Plotting Rebellion Is Fun!

While home during the Labor Day weekend, I spent Saturday morning with several prominent members of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots.

Together, we worked on the roles and organization needed to launch the street-level politics needed to get more fiscal conservatives into public office.

Labor Day weekend was the first time I had set foot in California since being called up to active duty in January. The "honey-do" list could wait; I had to meet with my political friends first.

The magic of the meeting, held inside a not-so-clandestine coffee shop in downtown Redlands, was that most of the people who organized and ran the meeting were political rookies. They were confronting the same obstacles – such as the organizing volunteers and assigning responsibilities – street-savvy Democrats had surmounted decades ago.

Dang it’s fun to be on the side of the rebellion! The grass is greener and the coffee tastes better on our side of the political fence.

The rise of the tea party movement stems from liberal overreach, arrogance and condescension as well as from status-quo Republicans who benefitted from government largesse. I decided to get off the couch and into the fight the night Democrats voted to impose Obamacare, and all its nanny-state socialism, onto Americans who clearly did not want it.

Talk is cheap. It’s going to take the sweat, toil and tears of countless American patriots – just like the ones who drank too much caffeine with me on Saturday -- to return our country to what our Founding Fathers wanted and Ronald Reagan practiced. What’s so fun is we’re scaring complacent Republicans as much as we are frightening bloated Democrats.

I don't want to wait until November to "fire when you see the white of their eyes"; I'm in a hurry to vote them off the battlefield during the spring primaries.

The tea party movement is driving American political discourse because all the action is on our side. Like the patriots I met over coffee, we are displaying the enthusiasm, motivation, creativity and humor we need to make a blue country red.

What can the Democrats even do to counter the tea party during the 2012 election cycle? Defend the status quo? Continue playing race cards from the bottom of the deck? I do hope liberals at least try something; after all, next year’s elections would be downright boring if liberals failed to show for tea time.