birch

Dwight David Eisenhower, born in Texas and reared in Kansas, grew up to become supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II, He won two landslide elections as president of the United States. He served as president of Columbia University, and he has been enshrined as an enduring icon of Republican politics.
But to Robert Welch, founder and president of the ultra-right John Birch Society, the moderate and genial Ike was very likely something else: . . . "a conscious dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy" . . . for whom "there is only one possible word to describe his purpose and his actions. The word is treason."
Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, reared in Asia and elected to the U.S. Senate, decisively won a historic election to the presidency. In that office, Americans have to agree, he is laboring manfully if imperfectly to get the nation out of the worst financial mess since the great depression.
But if you had happened to attend a recent political forum of the right-wing Tea Party in the Colorado Springs area, you could have bought bumper stickers with messages like this:
"Roses are red, violets are blue, Obama's a Commie and Pelosi is too."
Or: "Honk if you voted for Barack Obama, you Socialist bastard"

From what I've been hearing and reading lately about the ideas rumbling around inside the growing Tea Party movement, they remind me more and more of some of the notions of Robert Welch's old Birchers in their heyday 40 or so years ago. Notions like: guarding against the formation of a New World Order being pushed by secret U.S. "elites"; abolishing the Federal Reserve, heart of the national banking system; resigning from the United Nations; "nullifying" inconvenient federal laws, and standing up for the "sovereignty" of the individual states in any dispute with Washington.
And, by the way, what's wrong with giving at least some thought to the idea of secession?

Now of course the core ideas of Tea Partiers aren't identical to those of the Birchers, but they have a disturbingly similar tone. Both have goofy ideas about the tax system they so abominate. Both, for instance, would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and the graduated income tax.
Come on, they say, let's be reasonable. Let's have a really "fair" tax.
And what would that be? Well, it would be an excise tax, like a national sales tax, which everyone would pay at the same rate.
See? The millionaire would be charged the same tax as the welfare mother for a bottle of milk. Or a bottle of champagne. What could be fairer than that?

There are, of course, some big differences between these two political movements. Unlike the Birchers. the Tea-ers have no national leader, organization or discipline. And, unlike the Tea Party, the Birch Society -- even when it was being widely publicized and discussed -- was always considered to be politically out of bounds to the mainstream.
Kooky.
While there were lots of highly conservative Republicans in politics in the '60s and '70s, they wouldn't have been caught dead at a Birch event, and they would have spurned a Birch endorsement.

Nowadays Sarah Palin, reigning queen of the party, is happily playing footsie with the Tea-ers, and top GOP leaders have offered them everything but the keys to the safe if they'll only come aboard.

Pointy-headed liberals like me hope they do. What fun! What mischief!