Tea Party hijack.

One day a strange dog came near my backyard fence.  My dog and cat both went out back and proceeded to go completely nuts trying to get at him.  The fence was immovable, but dogs and cats don't really get that kind of logic so the intensity continued to ramp up.  It became so chaotic that within moments they started attacking each other.  It was quite a sight.

The Tea Party movement was exhilarating at the beginning.  For me personally it was like having lived with no air and then finally taking a big deep breath.  It was exciting and hopeful.  It was an outlook that the sleepers had finally been awakened.

Now I don't know what it is.  Maybe I do and it just frightens me to think about it.  Gone, it seems, are the days of like-minded, concerned citizens standing up to the bloated federal government and saying "We're not going to take it anymore!  The constitution is the law of the land!"  The Tea Party got into state government and probably with similar intentions and it has trickled into local government too and the basic principals still apply.  Unfortunately though we have seen concerned citizen groups turn into candidate mill-houses and some of the planks in the platform are really questionable.  I'll highlight one in particular in my next post. With the immovable Obama administration and ultra-liberal members of the House and Senate the crazed dogs and cats have turned on each other with the only great loss being that of the Republican Party.

Tea Party groups are good at identifying conservative candidates and championing their election at the state and federal level, but what I've seen from our own Texas Patriots Tea Party based in Burleson, TX is that for local representation and state level for our own district they are inside traders.  Made up of elected and appointed leaders in addition to activists and citizens their candidate choices are far from objective.  They like the power they have by getting internal choices into office. It's a safe bet that if the TPTP is backing a local candidate then they either already have control over that person or are betting they will once in office. This is counter to what the tea party movement was supposed to be all about.

I'm not a squishy Republican.  I'm not a RINO.  I'm about as tea party as one can get, but I'm not a nut either because I want to be taken seriously.

Today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram article from liberal writer Bud Kennedy is a great example of why the tea party is vilified in the press and why Johnson County is looked down upon by many.  The in-fighting is not helping any conservative cause and the tactics of some of Johnson County's tea party members is holding our county back.  Numerous members of the Johnson County Commissioners Court and the Emergency Services District are becoming known for their crony characteristics and they have large numbers of people fooled because the Johnson County voters put their trust in these people.

The only hope for our county is the Chisholm Trail Parkway.  It will take an influx of intelligent, awake voters to run these crooks out of power.

A.J.