By John Seiler

Last week I noted that Sam Donaldson attacked the Tea Partiers for their slogan, “We ought to take back our country.” Actually, I noted, they just didn’t want to keep paying massive taxes to subsidize people like Sam, who has taken massive taxpayer subsidies for his horse farm.

But I’ve done a little more research.

In his 2003 presidential run for the Democratic nomination to oppose Republican President Bush, former Democratic Vermont Gov. Howard Dean wrote a book, “Winning Back America.”

In 2004, Dean wrote with Judith Warner, “You Have the Power: How to Take Back Our Country and Restore Democracy in America.”

In 2012, Daniel Kreiss, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, wrote, “Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics).” As you may recall, in 2004 Dean initiated some digital campaign strategies that later were used by other candidates, and mastered by President Obama in 2012.

In 1998, environmentalist Jane Kay Holtz wrote, “Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.” (The title was ungrammatical. “It” could have referred to taking back the automobile, when she meant taking back America.)

And way back in 1982, Mark J. Green, an associate of Ralph Nader, wrote, “Winning Back America.”

It’s not only Donaldson’s demonized Tea Partiers who want to “take back our country,” it’s almost any political group. It probably goes back to ancient Greece where those out of power said, “Everything is rotten, we need to take back Athens.”

Donaldson, now 78, has been watching politics 21 years longer than I have, so surely he knows that.

Donaldson long posed as an “objective” journalist who was “without bias.” But all along he really was just a left-wing ideologue gulling his viewers.

What all of us need to do is take back our TVs by flipping the channel away from Donaldson.