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warrior bodhisattva
Super Moderator
Location: East-central Canada
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Thousands rally around Beck to support America turning back to God
Quote:
Beck, Palin Stress God, Country as Tea Party Activists Rally in Washington
By John McCormick and Lisa Lerer - Aug 28, 2010
Fox News commentator Glenn Beck and Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin exhorted tens of thousands of fans and activists gathered on the National Mall in Washington to embrace the nation’s tradition of religion as part of their decision-making and daily life.
“Something beyond imagination is happening,” Beck said. “America today begins to turn back to God.”
Palin, 46, told the crowd to look at monuments around them on the National Mall for inspiration and urged them to act with the courage of presidents and leaders before them.
“You have the same steel spine and moral courage as Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King,” she said. “It is in you. It will sustain you, as it sustained them. So with pride in the red, white and blue, with gratitude to our men and women in uniform, let’s stand together, let’s stand with honor, let’s restore America.”
Palin and Beck are both stars of the Tea Party movement, a loose-knit coalition of voters seeking limits on government spending, taxes and debt. The “Restoring Honor” rally where they appeared was billed as a celebration of the military, patriotism and American heritage.
Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate and now a contributor to News Corp.’s Fox News, said she was appearing as the mother of a soldier, not a politician. “Say what you want about me, but I raised a combat vet and you can’t take that away from me,” the former Alaska governor said, referring to her son who served a yearlong deployment in Iraq.
Martin Luther King
Beck, 46, has insisted the assembly -- with a stage at the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech exactly 47 years earlier -- isn’t a political rally.
A video clip of King’s speech was played before an appearance on the stage by Alveda King, the slain civil rights leader’s niece.
The size of the crowd promises to be topic of debate. Before the event began, organizers estimated it would be somewhere between “tens of thousands” and 300,000. While there is no official source for such estimates on the National Mall, Beck told the audience that the accounting from his vantage point showed more than 500,000 people.
The gathering began assembling before dawn as people carrying lawn chairs and water arrived. Attendees, many wearing patriotic outfits or T-shirts from local Tea Party groups, were discouraged from bringing signs and no current officeholders were allowed to speak.
Political Activity
Even so, there has been plenty of political activity around the rally.
Activists gathered at a warm-up event yesterday organized by FreedomWorks, an advocacy group affiliated with the Tea Party, where they listened to candidates and picked up campaign signs supporting Tea Party-backed candidates.
“What happens this year will make what happened in 1994 look like a Sunday picnic,” Mike Lee, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Utah, told yesterday’s gathering in a reference to Republicans gaining control of the House in that year’s election.
Republican Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota said yesterday that members of Congress would hold an outdoor meeting after the rally.
“My, my, my, the U.S. Senate won’t know what hit them,” she said at yesterday’s rally. “Can you imagine not only conservatives, but constitutional conservatives?”
Bused to Rally
Americans for Prosperity, a Tea Party group, held its political action convention in Washington over the weekend and bused people to the rally.
The head of the House Democratic campaign committee, Maryland Representative Chris Van Hollen, challenged the claim by rally organizers that the event is nonpartisan.
“It’s a blatant political effort,” he told reporters yesterday at a Washington press conference. “You’ve seen Glenn Beck and a lot of the talk show hosts on Fox News out there talking about this election.”
Beck has said it is a coincidence that his event is taking place on the anniversary of King’s speech.
Last year he said on Fox that President Barack Obama is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” Beck later told CBS’s Katie Couric in an interview that he was “sorry the way it was phrased.”
The rally took place at about the same time as another in Washington organized by the Reverend Al Sharpton and other African-American and civil rights leaders commemorating King’s speech and focusing on education equality.
Beck Mocked
At the Sharpton rally, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s non-voting member of the House, mocked Beck.
“You can’t blame Glenn Beck for his March-on-Washington envy,” she said. “Too bad he doesn’t have a message to match the place.”
Beck, Palin and allies are bolstered by skirmishes their candidates have won in a war against the political establishment. One is playing out in Palin’s home state, where Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski trails a Tea Party rival in a protracted Republican primary vote count.
Murkowski, 53, who followed her father into office, is 1,668 votes behind political newcomer Joe Miller, 43, a Gulf War Army veteran endorsed by Palin and Tea Party activists. Thousands of absentee votes are to be counted starting Aug. 31 to determine the winner of the Aug. 24 primary.
“This is about we the people,” said Coral Haven, a 62- year-old from Crescent City, Florida, at the rally. “There’s no leader and the politicians don’t know what to do about it because they can’t identify a leader.”
John Rivard, 72, of Houston, Texas, said he was proud that the Tea Party movement is about many and has no single leader. “It’s of the people, and no one is pushing us,” he said.
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Beck, Palin Stress God, Country as Tea Party Activists Rally in Washington - Bloomberg
Is this the day that Beck followers (many Tea Partiers?) push forward into the political sphere with their intentions fully bared?
What do you make of this? Is it all show, or is it a milestone in the Tea Party movement?
I'm not sure of the overall message. Do these people want to tear down the separation of church and state, or are they speaking merely of everyday American life?
Is there a religious longing simmering beneath the surface of American politics and society?
I'm not sure I get what Beck is doing here. Can anyone help me? All I can see is two "champions" of the Tea Party movement, Beck and Palin, doing some PR work.
And what do you make of Beck holding the rally today specifically? Coincidence? Intentional?
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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot
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