Over Before It Started (RIP Wendell Wilkie)

Tonight, three hours north east of here, there's a party going on, a Tea Party. Seems like the people gave themselves this name had no problem in revisionist history of the original two and a half centuries ago. It is also very interesting that the first Tea Party convention had a sold out crowd of 600 which everyone is now calling a movement. Just goes to show you how much America has down-sized itself in the last five years.

The participants, mostly middle to old age white males and females are the same cast of characters we saw during the 2008 presidential election. They are a mean ornery bunch who are dead certain their views are right and that it is only they who can bring our nation out of wilderness and back to prosperity.

Naturally, this collection of odd balls, nutcases, revisionists and whatever think that they hold the keys to the kingdom while everyone else in our nation is chicken fodder. They're anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-multiculturalism, in other words just plain anti.

Tonight, they have found a leader to whip them into shape to take on the Obamanation in 2012. Her name is Sarah Palin. The last time we saw Sarah, she had resigned her post as Alaska's head of state, claiming that the pressure of her celebrity, the fame of heading SNL and the media wanting her scalp was too much and she had to resign for the good of the state. Funny, the people of Alaska could have cared less and were happy to see the circus called Palin Inc. leave.

So here we are in Nashville, the birthplace of country music and in the state where the KKK was born giving birth to new form of delusion. These people see it all slipping away, their America slipping away down a rough slope called change. What these Tea Partiers fail to realize is that no matter what new or revisionist plan they hatch to "take back" America, our nation for the most part has moved on. A recent CNN poll showed that at least 40 per cent of those polled don't know who or what the Tea Party is. Not a good sign for a group that has put itself front and center as an antidote to Obamanation.

There have already been cracks in the "tea bags" with differing factions already splintering into more shadowy groups as well the the GOP trying to ride on their coattails. Add Sarah Palin into the mix and you have a powder keg, ready to explode and last but not least, the same factions who put President Obama in office waiting, just waiting to have their voices heard.

Tom Candero fired the first salvo at the convention, saying the those who voted for the socialist Obama couldn't spell the word vote. Funny, there were a lot of people who couldn't spell that word and there will be even more in fall of 2010 and 2012.

The picture posted here is one of me and my counterpart, Frank Zuo, taken at the Bund in downtown Shanghai. This picture represents the future of our country, not the past Tea Partiers are so beholden too. Our communication with other countries who don't look like us are critical to our nations over all survival. Tea Partiers nor Sarah Palin are going to stop this, they will be steamrolled if try too because the world is interconnected more than ever before.

In the mid 1930s, Wendell Wilkie was a populist candidate who ranted and raved against the New Deal put forth by FDR. That election came and went with Wilkie getting his clocked clean and fading into the netherworld of American history. Wilkie however, did side with FDR later on the issue of isolationism. People change has started, there is no going back.

The original Tea Party was one of great change and was another breeze that fanned the flames revolution years later. Those Tea Partiers were visionaries, the ones sadly parodying themselves as the original are cartoon characters, just like their anointed leader.