Since 1565

The local Tea Party remains highly active, but it’s no longer just in a bat­tle of good, (GOP) ver­sus evil, (All Things Obama). The Tea Party here in St. Augus­tine is also fight­ing a bat­tle for polit­i­cal relevance.

The group that marches up and down St. George Street, dressed as 18th cen­tury patri­ots com­plete with tri­corn hats, while pass­ing out copies of the Con­sti­tu­tion, makes for some great polit­i­cal the­ater and photo oppor­tu­ni­ties, but as the 99% rises, the Tea Party is quickly becom­ing an amus­ing side show.

And they know it.

With all the defen­sive com­ments about Occupy cov­er­age in the on-line edi­tion of The Record from a Tea Party spokes­men known as Town Crier; cou­pled with the absence of any cov­er­age about local Occupy events in the Right-leaning His­toric City News- thus prov­ing its own pro­pa­ganda qual­i­ties. The Tea Party may still be march­ing, but they may be march­ing into obscurity.

These Tea Partiers have a fierce reli­gios­ity towards the Con­sti­tu­tion, not unlike a crazed wild-eyed preacher on a street corner:

“Have you read your US Con­sti­tu­tion lately?”

“Have you asked Thomas Jef­fer­son to come into your heart?”

“Do you fol­low the gospel of Hannity?”

“Repent and Replace!”

These cit­i­zens cer­tainly have the right to protest a duly elected gov­ern­ment by their Amer­i­can peers. But when they fail to see the larger pic­ture, they might as well be chas­ing down wind­mills like Don Quixote. The good news is that there are cos­tumes for him too.

Many have com­plained the that 99% mes­sage is too broad– Wall Street, banks, cor­po­ra­tions, cam­paign finance, a lost repub­lic and a shrink­ing mid­dle class– bet­ter to be too broad, at least at this stage, than too narrow.

Just replace Obama with Rom­ney and replace Reid with McConnell, stop the spend­ing and LOWER taxes– all prob­lems solved.

What the local Tea Party has the hard­est time swal­low­ing is that not only are they part of 99%, but that they have been used like a tool by the 1%. All you have to do is look at what many con­sider the ori­gin of the Tea Party back in Feb­ru­ary 2009 when Rick San­telli went on a rant at the Chicago Board of Trade.

TARP was just fine when it came to bail­ing out too big to fail banks and cor­po­ra­tions that passed around worth­less paper, but when it came time for a pos­si­ble assis­tance to neigh­bors that were deeply under­wa­ter in home val­ues and adjustable rate mort­gages– that’s SOCIALISM! Tea Par­ties UNITE!

Some other Tea Party groups around the coun­try have real­ized this. They see the lost decade. They see how wages for most have remained stag­nant or even fell back in the last 30 years. While the top earn­ers make even more. They ask them­selves if the 99% has just been lazy, while the top 1% been so much more pro­duc­tive. They see a repub­lic so awash in cam­paign cash that the found­ing fathers them­selves would prob­a­bly fail to rec­og­nize it.

Yet here in the Con­ser­v­a­tive Cor­ner of Florida, the local Tea Party refuses to see any of that. Here it’s still the epic Left vs. Right bat­tle, or the 99% unem­ployed hip­pies look­ing for a hand­out vs. the patri­otic and pro­duc­tive. It only seems fit­ting that the Tea Party of the his­toric city of St. Augus­tine is prob­a­bly des­tined to soon become another rem­nant of ancient history.

*** Cor­rec­tion: His­toric City News did in fact run a detailed story about the Occupy St. Augus­tine on Novem­ber 6th a full day after the event hap­pened. How­ever, there were no sto­ries, or reminders of the polit­i­cal event before­hand, unlike the announce­ments of times and loca­tions for upcom­ing Tea Party meet­ings and events.