We are all waiting to see what happens come January 2011 when the Tea Party, a.k.a. the Republican Party, assumes power in the House of Representatives. We all know what the Tea Party movement stands for: smaller government, less spending, lower taxes, and a return to the principles of constitutional government espoused by the Founding Fathers.
But if you would like a very good guide to what the Tea Party should do, simply read Beverly Eakman’s brilliant little book, A Common Sense Platform for the 21st Century, published just before the November elections. Bev, of course, is best known for her groundbreaking book, Educating for the New World Order, which explained how psychology is being used in the public schools to get American children to become the willing slaves of the New World Order.
She opens her book with a scathing critique of our so-called two-party system. As we all know from Carroll Quigley’s masterpiece, Tragedy and Hope, the moneyed power, including Carnegie, Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and other big Wall Street bankers, contrived a method of controlling both political parties so that the voters would only have their chosen candidates to vote for. Their chief method of preventing constitutional conservatives from gaining power was to cut them off in the primary elections. Indeed, that is how Rino-in-Chief the elder George Bush got started in politics. He was asked to run against a Bircher to prevent the latter from getting into Congress.
Of course, politics had been an important part of the Bush family life, since his father, Prescott Bush, had been a Republican Senator. He was a Wall Street executive banker, a Partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. Socially liberal, he was treasurer of the first national campaign for Planned Parenthood. As a Yale Bonesman, he used his Skull and Bones connections to make his way to Wall Street. In fact, all three Bushes have been Bonesmen. They make the perfect Rinos.
It was George H. W. Bush who called Reagan’s advocacy of free-market economics, voodoo economics. And when he became President he easily changed his “read my lips” to “read my hips.“ That lost him the conservative vote, and Bill Clinton became President.
The Bushes have always been big-government Republicans. Thus, when George Bush the younger was elected President, one of the first things he did was join with Ted Kennedy in creating the most expensive and expansive reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which Lyndon Johnson said that once it was started, it would never be stopped.
Reagan had wanted to abolish the Department of Education, which had been created under Jimmy Who. But the Rinos in his cabinet prevented him from doing so. While Rino Republicans usually don’t create these new liberal programs, the Democrats create the programs and the Republicans consolidate them. That has been the pattern since the election of Lyndon Johnson whose Great Society agenda greatly expanded the federal government in every area of American life.
The resounding defeat of the Goldwater conservatives gave Johnson and the Democrats in Congress all the votes needed to pass their programs, which included the Civil Rights Act, Food Stamp Act, Economic Opportunity Act, Voting Rights Act, Immigration Act (which liberalized immigration policy and quadrupled the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007); the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which opened wide the federal treasury for the benefit of public educators); the War on Poverty; Medicare and Medicaid; the Gun Control Act of 1968; the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and National Public Radio.
President Nixon then consolidated the gains made by the Democrats. When Howard Phillips tried to shut down the Office of Economic Opportunity, he was fired. It seemed that big, fat, expensive and expansive government was here to stay. President Ford’s brief tenure after Nixon’s resignation didn’t do much of anything. But it was Jimmy Carter who then proceeded to expand the federal government by creating the Department of Education.
After four years of Carter malaise, the nation was well on its way toward socialism. But the election of Ronald Reagan put a temporary stop to the process. Reagan’s main concern was defeating communism. He tried to get rid of the Department of Education but was thwarted by his own big-government Republicans. But he succeeded in ending the communist threat and tearing down the Berlin Wall. The Reagan years are now regarded as a great time when conservative ideas flourished. But the Rinos made sure that it amounted to little more than Reagan rhetoric. There was no dismantling of the super-state.
We now know what George H. W. Bush’s presidency gave us: a full dose of Rino complacency. Which led to eight years of Clinton, who was too busy with sex to really do much damage to the Republic. His wife’s health plan was defeated before it even got off the ground. The Republicans simply maintained a holding action, slowing down the crawl to socialism.
After Clinton came George W. Bush. The attack on 9/11 forced him to change his priorities to maintaining the security of the American people. He gave us No Child Left Behind, an expansion of Medicare, and other big-government programs. But his enduring legacy is getting us into two Middle East wars. After getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, he turned his attention to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We will not know whether or not the invasion of Iraq was worth what it cost in lives and treasure until perhaps after a decade or two. As for Afghanistan, it is too backward, too Islamic, too primitive for it to be saved from future tyranny. Once we leave, it will revert back to what it has always been, an Islamic backwater subject to any tyrant who manages to take power. It makes no sense to waste any American lives in trying to transform that country into a modern, democratic state.
The disillusionment of the American people with George Bush opened the door wide for Barack Obama and his team of socialists to take power. And no sooner was he in the White House and the Democrats in control of Congress than the socialist juggernaut went into action. So we got National Health Care, and the rest of the socialist agenda.
But what all of this did was wake up American conservatives who were not about to see our Constitutional Republic destroyed. With the Rinos in retreat, American conservatives, led by such dynamic personalities as Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, and others have vowed to take over the Republican party and turn it into a vehicle for conservative political action.
But what kind of agenda will the Tea Party Republicans set forth? Will they be able to begin dismantling the super-state? Can they start taking apart the Public Education Empire? Can they restore economic freedom? Bev Eakman outlines what they must do if the conservatives are to be true to their principles. Now is the time to start thinking of the unthinkable: undoing the whole mammoth liberal government structure the big-government politicos have built since Woodrow Wilson helped create the Income Tax and the Federal Reserve.
Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of nine books on education including NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, The Whole Language/OBE Fraud, and The Victims of Dick & Jane and Other Essays. Of NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, former U.S. Senator Steve Symms of Idaho said: “Every so often a book is written that can change the thinking of a nation. This book is one of them.” Mr. Blumenfeld’s columns have appeared in such diverse publications as Reason, The New American, The Chalcedon Report, Insight, Education Digest, Vital Speeches, WorldNetDaily, and others.