Jew World Order

That, of course, is the White House interpretation of an impasse that now
threatens to bleed into much more serious negotiations over raising the debt
ceiling. Both the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury warned
this week that would be “catastrophic” for the world economy.

But twenty-five miles outside Washington, in Chantilly, Virginia, the “extremists”
Mr Obama says have the power to bring the world economy to a shuddering halt
could be found gathering for a meeting over greasy pizza and flat Coca-Cola
in a sparse community centre.

The activists of the “Virginians for Quality Healthcare” – a Tea
Party-aligned group – are very clear about who is the true enemy of American
prosperity as they open their meeting with a short invocation to the Lord to
help them bring “liberty and justice to the American people”.

“Americans have to stand ready for whatever Barack Obama throws at them,”
says Ron Wilcox, founder of the Northern Virginia Tea Party.

“We have to hold fast and Americans need to understand that they need to
stand fast for liberty.”

Like more than 70 per cent of Americans according to recent polls, none of the
Virginia Tea Party activists believe the government shutdown is, in itself,
a good thing – but they believe it is an unavoidable fight worth having to
roll back the Affordable Care Act.

The legislation otherwise known as “ObamaCare” will require all
Americans to purchase health insurance as part of its “individual
mandate” but which Republicans consider an affront to individual
liberty and a travesty of the US Constitution.

While Republican elders in Washington fear a repeat of the 1995-96 shutdown,
when the party led by Newt Gingrich took the blame and revived Bill
Clinton’s ailing political fortunes, the Tea Party is rejoicing that finally
battle has been joined.

“They [the Republican leadership in Washington] have been acting like
Obama’s best friends and now they’ve found some backbone,” says Audrey
Dutton, a Virginia housewife with a ‘Repeal ObamaCare’ sticker on her
leopard-print handbag.

So what Mr Obama and the Democrat leadership in the Senate describe as
blackmail, Mrs Dutton sees as Republicans taking a necessary “last stand”
against the law. “It shows that even at this late hour we cannot let
the American people down,” she adds.

That is precisely the stance of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who has become the
unofficial leader of the Tea Party wing in Congress and the most prominent
in a group of Young Turks elected to Congress after 2010 on the back of
conservative opposition to Mr Obama’s health care reforms.

“ObamaCare is the biggest job killer in this country,” Mr Cruz said
during a 21-hour marathon speech against the health care law. “The
American people want to stop this madness and so do I.”

But while Mr Cruz is lauded by the Tea Party and the Republicans grassroots,
the leadership in Congress has taken a different view, accusing him of
picking a fight the party cannot win while handing Mr Obama a chance to
paint all Republicans as dangerous obstructionists.

At one private lunch this week, Mr Cruz was assailed by senate colleagues
demanding to know what his exit-strategy was after forcing the shutdown, and
accusing him of backing a conservative group that has attacked 25 Republican
senators for failing to support the Tea Party stance.

“It just started a lynch mob,” one senator who was present told the
*New York Times*, as news of the open dissent within GOP ranks drowned out
Republican attempts to focus media attention on Mr Obama’s refusal to
negotiate.

Even Senator Rand Paul, another Tea Party favourite who has inherited his
father’s libertarian followers after the 2012 campaign, was caught on an
open microphone strategising with senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
admitting “I know we don’t want to be here [in shutdown]” before
discussing how to shift the blame onto Democrats.

Not surprisingly, Mr Obama has seized on the ammunition being provided. In the
same Maryland speech, he quoted Marlin Stutzman, a conservative Congressman
from Indiana who had admitted the Tea Party caucus did not really have a
strategy at all.

“One House Republican said, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We
have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
That was a quote,” Mr Obama said, before repeating it for emphasis, “Think
about that.”

Pragmatic Republicans fear that voters will do just that if the shutdown is
allowed to persist too long. It would allow Democrats to further demonise
the party – much as Republicans were once able to do to Democrats before
Bill Clinton dragged the party back to the centre.

“They’re doing to Republicans among independent voters what Republicans
had done to them for many years, with the word ‘liberal’,” a Republican
senate aide told *The Sunday Telegraph*, “Democrats are inverting the
brand so that you can label someone a ‘Tea Party Republican’ and that’s an
insulting epithet.”

For establishment Republicans the failure to recapture the senate in 2012 is
blamed on Tea Party politics that alienated the kind of independent voters
that decide general elections.

The most obvious case was in Indiana, where Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party
favourite easily unseated the moderate Dick Lugar in the Republican primary
by vowing never to compromise with Democrats but then lost the previously
rock-solid Republican seat by seven points in the general election.

“That’s a prime example of Tea Party tactics costing us elections,”
said another Republican working on strategy for the 2014 midterm elections,
who added that while the leadership was now desperately looking for a
face-saving way out of the impasse, they were also keen not to see Mr Cruz
rewarded.

“If Ted Cruz comes out of this looking like he won something in any way,”
he added, “then it just raises the stakes for next time.”

But away from the febrile atmosphere on Capitol Hill, there are Republicans
who are already taking up positions in anticipation that, when the dust
settles on what the cable news networks call the “shutdown showdown”,
the Cruz brand of scorched-earth politics will ultimately not endure.

The most prominent of these is Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New
Jersey who attracted the wrath of Republican grassroots for visiting the
wreckage of Hurricane Sandy with Barack Obama just days before last year’s
general election, a move that was seen as damaging to Mitt Romney and
designed to burnish Mr Christie’s credentials for a run in 2016.

Mr Christie is one of 30 Republican governors who the GOP leadership holds up
as the standard-bearers of a tough, results-oriented conservatism that can
win over undecided voters at a time when the middle classes are still
feeling little tangible benefits from the economic recovery.

It escaped no one’s notice that Mr Christie, who is currently 24 points up in
his November gubernatorial re-election race, chose this week to launch a new
campaign advert trumpeting his credentials as a tough-guy who can reach
across the aisle and get things done.

“Everything we’ve done has been a bipartisan accomplishment,” Mr
Christie says in the advert in his best tough-guy voice, “See, I think
as long as you stick to your principles, compromise isn’t a dirty word.”

In Washington at least, it seems the jury is still out on that.