Stigma of the Tea Party?

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Every time I hear about the Tea Party, people talk about it like there is supposed to be a stigma attached to it. I am not in that movement, but I am curious as to what issues they are addressing that turn many people off from it.

The only stigma I am aware of is the bigotry of the left-wing media in characterizing the tea party movement (to the extent it is a movement). What is happening is that people with a moderately conservative bent do not organize very well, but this year opposition to Obama's extremities have brought out the non-evangelical conservatives and the independent voters in droves. This is very alarming to the lefties so they are using every dirty trick they can to paint the anti-liberal backlash with a tar brush.

ruveyn

American Democrats and their foreign allies are just trying to perform character assassination as they have done ever since I remember. Standard rhetorical tactic actually, since of the three parts of an argument (speaker, logos, and ethos) the speaker is the easiest to cast down by insults and gossip. If they went after the logos of the argument, then they'd actually have to perform some much needed cogitation. And attacking the ethos of an argument is fairly useless too, and easier to snipe as an appeal to emotion. But basically, people are just trolling the Tea Party because they see them as opposition.

Basically wealthy conservatives who don't believe in redistributing their wealth like everyone else thus using the commie tactic by espousing the label socialist.

^- That, in part.

You sound like the Iranians when they blame their troubles on the influence of foreign devils. And the bulk of your paragraph employs the tactics that it deplores in the American Left.

Both the American Right and left have foreign allies. Why castigate them while forgetting those traits in yourself? What you are essentially doing is what sports fans are infamous for:

-we won because of skill.
-they won because they cheated

-the weather was against us, so we lost
-the refs favoured them

-we won the election because our moral position resonated.
-they beat us at the polls by cheating

Nobody ever says "Oh man, lucky the snow was blowing in their faces or we would never have beat them." No, its always about skill and righteousness in you, and bad luck and cheating by the other guys.

And you know very well thats what the other team says about you when the situation is reversed. Fair or not.

Ironic isn't it?

Fuzzy's dead on. However, I really think the right wing tends to be worse about those sort of things. Maybe I'm not paying attention to far enough left sources, but I fairly regularly check blogs that are well to the left of the Democratic party and I don't see the type of blind, vitriolic, knee-jerk hatred that I see coming from what I thought were supposed to be comparable right-wing sources.

They're a bunch of silly Chicken Littles for whom the sky is falling.

The stigma is, the tea baggers tend to be red necks who can't stand that we now have a black president. That sort of racial prejudice doesn't exactly go over well these days. That, and the fact that they oppose health care reform, and the government's cracking down on the insurance industry shows they essentially vote against their own interests, which is never a bright thing to do. These are after all the same people who scream about Obama's "socialistic" government staying out of their medicare. They don't understand what socialism even is.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Obama's extremities? You mean just his arms, or his legs, too?

From what I understand there are two types of "tea party" people
the libertarians who have legitimate concerns about the consolidation of federal power and corporate interests
and the right-wing hacks which are an extension of the ultra-right wing of the republican party who are racist, ignorant and want to turn this country into a xenophobic theocracy.
It's the latter who are the loudest and give the movement the bad name that it gets.

That is exactly it.

The globalist agenda despises individualism and freedom for ORDINARY people. The Tea Party movement is all about people getting tired of government doing what it (or a select few) want at the expense of everyone else, and they want government hacked back to the powers it was specifically allowed to have and no more. They want a government that realizes its proper place as a public servant and not a public master.

This, of course, is not acceptable to the globalists, and their holdings (which includes most all of the mass media) are doing all the spin they can to demonize the movement as evil, bigoted, terroristic, etc.

Nah. They're just a bunch of losers who have nothing better to do than to sit at home and watch Fox News all day. At least going to a teabagger event gets them out of the house, and they can hold a sign and maybe get on TV.

When we Canadians are not navel gazing, we are watching you Americans. In fact a good portion of our history classes in school is the study of American History.

From an outsiders point of view, its fairly obvious that the average American is a carefully and willfully cultured idea. Certain influential people had a strong effect, such as Websters efforts to deviate American english spellings from that of the British. Other examples are the elevation of folk heroes, the near deification of certain presidents, war heroes, et cetera. Indeed, certain figures and events commonly assumed to be real are at best amalgamations of myths and tall stories.

Examples? Without using google, tell me which of these were real people, places and objects.

Daniel Boone
Uncle Sam
Davey Crockett

Lincolns birth cabin
Washington chopping down the cherry tree
Franklin flying a kite in a thunderstorm

AND Throwing the tea overboard to protest taxation.

These stories all predate(often by centuries) any sort of organized media, lest of all modern media.

The distinction you make is quite valid. Government has gotten quite out of hand in the last 80 years and there are principled grounds for protesting the breach of Constitutional bounds which occur on a daily basis.

The left-wing press and media, however, conflates the principled libertarian objections with the braying of the yahoo faction. To the left-wing all protest against intrusive government is clearly racist and ignorant. And denial of the liberal-statist agenda is clear evidence of either ignorance or hatred.

ruveyn