Over this long holiday weekend TV Landers have been treated to the network’s coverage of tea party assemblies, gatherings which represent both whacko libertarianism as well as the last groan of the GOP’s digestive tract. There are various groups behind the tea party movement and I won’t link to them here but you can do a simple Google search and discover that they love to clothe themselves in patriotism and reactionary rhetoric about social programs and “big government” and yes, should you want to hold a tea party they will even outfit you with talking points so you too can be a “ditto head”.
Mostly the tea party crowd hates the idea of medical insurance and they believe that existing programs like medicare are vast Federal fraud factories bilking the honest citizenry out of their honest dough. Ergo, without proof they argue passionately that Big Brother is at hand and that President Obama’s health care plans will rob the already exhausted tax payer of his or her right to live free and die without the help of his or her government. Buried in the sophistry is the idea that existing health care insurance is good and those who don’t have health care coverage are “those people” who can’t pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and to hell with them. I think the tea party movement would be more accurately represented if we called it the tea party at the gates of Hell movement. They could even have a logo with Cerberus the three headed dog who would be depicted drinking from a little cup.
Their vision of America is driven by a terrible hostility both for taxation and for government programs that help people. They do not call for an end to military spending or entitlements for the wealthy and for corporations. You will find no outrage on their web sites about the wholesale disappearance of American manufacturing jobs to China. The tea parties are not about the middle classes at all.
Their plan such as it is would be to have the whole country look like California.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 