Goldberg on the Tea Parties

Jonah Goldberg has a thoughtful, and thought provoking piece today at Townhall.com on Reading the Tea Party Leaves. Goldberg gently castigates much of the MSM reporting on the the Tea Parties thus:

If you read the Op-Ed pages these days, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the GOP and the conservative movement have been taken over by know-nothing mobs, anti-intellectual demagogues and pitchfork-wielding bigots. There's no omnibus label for this argument, but it's a giveaway that a person subscribes to it if he or she describes the "tea party" movement as "tea baggers," an awfully telling bit of sophomoric condescension from the camp that affects the pose of being more high-minded.

The Tea Party movement is primarily a conservative movement, but there are some slightly left of center folks in there who, believe in what the movement is trying to do, as well as some libertarians, gun rights folks, so called fiscal conservatives, etc. What all of these people want, though, is a restoration of the Constitution as a framework for how government works. Rather than having a Congress that views the Constitution as a hurdle to get over, or go around, and their constituents as irrelevant, we want our Representatives to follow every dot and tittle of that great document. We are tired of the chicanery and skullduggery of what has been going on, on both sides of the aisle, for too long. We want Congress to make itself relevant again, and stop giving away power to the Executive. We have been reading history (Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is a great start, by the way) and have concluded that the ship of state began sailing off course sometime between the Civil War and the sailing of Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet. We want a restoration of how things were done before all this leftist crap happened. The tea party movement, as much as anything, seems to be a way to set in place an organisation to take on the long cultural war that will need to be fought, street by street, house by house, until we have again reached the shores of freedom and liberty for all.