Oh, nonsense. It’s not fiscal conservatism to rant “keep the government off my Medicare” while you try to keep other people from getting medical insurance. That’s a combination of greed and incoherence, not fiscal conservatism. And as has often been pointed out, if these people really cared about fiscal conservatism, they’d speak up when Republicans are running the country.
The difference between traditional Republicans and Tea Partiers is that the TPers are the even dumber, crazier, more extreme fringe of the right. They are the most ignorant, the most thuggish, the worst educated, the most racist that the Right has to offer. They are an incoherent mass of quite stupid right wing angry people with no real plan or idea what they are doing or what they actually want.
Present-day Republican thinking can be summarized as not liking taxes, and agreeing that Obama is “not one of us.” Fiscal conservatives and libertarians are simply Republican-like thinkers who’ve learned some long words. There are some otherwise-intelligent right-wingers in this forum who would consider this an absurd oversimplification, but it basically isn’t.
In one recent thread a Tea-bagger said he/she wanted to return to the ideals of Teddy Roosevelt. I posted a summary of the Bull Moose Party platform. Never heard back from the Tea-bagger.
Face it friends. To speak of “Teabagger ideas” or even “Republican ideas” is to confront an oxymoron.
No, it happened a lot earlier. FDR brought Blacks into the Democratic party at least 30 years before Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” and Republicans became the party of banks and big business at least as long ago as Reconstruction; they stopped being social progressives around the time Teddy Roosevelt left the party.
If Obama had tackled immigration reform before health care Tea Partiers would be anti immigration. If he had gone for gay rights first Tea Partiers would call themselves protectors of marriage. They are angry stupid old white people pissed about not being in charge, that and nothing else.
Except that they don’t know that, about lowering taxes. They’ve been told the opposite, or at least not the part where it’s the taxes on those making over a quarter million (i.e. not most of them) that are going up, and that it’s Bush’s estate tax law that’s expiring under its own terms without the traitor or his traitor party doing anything at all.
At the risk of counter-hijacking this thread back to the OP,
I’m a center-leaning conservative who can actually tell you what the Bull Moose platform was and approves wholeheartedly. In terms of the descriptions upthread, I’m an Eisenhower conservative. Admittedly, I voted for Obama because the Republican party has no grounds to call itself “conservative” on any subject any more.
In my opinion, the Tea Party types represent the type of people who feel they’re disenfranchised and the country is going to hell basically any time there’s not a movement conservative (spits) in charge. The extra energy this time around seems, from a point of view inside the conservative side, to be coming ENTIRELY from “holy shit, he’s black TOO? This is infinity times worse than Clinton!”
That said, I think the tea-partiers are the uneducated, unthinking and easily rabble-roused part of the GOP. All the sane folks on the right are floating in the middle trying to distance themselves from the hooples.
I’ll be very surprised if we’ll be hearing much about the Tea Partiers 2 years from now. They’re just too fragmented, and with the major “leaders” seeming to be Palin and Bachman… well, that leadership will lead them into oblivion.
