"Tea Party" protestors silent when Bush was trashing the Constitution

Working Class Zero

Timothy Egan | NY Times | Sept. 16, 2009 (excerpt)

Additional remarks by Michael Hoffman follow this column

...For average Americans, the last 10 years were a lost decade. At the end of President George W. Bush's eight years in office, American households had less money and less economic security, and fewer of them were covered by health care than 10 years earlier, the Census Bureau reported in its annual survey. The poverty rate in 2008 rose to 13.2 percent, the highest in 11 years, while median household income fell to $50,303. The decline started before the collapse in the housing and financial sectors. Harvard economist Lawrence Katz called it "a plutocratic boom."

President Bush cut $1.3 trillion in taxes — and the biggest beneficiaries by far were the top one percent of earners. At the same time, Wall Street was inflated by the helium of a regulation-free economy that eventually gave us Bernie Madoff and banks begging for bailouts.

...Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Now consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington D.C. over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots...

Where were the angry "stiffs" when the banking industry rolled the last Congress — majority Democrat, by the way — into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock? Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days' notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism? They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

Michael Hoffman adds:

Where were the Tea party patriots when Bush lied us into the invasion of Iraq? Where was one Congressman to shout "You lie" at Bush during a joint session of Congress after it was revealed there were no "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" and the wastrel war was a fraud?

Where were the Tea party patriots when George W. Bush gave himself the power of an 18th century British monarch, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and send anyone he declared to be an "enemy combatant" --including any American citizen -- to perpetual imprisonment without trial?

Where were the tea party patriots when President Bush instituted warrantless wiretapping?

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison wrote, signifying that our Constitution's separation of powers plan of government depended on the president, Congress and the Supreme Court acting as a natural check on each other. But "King" George made the Executive branch dominant, severely weakening the Founders' checks and balances, while the Bush regime's USA Patriot Act gave the executive branch unconstitutional law-enforcement powers.

Where was the Tea Party revolt when the protection from arbitrary arrest, found in the Magna Carta and he Constitution of the United States -- one of the most powerful weapons against tyranny in the arsenal of the Republic -- was trashed by Mr. Bush and Fox News favorite Dick Cheney? Before Bush and Cheney, only one American president had suspended habeas corpus — Abraham Lincoln, during the War for Southern Independence— and the Supreme Court duly struck down his arrogation of power.

Where were the Tea Party activists when the Bush administration commissioned Admiral John Poindexter, convicted of crooked activities in the Reagan administration, to head the Orwellian "Total Information Agency" to "data mine" every computer in America? To add insult to injury this Federal agency debuted under an emblem of blatant masonic-Illuminati symbolism.

Where were the Tea Party activists when Bush was asked about his involvement with the demonic "Skull and Bones" secret society and refused to answer, citing the oath of secrecy he took as a member of that wicked group of occult conspirators?

Obama may be evil, but the selective indignation of the current fake "Tea Party revolt," which is held within limits amenable to the neocon wing of the Republican party and its Moneybags backers, reveals the hidden hand of the Cryptocracy steering America back to the Republican reign of the rich and the continuing evisceration of our Constitution that did not start with Obama, but which reached unprecedented heights of despotism under President Bush and Vice-President Cheney --aided and abetted by the "patriot" Fox Network.

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