RULES FOR TEA PARTIERS (with thanks to Mr. Saul Alinsky)

I made a half-assed attempt to drum up someone to go picket Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s office with me the Friday before last. The endeavor would have been easier if I posessed acquaintances in Manhattan over two and a half years of age and under seventy-two, but my personal philosophy of life is “If you’re not my baby, you’re not my mother, and you’re not paying me, then why the hell am I talking to you?” It works for me.

The person I contacted, curiously enough for a New York lawyer, unfortunately couldn’t go because he has a job (at what, even more curiously, I suspect is not a government entity, curiouser and curiouser… ). Then also we were planning to go upstate on Friday. A Friday in summer does seem like an inconvenient day for a protest. So instead I Fedexed a letter to Carolyn B. Maloney (who is not Irish, by the way. My mother always points this out, and she’s right. There are a few fake-Irish politicians, like John Kerry. I guess they figure it worked for Kennedy. Phhht. Sorry, I spit in disgust whenever I mention the Kennedy family. It’s good luck.) urging her to join the Blue Dogs. I lightning-quick received a form letter in response, assuring me that she supports Obama’s healthcare plan. New York City can be a lonely place for someone who’s not into Big Brother government.

Anyway, the tea parties are catching fire. Check this out and this and this.

Beautiful.

Now, with these brave tea partiers in mind, I would like to set forth some “rules” I picked up from somewhere, I think they’re useful:

RULE 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have. Guns, baby. And ammunition. Wolverines!

RULE 2: Never go outside the expertise of your people. Since our “expertise” is being “we the people,” I think we’re ok on this one.

RULE 3: Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy. Since the enemy lacks expertise in almost everything that does not have to do with enriching Government Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, we’re doing well here too. Let me see, they lack expertise in, inter alia, honesty, integrity, patriotism, courage, and the democratic process. They also have no expertise in reading their own legislation, although they have mucho expertise at reading a teleprompter (Maybe if they put the healthcare bill up on TOTUS it would get read…?) So the field outside their expertise is a wide, wide, wide one, in which we may cavort, from time to time catapaulting dead cows over the balustrade.

RULE 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. Where’s the hope, dude? Where’s the transparency? Where’s the the end to lobbyist connections? Where’s the post-racial? Where’s the bipartisanship? Where’s the “unity”? Where’s the “making everything great for ‘working class’ families”?

RULE 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Those “mom jeans” comments hurt.

RULE 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. Hmm, what do “my people” enjoy? Spending time with their families? Working? Getting to keep more of what they earn? Not being bombed or attacked? Expressing opinions about the government without fear of retribution? Attending services at their particular house of worship? Shooting?…

RULE 7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. Coffee parties? Keg parties? Maybe we could take a tip from ACORN and beard our elected representatives in their dens.

RULE 8: Keep the pressure on. Never let up. Saul, you are preaching to the choir. We’ve got to be on our representatives like white on rice. When Rep. Carolyn Maloney changes her hair style, I want to be faxing her a letter telling her I liked it better before.

RULE 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. Maybe when you guys make the threats, Saul. Since I’m sure more than half of your protesters couldn’t be bothered to show up.

RULE 10: If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive. Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. I don’t know about the “pushing a negative hard enough that it pushes through and becomes a positive” mumbo-jumbo. I do agree that “everyday people” have a sense of fairness, and they show disapproval when they see power being abused to act unfairly.

RULE 11: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Well, duh. This is certainly a stupid one. You’re obviously attacking because you want something, right? You’re not just attacking simply to destroy? Oh wait, I guess you guys are. In our case, we are fighting to conserve the God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. Hence, the name, “conservative.”

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Like all of Alinsky’s thoughts and rules, this is nothing original. Drum up a lot of hate against your target person. I don’t think tea partiers need to do much on that score, the money situation is doing it for us. Even tea partiers only hate on the people involved because they’re trying to destroy our country and impoverish and enslave us. We’re not hating on them because we’ve got our own anti-American agenda to perpetrate, we’re hating on them because their destroying the best system for human happiness this rotten beautiful world has ever known.

Who is this Saul Alinsky guy anyway? What kind of a guy parlays being a destructive, manipulative, hateful pain-in-the-ass into a career?