PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

It is not easy to predict the future. In fact, it is nearly impossible. One thing, right now, looks to be dead center on, however: the developing Tea Party movement, if that is what it is, has already sown the seeds of its own defeat. It looks like it is only a matter of time before the whole thing goes down in a big pile of steam.

If you don’t believe this assertion, check out the Washington Post story on a 52 year old man who traveled on his own time and money to show his opposition to health care changes when Obama went to Iowa Thursday. (The lin

http://tinyurl.com/yd5javc

k is in blue) This is not just a story of frustration and anger, it seems to be a story of a man coming unglued.

You can’t build a modern political movement mainly with people who are so upset, about something, that they can’t really think straight. It can’t be done. Comparing Obama to communists and to Hitler is so over the top that it passes out of the range of reasonable  conversation. What’s more, there is very little socialist in the health care changes or very little even of what would be called social engineering.

In building materials, the rule is that which does not bend, breaks. Even something as strong as steel has to have some flex in it. Otherwise, it becomes more and more brittle until it just snaps in two. The impression left by the Post story, and many others, is that the Tea Party crowd is composed of many people who have already snapped themselves. It is a safe bet that most of these people have spent far too much time listening to Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity, that trio of moderation and wisdom. Radicalism is its own trap. Absolutism allows little room (none) for growth and development.

We must add this: it is very difficult to make any sort of revolution drawing mainly from an older crowds. Revolutions are not made by people over fifty. Sorry, they just aren’t. There might be counterrevolutions led from behind the scenes with people 50, 60 and 70 years old, but, even then, you need much younger people in the field.

I carefully read the Washington Post story about the protester man in Iowa and I can’t figure out what has him so upset. Perhaps, like the Republicans, he is worried that this thing will actually work out and people will like it. Maybe he just can’t accept the idea that Obama, won the last election. Maybe he is disoriented by a world in which an educated man of color can now occupy the White House while he sits on the unemployment rolls in Iowa.

The American people have a right to be angry about the way the health care changes came into being. We watched 14 long months of ugly debates, horse trading and general Congressional cowardly behavior and, the protesters are right, the legislation is too long, too complicated and probably tries to legislate way too much, many things which, in fact, can’t be legislated. These facts do not a revolution make, nor does the overheated, half baked rhetoric of the Tea Party make for a true political movement. Too much anger leads into a dead end street where little can be attempted  and less accomplished.

Doug Terry, 3.26.10

A tea party protestor in Iowa wants to be heard

Randy Millam, 52, was resolved to attend a protest rally on the University of Iowa campus where President Obama made a speech on health-care reform on March 25, 2010.

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