Of Tea Parties and bad pennies

Patrick Buchanan is not one of my favorite commentators (abrasion level is too high to suit me), but he cameup with a beautiful phrase that bears repeating, "secession of the heart" when he weighed in on the huge amount of commentary about Tea Parties. (including a surprisingly balanced account of the Ohio Tea Party movement from The Other Paper in Columbus).

Here is Mr. Buchanan's take, in a piece entitled "Secession in the Air":

What called the Tea Party into existence?

Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been treading water for a decade, working harder and harder with little or no improvement in their family standard of living. They see the government as taking more of their income in taxes, seeking more control over their institutions, creating entitlements for others not them, plunging the nation into unpayable debt, and inviting inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers, mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they detest is at war with the country they love.

The secession taking place in America is a secession of the heart — of people who have come to believe the government is them, and not us. (Emphasis added)

You might say we keep coming back at them like a bad penny (to use a very old cliché). Speaking of which, the feds decided to redesign the reverse of the penny. The ceremony rolling it out has the propagandists touting how Lincoln and the shield design proclaim the "indivisibility" of the union. I guess they think that we'll cheerfully reduce ourselves to slavery as long as the union is preserved.


They have another think coming.

Virtual buckeye to Rebellion.