Operation Carpetbagger

Beginning in January of 1944 the U.S. Army Air Forces began an aerial supply of weapons, covert agents, and other war fighting materials to members of the resistance in France, Italy, and other European countries living under German occupation.  In over 1,800 sorties, the crews dropped tens of thousands of parcels of supplies and delivered 1,000 parachutists to assist the resistance.  Twenty five B-24s were lost in this mission, dubbed Operation Carpetbagger.  Additionally, 208 men were presumed missing, but fortunately many of them parachuted out and were able to make their way across enemy lines with the assistance of the partisans to whom they had been ferrying these critical supplies.

It is understandable that the reader is asking what this has to do with a War on Socialism.

To better explain where I am going with this, let me use myself as an example.  Though I have to point out that the colors that we use to represent political ideology are backwards – “red” should clearly refer to the American left given their close resemblance to socialists, I live in a very red county in a very red congressional district in the very red state of Georgia.  Accordingly, when the August recess tea parties occurred across America, I had no one to yell at.   Though I argue that my two senators (Chambliss and Isakson) and congressman (Deal) quietly stay too low on the radar, unlike firebrands like Michele Bachmann or Jim DeMint, they did at least vote against the radical leftist agenda of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid statist triad.  So while I am a natural rabble rouser with a lot of justifiable anger at the self-destructive course of our nation under this radical leadership, I have no one to yell at, no one to shake my fist towards, and no one to vote out of office in the next congressional election cycle.  That can get quite frustrating for someone with a fire in his belly for liberty and self-determination.

I came to the realization that when the rubber hits the road, there are two types of conservative activists who simply cannot make a difference where they live.  In addition to those of us who live in safely conservative districts, there are a lot of people who live in districts that are so liberal that there is no chance of making any real change, at least not in this next critical election.  Rather than getting together at rallies with other like-minded people and shouting “hell yeah” at each other, we need to harness this passion and energy as effectively as possible.  The idea of Operation Carpetbagger came to me, and I even purchased the domain name with the intent of setting up a web site to implement this.  However, after scoping it out and expanding the project greatly it became rather obvious that by the time that I and my eager volunteer-engineer friends could implement the project, the ruling statist cabal in D.C. will have steamrolled over another good chunk of our Constitutional rights.

Trying to be practical, I came to the conclusion that I should communicate my ideas to the Tea Party leadership in hopes that they could simply add my ideas to their existing web infrastructure in a far shorter time and that I could instead use my passion, debating abilities, and communication skills to make a difference in other ways.  Several highly respected friends are actually urging me to run for political office.  I officially joined the Tea Party Patriots and intend to get the group going in my rural county which has no official Tea Party at this point.  More importantly, I am also sending this article to an acquaintance of mine who is in the top leadership of the national Tea Party Patriots in hopes that she can get the idea into the hands of their technical people.

Admittedly, the term carpetbagger has an understandably negative ring to it here in the South because of its use in the Reconstruction era, but the label is not important.  What is important is setting up a mechanism for people to sign up to be active in another district if that makes sense for them.  My vision for this would involve people signing up at TeaPartyPatriots.org, which would use their IP address or an entered ZIP code to determine the user’s location.  The web site would then use this information to intelligently decide whether this individual should work in their district or would instead be more effective in working in another nearby district where the margin in a congressional race is closer.  Based upon some metrics and user-entered information, it would determine this user’s effective area for particular action items.

Among the action items that the web site could suggest:

• Make phone calls for a candidate.  In this case, the effective area expands to the entire US.
• Monetary contributions
• Voter registration drives
• General campaign volunteering
• GOTV – get out the vote campaigns
• Calling into regional or national talk radio shows

We are smarter and more motivated than the other side.  We can and will defeat the statists whose power-hungry actions and policies are affecting the opportunities and standard of living of our children and grandchildren.  Never forget that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.  Your grandchildren are going to ask you what you did in this historic struggle for the soul of America.  What will you say to them?