Muff:
ever been to a Tea Party rally? I have been twice. These people were not NEO-Cons, etc.
They want fiscal responsibility. They want a fair tax code. They want an end to the welfare state as it is being created. They want smaller federal government and more power to the individual states.
At least at the two I was at.
Painting them all as racist homophobic bigots, etc is using a very broad brush and in my experience, is wrong.
Naw, I paint them as uninformed folks who are motivated by sloganeering. They may claim to want fiscal responsibility, but I'll bet not one in ten knows where money comes from or where it is spent. Remember the woman who bellowed "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"?
That's the teaparty problem. They want spending cuts, but no cuts for THEIR share of the goodies.
I like the enthusiasm of the teaparty. As I said before, we could use a revolution, but first the teaparty is going to have to educate themselves about how government works and how to make meaningful reforms.
I have a friend who is a teapartier. The other day he was ranting about excess government spending. I asked him what he would cut. The only thing he could think of was Michelle Obama's staff, 1/10,000,000 of the budget. Cut his SS or Medicare? No way, Jose.
Look at this week's budget debate. The teapartiers pushing to cut funding for NPR, which is a grand total of $5 million, and not one word about cutting the hundreds of billions of shortfall in Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
I'll take the teaparty seriously when they begin to act seriously. For now they're just noise.
Are they all racists and bigots? No, but many are, and they are tolerated, even encouraged by the teaparty heroes like Palin, Beck and Bachman.
