CFR Journalist Calls Tea Party Talk Seditious

Joe Klein is worried. All this constitutional talk on the part of the Tea Party movement may actually lead to significant change (not Obama faux change, but the real McCoy).

Mr. Klein, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, does not take kindly to the commoners organizing and refusing to sit down and shut up, so over the weekend he characterized exercising the First Amendment as sedition.

“I did a little bit of research just before this show — it’s on this little napkin here,” Klein told Obama attack dog Christ Matthews. “I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.”

Mr. Klein, of course, realizes Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck will not challenge the primacy of the state — they will merely flip the rigged political game back over to the Republican side of the coin. Klein and the CFR will not be sent packing under a Republican regime. Establishment Republicans are not allergic to the CFR and its plan for world government.

No, Mr. Klein was talking about the real Tea Party — the original Libertarian version that was paved over by the artificial “astroturf” version cobbled together by establishment Republicans.

Sedition is reserved for real patriots, not Republican neocons. Mr. Klein is merely speaking out loud what the establishment discusses in private.

Our rulers are eager to bring back the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The law signed by John Adams established punishment of up to two years of imprisonment for “opposing or resisting any law of the United States” or for writing or publishing “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the President or the U.S. Congress.

The government, of course, gets to decide what is “false, scandalous, and malicious writing.”

President Thomas Jefferson allowed Adams’ monstrosity to expire in 1801 but it has come back in various manifestations since (for instance the the Espionage Act of 1917 that was expanded to cover criticizing the Government of the United States, and also the Smith Act of 1940 which made it a crime to advocate or to teach overthrowing the government or to be a member of any organization that advocated such).

Last month the FBI arrested members of the Hutaree “militia” (they liked to play paintball games in the woods) and they now stand charged with sedition against the government.

Stay tuned. It looks like sedition is about to stage a comeback.