WE ALL OWE YOU A DEBT OF GRATITUDE

As I noted earlier this week, I don't make a practice out of writing about politics here. I generally save that kind of stuff for Twitter and Facebook. But as Emerson so aptly put it, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I want to take a moment to thank the thousands of Tea Party/9-12 patriots in Massachusetts and elsewhere who worked their asses off to elect Scott Brown on Tuesday. You sent a message to both political parties and to the chattering classes who prop them up.

You showed a level of political maturity few of the pundits thought you would ever have. You threw your weight behind an imperfect candidate because the timing was right and because he at least stood for some of your first principles.

Let's not kid ourselves, Scott Brown might be a Republican, but he's from Massachusetts. Stick the same guy in Texas and he doesn't look quite so good, does he? (Although next to Kay Barely a Republican it's hard to say).

The point is, the pundits were all convinced you were only interested in running ideologically-pure candidates, perhaps on your own party ticket. They thought you were a bunch of unsophisticated rubes who only wanted to be spoilers and little else.

You showed the Inside the Beltway crowd they--as usual--didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Those folks are just as blinkered as the politicians who live in that cozy little Washington cocoon. Neither of them has a clue as to what real people in the real America are thinking.

What nobody seems to get is this really is a revolt of the middle class against the elites who control the political and economic systems and have run the country into the ditch. I suppose you could call it a populist revolt, but I hesitate to use that word because of all the negative baggage it brings with it, conjuring up images of "Sockless Jerry" Simpson, Tom Watson and William Jennings Bryan.

This is not a revolt of the "Know Nothings" like we saw 150 years ago. Not even close. Sure, there are know nothing elements there, but there are in every mass movement, including the two political parties.

This thing that has come to be called the Tea Party Movement is largely an uprising by the people who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the children and just want to get on with life without the government picking their pockets and being a nagging nanny. Their motto might well be simply "Leave us the fuck alone." (Although some would be too polite to use the F-word).

I also want to take a moment to thank all the Ohio patriots who showed up Friday in Elyria on a truly crappy day to protest against the Community Organizer-in-Chief. You knew you were gonna get wet, you knew they'd put you far away from the where the high and mighty would see you and you knew the mainstream media would largely pretend you didn't even exist.

But you put on your rain gear and brought your homemade signs and you let your voices be heard as Americans have always done when the government got too onerous. We all owe you a debt of gratitude because you spoke for the silent majority which is silent no longer.