Grassroots Texans should be very encouraged. Paul Burka and Bud Kennedy are moaning about Texans rising up and demanding common sense be applied to government. Theirs is the song of the embittered establishment functionary, and it represents real hope in our age of failing government. The story is about another establishment pawn, this time Rob Orr, retiring because of a Tea Party opponent, and how the Tea Party overestimates our governmental problems.
First, it must be understood who these two men, Burka and Kennedy, are. In Texas state government, they are the establishment’s media guardians, and they are false prophets. Their job is to read the landscape and direct the state political conversation into safe and advantageous harbors for the ruling class.
In a sense, and there are a couple more of them, we are on their “watch”; they are narrating state politics for the ruling class right now. And, embarrassingly for them, it is on their watch that Texans are beginning to take the game out of the establishment’s hands.
This has never happened before, so one can understand their discomfort. Law abiding citizens have been in a democratic slumber for about 250 years. It has taken that long for a quote usually attributed to 17th century Scottish historian Alexander Tyler to be shown true. It reads, “Democracy is always temporary in nature. It simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government because sooner or later voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the Public Treasury.”
The quote refers to gifts like academy-regulating government research grants, competition-stifling laws, free schooling, ever-multiplying government jobs, social security, free food, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and socialized medicine, to name a few. This can only be called what it is – socialism – and it has been slipped underneath Americans without us recognizing it very well.
After the United States started its experiment in democratic republicanism, Europe began to copy us, but took an even more aggressive approach to granting itself gifts from the treasury. We can all see the end of the party approaching. Southern Europe is in the worst shape, but we know that they are only at a slightly more advanced stage of the same disease. It is in this context that the Tea Party was born.
The Tea Party is, in effect, Americans telling the author of the famous Tyler quote that he was smart, but not that smart. He never knew Americans.
And in Texas, since our state was born with an especially stubborn independent nature, we are reminding the other 49 American states who they are. Yes, we’ve grown fat and lazy and entitled as a democratic republican people, but we aren’t proud of it, and we mean to save this system.
The ruling class posts that Burka and Kennedy occupy have existed as long as the media have been a major part of American life. Journalists, though they served some legitimate functions, were watchmen for the socialist part of the ruling class, with aims on getting the upper hand from the corporatist side of the ruling class. At some point they succeeded, and have proven to be twice the tyrannical master the old guard ever was. Their only trick is consolidation of power by moralizing the next set of bribes for vote groups and immoralizing the opposition.
Burka, Kennedy, and company are performing worse than any of their predecessors ever have. This makes them embarrassed and mad.
They still haven’t figured out that using as a measuring stick the spending habits of the other 49 reckless state governments, or of other countries, is useless. It doesn’t matter. Nobody hears it. The Western world is dying of addiction, Texans are busy working on a solution, and the dope dealers complaining is good.
–Burka venting about his own failure