Col. Nathan Jessup, Tea Partier

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

“Son, we live in a world that has elections, and that elections have to be guarded by men with principles. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lefty? The Tea Party has a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom.

You weep for Progress, and you curse the Tea Party. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what the Tea Party knows. That Progress’s demise, while tragic, probably wasted lives. And the Tea Party’s existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves these United States.

You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at Burning Man, you want the Tea Party at that election, you need the Tea Party at that election.

The Tea Party uses words like honor, code, loyalty. It uses these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. The Tea Party has neither the time nor the inclination to explain itself to a citizen who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom the Tea Party strives to restore, and then rejects the Constitutional manner in which it’s provided.

It would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, it’s suggested you pick up a sign, and stand tall at a rally.

Either way, the Tea Party doesn’t give two hoots what you think you are entitled to.”

26 comments

  2. A Few Good Men is the breakthrough work by Aaron Sorkin, who later created the right-hating/baiting works The American President, The West Wing, Studio 60 on The Sunset Strip, and Newsroom, for which Jeff Daniels inexplicably won the Best Actor Emmy over Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston (among others). The ironic thing to me about the Jessup monologue is that it so completely sums up the sort of thing I’d think many soldiers would like to say to Sorkin’s face, with the complication that he wrote them. The evil little twist is that Sorkin apparently thinks that the type of people who take their role as protectors of this nation are also the type of people who would order the murder of a soldier.

  3. it so completely sums up the sort of thing I’d think many soldiers would like to say to Sorkin’s face

    The brilliance is more subtle than that. It looks, at a glance, plausible, but it reveals something deeper about the power of command, left untended over time, turning a true warrior ethic into a ruthless power trip.
    The writing and the acting hit a very small target dead on.

  4. Even though released long before ‘A Few good Men’ also macro-encompasses liberal foreign policy since 9/11 Lawyers against Warriors that is still in place, and expanding under Obama, to this day.

Comments are closed.