An example of how TEA Party people should NOT behave (VIDEO)
The Congressman is right. Listen to what he said - he said that you have to have a plan to get back to it (constitutional limited government) and you just can't say "I stand for the Constitution" and expect to win. He never said or implied, to set the Constitution aside like he was accused. Immediately the TEA Party activists took what he said and converted it into something he never came close to saying in the video.
The Congressman is right when he said half the people do not believe in the Constitution - largely because they are clueless to what it says. Just the other day I had to sit down and talk with a 59 year old women who was furious and decided that she would never vote again. Why? Because she had just heard about the Electoral College and so she thought that no ones vote counted any more.
I LOVE TEA Party people, but the kind of knee jerk over reaction to what he said, without actually LISTENING to what he said, is the kind of stupidity that will render them irrelevant. No one wants to talk to you when talking to you is like talking to a Klingon. Knee-jerk over reaction rampage is not how to win people to your side.
With that said there is a lot of truth to what the TEA Party activist at the end said about the erosion of the Bill of Rights.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U46MkU_-_wE]
No one is going to win an election by campaigning on going back to 1787 overnight. Campaigning on going back to 1787 is not electorally possible when half the people are more familiar with Justin Bieber's love life than they are with Separation of Powers.
Much like the abortion battle, we are winning more and more people to the pro-life cause and there are fewer and fewer abortions because we are educating people and winning hearts and minds. This is why pro-life people did a whole lot more than block the doors to abortion mills.
The Founders repeatedly and ad nauseum went to King George and appealed to him and others and yes they even offered compromises, and while it did not influence the king it did influence others and brought allies to our cause when shots were fired.
If in 1743 When Sam Adams started bring people onto his "radical" cause had gone around saying "War with England tomorrow if we do not get all of our demands tonight" he would have gotten no where. It is the journey to get there that brought him allies that he could never had gotten if he tried to go from 1743 to 1787 overnight.
I am not saying that we should sell out, what I am saying is that getting back to limited government is a path that will take time, it is not just something one can do overnight.
I would like to remind our TEA Party friends of my initial point: the group of activists in that video basically applied a point of view to the Congressman that he never said or advocated in the video. They took what he said, converted it to something MUCH worse, and applied that to him. Those are the tactics of Saul Alinsky.