This article is fairly long but well worth the read:
The Democrats’ new much-vaunted master plan for annihilating the Tea Party movement calls for aggressive class warfare, demagoguery, and lying about the beliefs, motives, and goals of Tea Party supporters, Sen. Chuck Schumer revealed yesterday.
Echoing President Obama’s infamous “bitter clingers” remarks, the New York Democrat argued that Tea Party supporters are cartoonish figures who are easily ridiculed.
Invoking all the usual liberal cliches about conservatives, Schumer said the Tea Party is successor to “the Know-Nothings, Prohibitionists, Father Coughlin, and Huey Long.” In other words, he believes the movement is a collection of hicks, yahoos, neo-Luddites, fascists, male chauvinists, and racists fearful of what leftist academics might call The Other.
“Tea Party adherents see an America that’s not reflective of themselves, and the America they have known, and they just don’t like it.” They are bothered by changes in the “cultural, technological, and demographic makeup” of the nation. It angers them that “white Anglo-Saxon men are exclusively not running the country anymore.”
Schumer said his fellow Democrats in the U.S. Senate plan to subject the public to a massive, presumably very boring post-constitutional civics lesson from now until the congressional elections in November.
Democrats “must stop playing defense and go on offense when it comes to the need for government,” Schumer said as public support for ObamaCare hit a new record low. “We must state loudly and repeatedly we believe government is often a necessary force for good.”
As unemployment persists and the economy continues sputtering along, Democrats will focus on highlighting examples of popular government programs and show how “government can help the average family.”
This will help, in his view, to drive a wedge between rank-and-file Tea Party supporters and “elites” because while “Tea Party leaders have convinced Tea Party grassroots and many other Americans that government in the abstract is bad or even evil, they have not been able to dissuade them from liking specific government programs.”
Democrats need to get aggressive in spreading their expensive, utopian ideals among the electorate, he argued.
Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Democrats “have been quiet, defensive, even ashamed of our views,” Schumer said. “Bill Clinton, for instance, clearly believed in an active government, loved new government policies and programs he could create and enact, but he felt compelled in 1996 to state that the era of big government is over.”
But now the public is ready to fall in love with huge, overweening government. Schumer rhapsodized as the U.S. national debt stood at $17.27 trillion and 72 percent of Americans expressed the belief that big government now poses a greater threat to America than big business or big labor, a record high since Gallup started asking the question a half century ago.
Schumer urged an orgy of new government spending.
He called for: more financial aid for college students; more funding for kindergarten through grade 12 education; more funding for public infrastructure such as roads and bridges; more funding for job training; and more handouts for domestic industries.
He called for U.S. corporate taxes, already among the highest in the world, to be increased by the closing of so-called tax loopholes. He called for fanning the flames of class warfare by raising the minimum wage and pushing the seemingly indestructible myth that women don’t receive equal pay.
He called for the overthrow of the First Amendment by overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that he claimed the chronically underfunded Tea Party movement has used to secretly “funnel millions of undisclosed dollars into campaigns with ads that distort the truth and attack government.” The IRS and other government agencies should join in the fight by doing things “administratively,” he said.
After making the laughable claim that the electoral system “has been rigged to favor Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries,” Schumer called for the system to be changed so Tea Party-backed candidates can’t win elections.