Tea Party Gains New Strength, Left Media Trots Out Old Hysteria

As the Tea Party movement continues to assert itself in American politics, the panic sweat on the Progressive Left is becoming palpable.

The tea party movement has become the dead bad-luck bird hanging around the GOP establishment’s neck. Its anger-fueled energy has forced moderate Republicans off ballots in places where moderates tend to win. It has burdened otherwise centrist Republicans with radical positions that don’t go well with a general electorate. The Grand Old Party is being taken over by an ideological fringe with unclear motives, a loose grasp on reality and little interest in actually governing.

Froma Harrop at least made the effort to pick up a thesaurus and use the word “radical”, a departure from the last six months of talking points that have only used variations of the word “extreme”.

The Left has become so used to controlling the narrative that they’re cloaked in ignorant bliss about their inability to do so any longer. A favorite tactic for many years has been to condescendingly lecture the Republican party on what’s best for it. The man so many would love to see as Mitt Romney’s running mate was, according to concerned Democrats in 2010, ruin the GOP.

The problem for the Democrats, of course, is that the “crazy” Tea Party people seem intent on purging the Republican party of members of Congress who love to vote with Democrats.

But here’s the thing: The ascendancy of Tea Party candidates like Cruz, while impressive, comes at a cost to the Republican Party: the loss of moderate Republicans who have been knocked off or have resigned. Other Republicans have simply moved farther to the right in order to placate the absurd demands of the Tea Party extremists.

The problem from the Tea Party movement’s view is that the Republican leadership has so often in the past taken direction from concerned Democrats like Jennifer Granholm and Harry Reid about what the GOP needed to do. For almost two decades now, congressional bipartisanship has been redefined to mean “the Republicans eventually come around to what the Democrats originally wanted.” Any opposition has been deemed unnecessarily combative.

Unbelievably, Granholm’s article is even more hysterical than Harrop’s, who usually writes as if she’s stomping her foot and threatening to jump off a high ledge if people don’t listen to her. The former Michigan governor even continues to trot out the insane meme that the Tea Party movement is fueled by a bunch of crazy Muslim hating birthers, all the while pretending those views are the same as being against higher taxes.

Whether it’s their Sharia law and birther conspiracies or their unwillingness to buck Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, the Tea Partiers have hijacked their party and carried it all the way to the right.

The template for Concerned Democrat Advice is to warn the GOP hierarchy that it can’t win elections if it keeps letting these upstarts, you know, win elections.

Tuesday night’s primary was a victory for Ted Cruz, but it also should be a victory for the Democratic Party. Because as the Republicans run to the crazy Tea Party right, they leave behind the huge mass of genuinely moderate and independent Americans that make up the majority of voters. The ones that used to consider themselves now-extinct moderate Republicans.

Post-2010, this requires a suspension of disbelief usually reserved for watching action movies. It is also, however, indicative of the arrogance still ingrained in the Left after decades of being able to craft political narratives at will thanks to their complicit friends in the media. In their minds, repetition equals truth. They believe if they keep telling Americans that this is all just some plot by the Koch brothers to take over the world that it will stick.

There was no talk of “hijacking” the Democrat party in 2008 when the upstart presidential candidate defeated the establishment, odds-on favorite to win the nomination.

What has been happening for the last few years is that the American electorate is awakening and availing itself of the best term limits we’ve ever had-our right to vote people out of office when we don’t like what they’re doing.

And there is nothing more terrifying than that to those who seek to do no more than perpetuate the status quo.