Accounting for the Tea Party, the OWS, and Tim Tebow

Accounting for the Tea Party, the OWS, and Tim Tebow

In the first part of a series titled, “What Sets the Tea Party Apart,” Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks asks, “What is the difference between OWS and the Tea Party?” a rhetorical question tantamount to asking the reader to distinguish a cesspool from a cathedral.

Kibbe might as well have inquired as to the difference between the Occupy Wall Streeters and Denver Broncos’ much maligned quarterback, Tim Tebow, who hasn’t publicly identified himself as a Tea Party member but who clearly shares their philosophy– and their condemnation.

The chief problem with the Tea Party and Tebow in the eyes of their detractors is that they represent everything their detractors are not. As for the OWS mobs, they should study up on the conservative movement and the conservative quarterback after, as Newt Gingrich suggested, they get a job and take a bath.

Many on the Left like to draw parallels between the anti-taxation Tea Partiers and the anti-everything Occupiers in a futile attempt to give a degree of credibility and civility to the latter. The two groups are as dissimilar as cleanliness and dirt.

Kibbe cites the 18th century English philosopher-economist Adam Smith in presenting his argument that the Tea Party is “set apart,” distinctive from other social movements by virtue of its commitment to what Kibbe describes with a single word, “accountability . . . the moral basis that binds a community, allows for cooperation, and enables human prosperity.”

I would add that the stark absence of a sense of accountability, compounded by an even more gross disinterest in civilized behavior, render the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations irrelevant except, of course, to the lives they have negatively impacted.

Adam Smith expressed that sentiment far more elegantly: “The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and possessions.”

Though few are calling for “vengeance and punishment” for OWSers other than the enforcement of existing laws, the accountability factor is key to understanding the phenomenon of relatively small masses of people trampling on the rights of the vast majority.

Matt Kibbe sees the issue as the realization of a concept Tea Partiers genetically inherited from America’s Founders and Occupy Wall Street somehow missed: “Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff.”

The Tea Party respects everyone and hurts no one.

The OWSers respect no one, hurt everyone including themselves and seize whatever “stuff” they can get their socialist, grubby hands on, from public park spaces to the rights of others to property and livelihoods while injuring those parks, those rights, properties, livelihoods, and themselves by their utter contempt for fundamental principles of personal and societal responsibility.

Tim Tebow’s principal responsibility on the football field is to win games for the Denver Broncos and, if he accidentally hurts anyone in the course of executing that duty, he would be contrite and apologetic since, well, that’s Tim Tebow.

He has admitted that he is also accountable to God, religion, and ethical dictates and that antiquated attitude toward morality rankles many in the sports world.

His critics have attacked Tebow’s athletic talents but what evidently bothers them most are other accountabilities. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=6358.)