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.)

Religious Hypocrisy and the Denver Broncos (Separate Issues)

Religious Hypocrisy and the Denver Broncos (Separate Issues)

Of the 5,100 bishops in the Catholic Church worldwide, nary a one is a woman, unless we count Bishopress Nancy Pelosi of the First Congressional Church of God who occasionally tends to act and speak as if she were an ordained prelate of the Church.

Her chief problem in that role of bishopress is similar to the one Pelosi faces as Speakerette of the House of Representatives: She doesn’t know what she’s talking about and, when she does speak, she rambles incoherently and much of her audience is more preoccupied in identifying where she got her last Botox shot rather than in the words of Catholic religious wisdom she vainly attempts to impart.

Pelosi ”publicly stated earlier this year that she had a duty to pursue policies ‘in keeping with the values’ of Jesus Christ, the ‘Word made Flesh.’ But at a press briefing last week, when reminded of this statement, Pelosi declined to say when Jesus got the right to life.”

Poor Pelosi was in a sorry state, faced with a positively preposterous problem, a querulous quandary.

In that, Pelosi was akin to some Denver Bronco fans but more about them later.

Bishopress Nancy, a nominal Catholic, was confronted with a conundrum: How can a Catholic, nominal or not, legislatress defend the values of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, and at the same time be an ardent supporter not only of abortion but of the most radical type of abortions, infanticide in the form of what doctors call intact dilation and extraction?

She thought and thought and thought about the question of when Jesus earned the right to life and then responded by saying, “Whenever it was, we bow our heads when we talk about it in church, and that’s where I’d like to talk about that.”

Umm, duh and wow!

Pelosi outdid herself on that one, not only by refusing to answer but by lying that “we bow our heads when we talk about it in church. . ."
(read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1827)