative
brinksmanship did nothing to punish those who illegally threw children into the
streets for a few points of stock for their investors. The financial sector of
the economy which typically ran about 20% of our GDP now dominates the economy
at almost 40% and is gorging itself in preparation for our next big bubble.
Ultimately seven million families have lost their homes so far and 80% of all
the money brought into the economy to handle the economic crisis has gone into
the hands of the very same 1% who almost destroyed the rest of us in the first
place.
Amazing isn’t it?
You’d think
the unveiling of lies and thievery of this scale would be front page news, but
it isn’t. The people who own the media are
the same people who don’t want you paying attention to their shenanigans on
Wall Street, so they don’t report, or they under report it, or they disguise
the truth the way Frank Luntz taught them to while they dissolve our collective
brainpans w empty calories and reality TV. As sinister as this all is, it’s all
done out in plain sight. This isn’t some secret back-channels bit of gossip,
here. Robert Kaiser, the author, is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the Luntz
memo was widely discussed in the political media. You can read about the whole
incident on Huffington Post, Poltico, Think Progress and so on. The document
itself is plainly available online in PDF format. This is open policy: allow
the banks to get away w government subsidized theft of trillions, give Wall
Street investors billions in profits and throw another million poor people into
the street, then lie about it. Here’s how.
Why would
Congress go along w this kind of thing? Well, earlier in the book, Kaiser
shares another disheartening statistic: In the 2008 election cycle, political
action committees and individuals from the financial, insurance and real estate
industries donated $501 million to candidates for federal office. The financial
sector is far and away the largest source of funding for federal candidates.
They were paid to lie, so they did.
It’s that
simple. Absolute widespread irrefutable proof that the GOP not only lie to the
American public for the profit of Wall Street; and you don’t have to follow Luntz
very far to see what else he has helped them lie to us about: Climate change?
Here’s a quote from his work on that: “Voters believe that there is no
consensus about global warming within the scientific community .... Therefore,
you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue
in the debate." The Affordable Care Act? He’s the guy who came up w the
“government takeover of health care” and “death panels.” Those gems among
others won Luntz’ work attacking the ACA the coveted Politi-Facts’ 2010 Lie of
the Year Award. So all the rigmarole over the ACA and the 43 different GOP
votes to repeal Obamacare, and all the vitriol over the launching of the
website was all started based on a little lie the Republican Party hired Frank
Luntz to concoct for them. Oh wait, something like that wouldn’t rightly be
called a little lie. That is an example of the famous “Big Lie” Herman Goering first
defined, the kind of audacious lie that political leaders tell again and again
until the people believe it is true.
Famous Lies of the Past
I admit it is
startling to face irrefutable proof that one of the country’s two leading
political parties have lied about things like climate change, health care, and
preventing the next great crash. But what really scares me is to wonder what
else they’re lying to the public about. Lord knows the history of our country
is riddled w scandals, lies, exploitations. In late 2010 I did an article
called “The Millionaires’ Club,” about the whole Wiki-leaks spectacle and the
importance of whistleblowers. I opened the article w a chronological list of
American scandals that ran over 400 words long and by the time I was done I was
so depressed I couldn’t write for a month.
And I am not
trying to tell you that the GOP holds the patent on prevarication or that there
aren’t any Democrats receiving financial sector money to turn a blind eye to
their wrongdoing, but starting as early as the 1960s, the Republican Party has
made it a practice to lie and distort to get what they’ve wanted. In 1964, following
the defeat of Barry Goldwater the GOP launched into a variety of planned
deceptions to steal the reins of power, including the famous “Southern
Strategy” wherein the GOP returned to the racist politics of days of yore and
dog-whistle language to covertly convey coded bigotry to appeal the secret
racist lurking in so many rural and southern whites. They backed Richard “I Am
Not a Crook” Nixon even as leak after leak revealed the man’s treachery and
malevolence. I mean seriously I was nine years old when the guy got elected I could
plainly see Richard Nixon was a dick.
Now when it
comes to long-term havoc wrecking fictions the champion was GOP hero Ronald
Reagan. He lied about Iran-Contra most definitively, but his most critical
deception, the one so many contemporary GOP lies are based on, was to suggest
that government is the enemy. The longtime success of this lie is why a guy
like Frank Luntz can bank on the public hating the image of government
incompetence even more than the actual Wall Street banksters who ripped them
off.
So, who is the
government and why is the GOP SO intent on having us hate it? Well, you know
& I know that the government is not some distant abstract monolith. The
“government” is something like 16 million Americans working at all levels in
all cities and rural areas of the country intimately involved in their
communities as citizens, parents and consumers. They are the people in our
communities whose very job descriptions are about making our country a better
place. When the GOP tell you that governments can’t be a job creator you know
that that’s a lie. Between local, state and federal agencies, the government
directly creates sixteen million jobs and then there are all the private
contractors who work for the government. Recent research shows that number to
be around 7 million more workers, so all by themselves, our various governments
and their contract laborers account for the jobs of nearly ten percent of the
American public and government spending accounts for over 30% of our national
GDP. This doesn’t even address the personal consumer economies of all those
people w paychecks and the economies of the businesses those people patronize
as consumers.
How
hypocritical can the GOP get w this lie? Well, in the first four years of the
Obama presidency while the GOP were busy blaming him for the Bush recession,
state and local governments in Republican controlled areas actually made
unemployment worse by laying off nearly two and half million workers and then
had the audacity to complain about Obama’s sluggish recovery.
When they tell
people that tax cuts for the rich are good for America because the rich are the
job creators, they know it’s a lie. The idea that “a rising tide lifts all
boats,” is great, if you have a boat! At a time when the top 5% of the country
own more than the bottom 70% boats are kind of hard to come by.
While it is
true extra money in the hands of the poor and middle class goes right back into
the system. With hundreds of millions of poor and middle class people, every
extra dollar they have adds up through consumer spending. However as has been
repeatedly proven, when extra money goes to the already wealthy, they tend to
horde it, or worse, gamble with it. That’s why, as noted earlier, the vast
majority of new money in the economy already goes to the already rich. And, no
matter how hard they clamber, giving them even more has a proven track record
of being the road to ruin. Both major periods
of tax cutting for the wealthy (the 1920s and the early 2000s) led to
catastrophic financial disasters. It’s widely documented, no secret. What tax
cuts do do is make the average man poorer. The government is our combined
wealth and resources--the roads, the parks, the schools, the infrastructure
necessary for a nation of three hundred million Americans, those are the things
of our government, that’s our stuff and each tax cut equates to a budget cut,
which means a cut of service, a cut in the quality of our lives. Why? So
someone who already has enough can spend even less in taxes.
AND, irony alert: the very people who complain
about borrowing money from China have already cut taxes so much we have to
borrow ever more just to meet the cost of basic government functions. As I
wrote back in 2012: “The government borrows 40% of all it spends because the
GOP resist taxes, which means that we still owe the money later anyway. You
can't run government without money, and you can't run a society this complex or
an economy this fragile without a government; so who are they helping with this
anti-tax BS? The public, who at some point will still have to pay for the debt
through future taxes anyway, or the GOP's banker friends who get paid back
either way guaranteed?”
So, it brings us right back to the banks doesn’t
it? Might also have something to do w our government’s refusal to prosecute
those really responsible for the mortgage disaster which is still inflicting
untold misery across the country. At the time we were told that nobody was
actually responsible, or if there were bad actors that they were a few bad
apples and the system was okey-dokey. Sounds like Luntz, right? “nothing to see
here folks, just move along.” Right? Well, since then while the news spotlight has
been steadily focused on most anything else, we have seen big bank after big
bank quietly making plea bargains as part of a “deferred-prosecution agreements”
after the fact and well after the public put away our pitchforks and torches.
Did you see the latest outrage? Just yesterday, Tuesday, Jan.7th, it
was announced the JP Morgan-Chase agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $1.7
billion for their part in enabling Bernie Madoff’s $50 billion ponzi scheme. Just
last month alone, HSBC agreed to pay nearly two billion in a money laundering
case; Wells-Fargo agreed to cough up half a billion for their mortgage
rip-offs, & JP Morgan Chase agreed to pay $13 billion out of a total $25
billion judgment against 5 US banks for their mortgage fraud in addition to
nearly a billion in fines for their manipulations in the British banking
markets. If that weren’t enough, earlier in the same year nine banks agreed to
an entirely different set of charges and have to pay $9.3 billion in fines on
them. Fannie Mae & Freddy Mack got awarded nearly $8 billion in settlements
from big banks for mortgage fraud last year alone. By the way that was the
second year in a row, major US banks had to pay $25 billion in settlements for
ripping off Americans.
Now ask yourselves, if the banks agreed to pay
this much, how much did they really owe? When the crime is stealing a family’s
home and a child’s future, can the cost even be measured in dollars &
cents? How can they get away with this? Well, who’s going to stop them if not
for our government and that brings the problem back full circle. Why won’t the
GOP protect the public from the rich? Maybe they are too focused on looking out
for #1, their fellow 1% that is.
That’s right the majority of the folks in
Congress these days are quite wealthy. A second theme from my 2010
article, “The Millionaire’s Club,” was a warning that like in the days of old
when the US Senate was run by the robber-barons of the Gilded Age, by 2010 the
rich had overrun the capitol chambers & the average congressman was now a
millionaire. Kaiser’s 2013 book updates these stats and notes that senator’s
average wealth is now up to thirteen million. Having only the rich makes our
laws means that the rich are the only people laws get written for.
Take, for Example, the Big Lie We Must
Fight Now
Right now the
GOP are pushing this lie that it is a good thing to leave 1.3 million families
to starve without unemployment benefits. Their story is that benefits make
people lazy, that unemployment benefits cause people to stay unemployed. At a
time when there are three job seekers for every new job posted that lie should
be easy to debunk. Besides, who really benefits from unemployment benefits and
other forms of government assistance? Well yes, the people who don’t starve to
death or live in the streets, they, of course, get benefit, but more
importantly, just like w the government spending on the paychecks for its
workers, that money then circulates through the system into the stores where
people shop, and onto the factories and farms that produce the goods and
produce those people consume. Notice, this is yet another version of the GOP
fronting for the wealthy and blaming the public for the problems their bosses
created. This latest GOP ruse probably comes equipped w talking points hand-crafted
by Frank Luntz himself. Why does the average American, especially the average
Arizonan so often end up supporting these scoundrels? Because they keep lying
to us.
Now there are
several other big lies, monstrous lies, I could address; but the fact is--if
the Republican leadership will lie to the American public this blatantly, this
frequently to front for the predators in the financial sector, it gives us
ample reason to challenge most anything they say as bunk. At the bare minimum I
am asking you to start calling BS when you see it. They have demonstrated they
don’t deserve the benefit of a doubt. They have played this way in the past,
how can we trust them w the future?
The Future in a GOP world
What kind of
future are they after? Well, judging from the claims they make and their track
record, the future looks pretty bleak for everyone outside that lucky1%. Grover
Norquist’s dream of having a government so small it could be drowned in a
bathtub, means government that could not provide social services to the needy,
security to the public, or infrastructure for the economy. My opponent, Paul
Gosar, for example, backs a popular Tea Party concept of ending public
education entirely. That would end the general public’s access to any
professional level job because they could not afford the education it takes to
train for it. Romney also championed this position when he said that every
American should be entitled to the best education their parents could help them
afford.
With no
education, social services, health care for the poor, or even fire or police
protection for areas who could not afford privatized services, much of America
would resemble a 3rd world country. Life would revert to a 17th
century Hobbesian hell. The famed philosopher wrote that government kept life
functioning in society and without it “the life of man [is] solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.”The Tea Party take great pride in their very
old-school desire to dismantle government. Though they claim to be
Constitutionalists to the man, their actual ideal government is closer to the chaos
the US went through under the Articles of Confederation, the type of government
we had prior to adopting the Constitution in 1791. With no national taxes,
court system, or unifying supreme federal laws, the states squabbled amongst
themselves, England and France were both sharpening their knives to carve the
new states back into colonies, there was rioting in the streets of every major
US city; and our government had even taken to firing on the US veterans of the
American Revolution rather than paying them. It’s true, the first of many
American scandals propelled by American greed shaping the policies of the
American powerful. I guess that means this kind of thing is an American
Tradition. But I think it’s time we stop it. We. Can. Stop it. We can put an end to this … tradition, this
misery, this nonsense.
Take Heart, the Demographics are heading
our way.
Just to check,
I am guessing I am not the only one in the room who has noticed a marked
increase in the racist tone of the GOP since Barack Obama took office? Maybe
not. How about a certain increase in GOP hatred and demonization of immigrants
over the past few years? Or, how about the ever-more-fervent fever pitch of the
religious right condemning all the sinners destroying America w their birth
control and LGBT marriage? Coincidence these messages are all becoming more and
more strident? I tell this is not an accident. The future will not be kind to
such behaviors by our elected officials. The GOP know they are losing control
and scrambling w all their might to keep you from seeing it.
The angry old
white guys with their hateful attitudes and narrow minds are dying off and
losing the press of the future. Single moms, minorities, and the LGBT
community’s numbers are growing and theirs are not. Traditional “hard-right-kill-a-commie-jesus”
evangelicals are going the way of Fred Phelps and his ilk. In the past 20yrs
the popularity of traditional Christianity has fallen off 15% and experts warn
that that paradigm is collapsing as the younger generations, no longer steeped
in dogma and a fundamentalist culture, are growing up to ignore the church
entirely.
The current
GOP flap over the Pope is a clue of how out of touch GOP attitudes are becoming
and how desperate they have become to perpetuate the lie that god is on their
side. Their Christ has no kindness for the poor or the sick; their Christ
claims “greed is good.” Maybe they should check their glasses. Sounds like
they’re worshipping Gordon Gecko by mistake. Turns out Paul Ryan cannot worship
Ayn Rand and Pope Francis at the time. So which one did the supposedly life-long
Catholic adhere to?
The future is,
that unless the right figure out a way to restrict progress, they are going to
be left behind by the march of time. Demographic change in ethnic populations
showed white male dominance of the American population is coming to its end and
the melting pot this nation of immigrants claims to be is soon to be the
reality. The only thing they can try to do to turn back the tide of the future
is to lie. And it is time we stopped letting them do that. I say it’s time to
stop them. Of course, the immediate thought that comes to mind when I say
something like this is, “Yeah, me and what army?”
Well, that’s
where you guys come in. First, let’s first accept some inconvenient truths
about the Democratic party here in western AZ. Currently in Congressional
District 4, there are just under twice as many registered Republicans as there
are registered Democrats. Ouch right? Yes, 77,700 registered Democrats versus
154,200 Republicans. There are also a few hundred Green Party members and a
couple of thousand Libertarians; and over one hundred and thirty thousand folks
who are so disgusted by the way things have gone, they won’t register w any
party, but they are ready to vote. I am here to tell you that just because this
district went 70% Republican last time it doesn’t have to stay that way. Of
course, we need to keep in mind those numbers didn’t happen overnight and won’t
be fixed that way either. The gap we have to overcome is immense, no kidding.
No serious
discussion of how to change it can begin without first acknowledging a
challenge this big is going to take some time. But like any elephant, no matter
how big, this one can be beaten or eaten one bite at a time. It is doable once
we decide to get to doing on it. Keep in mind, the future is on our side. The
question is, are we going to wait for it or start acting now? The longer we wait, the longer we will have
to wait. All of us, me included, want a candidate w a multi-million dollar
warchest, a dazzling smile, flawless style & silver tongue to emerge like
Venus, fully formed on a half-shell. Or more rightly, like Athena, springing
out of a headache; but that is not the reality of the ground truth. The truth
is I am working day and night to build myself to the stature it takes to take
on the GOP; and our Democratic Party in the West must do the same.
Like it says
in my most celebrated poem, “Vocal Javelins,” “If we all wait for someone else
to do it then we will never get it done.”
Stumble, walk, or race, it is time each of us decides to move this cause
forward. Each of us can move this some in our own way. Unlike any other period or any other place in
human history, the 21st century US citizen is uniquely empowered to
act. Our friends-networks now span the globe, a tweet can now fire the shots
heard around the world, a meme can change the minds of millions in the course
of a single evening and the pace of progress is still just beginning its
crescendo. Right now, out here as Democrats we know we’re outnumbered. We may
be small, but we are far from alone. With enough of us calling the GOP on their
BS, the rest of the world will start watching.
Separating Macho/Arizona’s frontier mythos
from GOP Talking Points
Arizona has
built itself on the mystique of the rugged western individualist—tough,
resourceful, ready for the fight, hewn from the land, the salt of the earth.
There is nothing about that myth that requires one to vote Republican. There is
nothing about being Arizonan that requires you to hate minorities or education
or the poor. There is nothing about Arizona or its people that benefits from an
ideology that wants to strip the land of our community wealth for the profits
of the few. And there is no reason on earth why good Americans should put up w
Tea Party Lies even one more election cycle.
How do you
address Tea Party Lies? Call them on it. Call ‘em on it loud and early and
often. How do we rescue the future? We stop the Tea Party now.
--Mikel Weisser
writes from the Left Coast of AZ
