Considering that their side offered up John McCain and Caribou Barbie as an alternative I would say they do hold a large measure of responsibility, yes. Obama was by far the best option given to us.
Keep your French out of our country, you god damned commie.
-Joe
IMO (in my opinion, remember) the Tea Party is a groundswell of anger at the fiscal irresponsibility with which the country has been run for decades, and was touched off by Obama and Congress with the stimulous, the bailouts and its accompanying government control of business, and the health care plan. Someone upthread questioned why the Tea Party seems to have sprung up the day Obama got into office, and my opinion is that to the degree this is true, it’s because of the aggressive and arrogant way Obama and Congress began to govern virtually from the day he took office.
And to answer your question from further upthread, I don’t believe I’ve ever said the Tea Party wasn’t also socially conservative.
Aggressive? After the previous administration started a ridiculous war just for kicks?
Which, by the way, pissed away trillions of dollars and got us into the world of budget deficits in the first place. Whence the Tea Party then when fiscal irresponsipility wasn’t just a slogan it was a plan?
Quiz question: Who signed TARP into law on October 3, 2008?
Bonus round: Who was president during the beginning of the economic recession in the United States in December 2007?
No need to be so snarky. They weren’t recommendations, they were cites.
You are aware, I hope, that this “stimulous” was first signed into law by G.W. Bush.
You’re just a partisan hack. What businesses does the Gov’t now “control” under Obama? Please be specific.
Please present an argument showing how letting the Big Three automakers go under without assistance would have been better for America.
The Health Care plan? You mean, the one that uses (originally) mostly Republican ideas?
You’re a moron.
How convenient for you. To most of us, though, “Muslim” isn’t a race but a religion, and the question of birth relates to his qualification to hold office as set forth in the Constitution.
So if you want to consider those to be “race based”, you are obviously doing so only in a dishonest attempt to paint as racist a group you simply disagree with politically.
And that’s really not very sporting of you, if I do say so myself.
How many decades are you talking about, anyway?
This country has not been run by a single, consistent policy over that time span. Parties come into, and out of power. Three decades is a number that works for me; that’s about when I became eligible to vote and started paying attention to the issues. It’s also the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. During that time, one party has clearly been more fiscally irresponsible. Anyone care to guess which one?
When people try to lump the decades together, it looks like an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the very real shifts in power that happened during those decades.
But then, that’s just my opinion.
What was your comment about the start of libertarian thinking, if not snarky?
Look, i’m not a libertarian, but i’m well aware of the classical liberal tradition and of the libertarian movement that took much of its inspiration from that tradition. I’ve read Hayek and Friedman. Hell, i’ve even tortured myself with Ludwig von Mises. I’ve received fellowships from a libertarian organization, and attended libertarian conferences where i, as a social democrat, was somewhat out of place.
Even when i don’t agree with libertarians, i find that many of them have clear, well-thought-out arguments about the nature and acceptable limits of state authority, and i also appreciate that the libertarians i’ve come into contact with have generally been happy to debate me honestly and fairly on issues where we disagree. It’s also clear to me that many libertarians do truly care about the poor and downtrodden in society, and that in most cases they don’t call for cuts to government programs out of simple spite.
But, in all the coverage i’ve seen of the Tea Party movement, even in cases where members of the movement have been shown speaking for themselves about their own beliefs, i have seen none of the intellectual rigor and thoughtfulness that tends to characterize the libertarians i’ve had dealings with in the past. What i have seen is lots of shouting about getting government off our backs combined, in many cases, with a level of religious and socially prescriptive and proscriptive arguments that are completely out of line with libertarian ideas regarding non-coercion and individual liberty.
The Tea Party movement has many full-blooded, genuine religious conservatives who probably do genuinely want reduced government interference in certain areas of the economy, but who have no sustained or consistent libertarian argument, and who seem happy for the government to keep its nose right in people’s business on certain social and cultural issues.
While libertarians do not constitute a monolithic group, and there were debates among libertarians over things like foreign policy, one thing that did characterize the arguments of many actual libertarian organizations like the Cato Institute during the Bush administration was a strong criticism of Bush’s spending policies, and of his overweening and intrusive legislation on a whole bunch of issues related to personal freedom.
But most of these Tea Party douchebags seemed to have no interest in such libertarian critiques 5 or 6 years ago, and that is why they have no credibility, the whining sophistry of *Starving Artist and other mendacious morons notwithstanding. I know a few libertarians who agree with some of the Tea Party’s general calls for smaller government, but who also keep their distance because they recognize that these positions are often not rooted in any sustained or genuine critique of government power or spending, but in a conservative opposition only to particular types of government spending, and to particular party-political positions.
Then what are you in this thread for? The OPs whole point was that the tea party groups present themselves as a movement for fiscal responsibility that embrace anyone who is for reducing deficits from either side of the political spectrum, but every candidate they support seems to be a far right social conservative (and often a loon to boot). You seemed to be arguing that we were taking these out of context and only noticing the socially conservative and loony.
So what was your point? If you agree that they are actually an overall socially conservative group, what are you arguing against?
Tea Partiers not only want to reduce the deficit, but they also want to reduce the size of the federal government. You’re not going to get many (any?) Democrats signing up for that.
While that’s true enough, it doesn’t mean that the Tea Partiers are Libertarians or even traditional fiscal conservatives. Where were they when the previous administration decided to start two wars and cut taxes? I didn’t hear much of, “We’re fighting two wars, we have to pay for them somehow.”
The much-maligned and woefully too small stimulus is a drop in the bucket compared to the two wars that we have run off the theory of . . . well, shit, y’know John, I can’t even imagine what theory the previous administration had in mind to pay for the wars. Where were the deficit hawks then?
You know, I am quite convinced that the plan that the previous administration had was this:
“When the Democrats are in power, they will have to pay for the mess then. They’ll have to either cut services or raise taxes, and when they do, we’ll hammer them as hard as we can. If they do neither, we’ll hammer them on the rising deficit”
I was snarky because I never said libertarianism was a theory of the 21st century, nor implied it. And by posting cites to two turgid texts like that you were the one being snarky.
Quite a few might like to reduce the military budget. Others would like to reduce corporate subsidies. No one wants a bigger government just to have a bigger government. Liberal’s and Conservatives just see different parts of the government as too big or too small.
This is also the case with regulation as well. Conservatives tend to want to regulate what individuals do (flag burning, gay marriage, abortion, etc.) while liberals tend to want to regulate what business do. There are very few true libertarians who want less government across the board, and the tea party movement, whatever their motto’s or origination don’t tend to back those types of candidates. The Paul’s are the only two I know of who come close to fitting that description.
ETA:
That would also explain the tax cuts (set to expire after Bush left office) and Medicare Part D (not showing up as cost until Bush left office). They may not have planned it that way, but anybody who stepped into office in January 2009 was fiscally screwed from the get go.
I’m going to type slowly to give you a chance to understand.
Calling someone a Muslim doesn’t make someone racist. What makes those who call Obama Muslim racist is that they would never in a million years make such allegations towards a white President.
The main reason Obama’s faith is challenged is because of the color of his skin.
Tell that to the Arab Christian (there are some in America – they’re 10% of the Arab world’s population) who has been getting funny looks ever since 9/11.
Oh they planned it that way, you can be assured. It is not just a series of coincidences.