Oooh, does that crazy woman in Delaware who’s running for the Senate count as a Tea Party leader? She got a Palin endorsement and all, she must be! You know the one, the one who said on TV that she dabbled in witchcraft, then followed it up with the ad that says “I’m not a witch, I’m YOU” which is a little confusing on account of I actually AM a witch so I can’t tell if she’s lying or crazy or just plain stupid. Oh yeah, she’s also the one who wants to stop everyone in the country from masturbating so I’m gonna have to go with crazy/stupid although “liar” isn’t totally off the table just yet.
I don’t think you got quite enough of the over-the-top stuff out of your post. The two quoted sentences are very, very close to violating the rule against wishing harm on another poster. Please dial it back a bit further.
Bullshit.
Tell me something-At what age did you decide that the ends justify the means? That it didn’t matter how the other side was brought down. That all’s fair in love and war, and that people who believed differently than you were only targets to be destroyed? That it’s all right to bring massive dishonesty to a debate, because it didn’t matter if people were convinced if you were right as long as enough mud was slung to make any reasonable decision impossible? When the hell did you give up on caring if what you said was correct as long as it towed the party line?
Let’s assume for a moment that what you say is true (it’s not).
And let’s also assume for a moment that the Tea Party, as a whole, really is mostly concerned about government spending and intervention in the economy (it’s not).
Why is it that this movement didn’t emerge when Obama’s predecessor was spending like a drunken sailor, and running the sort of deficits that generally get a Democratic president associated with the anti-christ?
I agree with most of your argument and, if the right is going to prevail in elections it might seem emotionally fulfilling in a serves-you-right sense for the stupidest to win. And this could happen: it seems like the stupidest Republicans are those doing best in the primaries.
But the consequences won’t be worth it. American voters aren’t very smart and will largely blame the most disastrous results on the legacy of Obama. Look what happened in Iraq. This effort was dominated by right-wing idealogues with above average intelligence and led to the Trillion-dollar mistake which future history books will call the beginning of the End of American Ascendence.
Couldn’t figure out an intelligible response to my comment in a MPSIMS thread, huh? Here it is again:
Since now we are in BBQ Pit, I can confess that I found your comment to be self-describing. Indeed if you’ve ever had anything useful to say, I’ve missed it.
septimus has a point. Rush Limbaugh took heat (and deservedly so) when he said he wanted Obama to fail. Do you really want to suffer the consequences of the Tea Party just to be able to say “I told you so”?
I’d like to see the federal government be more fiscally disciplined. I have no faith in the Tea Party to actually accomplish it. I don’t want to see them in office to even have the chance of screwing things up.
This. And not only do I not trust them to even start to balance the budget, they were either lying or deluded when they claim to not be socially conservative. They will succeed in passing socially conservative legislation, and possibly lowering taxes, but not even begin to make a dent in the budget.
For all you teabaggers out there, tell me, which of these programs should the Tea Party officially adopt as a platform:
– Reduce the size of the military
– Reduce Social Security benefits while leaving taxes intact
– Reduce medicaid benefits while leaving taxes intact
If you don’t do one of the three, it’s mathematically impossible to lower the national debt. The teabaggers don’t have the political strength to suggest any of these, and they surely won’t support increased taxes.
So seriously, I want teabaggers in this forum to suggest one of the above changes. If not, you have nothing to stand on.
I don’t know. I think Rush took a lot of heat because he has a ridiculous amount of influence over millions of [del]shit[/del]ditto-heads. Nobody is going to think or act or vote any differently because I got pissed and said I want the Tea Party to win. And I’m afraid a lot of them will win, so maybe pretending I want them to is just my ego’s way of protecting itself. Goddamn motherfuckers.
It does give one pause. But when you look at the fiscal discipline shown by the college-educated millionaires we’ve had running the government the last 80 years or so, it’s hard to believe they’ll be much worse.
Besides, they won’t be in total control anyway.
I don’t know that there are any teabaggers in this thread, and if there I don’t know if they’d want to talk about…you know, TMI and all.
And I don’t know that there are any Tea Partiers here either.
So you might want to ask first before you wind up interpreting a lack of response to mean that you’ve left them speechless.
The last 80 years have hardly been governed by one unbroken, monolithic fiscal policy. Some administrations and congresses have been better than others. Over the course of my lifetime, the people who talk like the Tea Partiers are the ones who spend like drunken sailors. So, yes, I can easily believe they’d be among the worst.
All of which is somewhat off-topic for this thread, which was originally about the Tea Partiers social agenda.
Nobody, to my knowledge, has had anything nearly as intelligent and insightful to say about the Tea Party as Johnathon Raban, in the New York Review of Books
Fuckin’ brilliant. Joe Bob 'luc says “Check it out!”
His main message seems to be that many of the people attending these events or identifying with something about the TP do not conform to simple conceptions of them as bigots and reactionaries. For example, he is surprised to meet a conservative white Southern woman who has adopted two disabled black kids.
And, of course, the President has nothing to do with formulating the policies that result in Congress appropriating and spending money, right? Presidential policies are completely irrelevant to the ways in which the federal government involves itself in the nation’s economy?
The fact is that the White House has considerable sway over these issues, and that, while talking of high-spending and low-spending Presidents might not be procedurally correct, it is a completely understandable shorthand for their economic policies that anyone will more than three brain cells can comprehend. Are you in that group of people?