So, what does the Tea Party stand for?

DevilsAdvocate said:
Well, I think that is the heart of the problem. The Tea Party seems to have descended into a platform of simply anti-government. Whatever the government is doing, it is wrong. There are many complaints, but not much for answers.
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With vestiges of the long standing "small government" appeal carried over from a variety of previous movements.

Contrarians, if nothing else.

The Tea Party is all about what is wrong, but nothing about what is right.
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Pithily put.

DR
 
cienanos said:
Here's a well written piece on the issue...I highly recommend it :)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/03/100503fa_fact_lepore
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Nice piece.

In the past year in America, political discontent has been characterized by a lot of bitter vitriol, some of which comes from the TEA party.

Yesterday, political discontent in Iraq was, once again, characterized by a car bomb. This time, a few went off, and then a third was set off as people helped those who had been hurt/killed by the first two. Body count looks to be 75 dead, over 130 injured.

I'd rather they caught up to us then we take any ideas from them, personally. I am not too keen on seeing tea barrels tossed into the harbor replaced by messier/gorier expressions of public discontent.

For all that people really don't like President Obama, there seems to be selective myopia in understanding how the GOP plotted a strategy, beginning in 2004, of utter hubris that nearly guaranteed GOP defeat in 2008 when Bush left office. They didn't change course in 2006, and drove the swing vote into the Democrats' hands.

The question is, do the various Tea Party leadership understand what they are doing with the swing vote? Seems to me they are alienating much of it. If their aim is to give President Obama a political drubbing, by knocking his party out of the Senate, or the House, then embracing the swing vote would be how to do it. It is the swing vote that brought President Obama to the White House.

But it was, IMO, GOP incompetence that lost them the House and Senate.

So what is it that these folks really want? All I grasp is what they don't want.

DR
 
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lomiller said:
The former, maybe, the latter almost certainly not for most of them. Like most right wingers they refuse to point to any real cuts they would support and are more likely to be opposing cuts to things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Defense.

For all their other loony ideas the one thing you need to give the Ron Paul crowd credit for is that they are the only right wingers who are willing to come out and say what spending they think should be cut. This, of course, is why they would never get elected. The US voters don’t want real cuts they want to be told they can pay less in taxes without real cuts.
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You have a point. A lot of people will say they support less government spending, but as soon as you propose cutting some program that they benefit from, they scream bloody murder. The trouble is, lower taxes are not really sustainable without cutting spending. Die hard supply siders will claim otherwise, but I think evidence suggests that this is wishful thinking. If the Tea Party were only about fiscal responsibility, and put forward a reasonable program for achieving it, I'd be one of their strongest supporters. Unfortunately, there seems to be a whole lot of lunatic fringe baggage along for the ride. I guess I'm more of an old school Republican, or a small l libertarian. I've been very unhappy with the increasing dominance of "Social Conservatives" in the Republican Party for a long time now. The Teabag movement seems to be trying to straddle that particular fence, embracing a lot of libertarian ideas (unfortunately, a lot of the nuttier ones) and still trying not to alienate the anti-abortion, anti-gay, crowd. I think the Tea Baggers will make some inroads in Congress in 2010, maybe even get a Republican majority in one or both houses, then crash and burn in 2012, a lot like the "Contract with America" crowd did in 1994 and 1996, when it becomes apparent just how extreme they are. I'm no believer in "history repeating itself", but it looks like it may happen this time.
 
The Tea Parties are not racist. They want the Bill of Rights completely unscathed. They want smaller government. They want the Federal Reserve as well as Fractional Reserve Banking to go the way of the dodo bird. They also believe there is such a thing as the New World Order and do not like it at all. On some counts I have to agree with them. On others I do not. My main bone of contention with most of the people in the patriot movement is Abortion Rights and that they want Gold/Silver to be the monetary system. Austrian Economics is a joke. Stephen Zarlenga is the man.

Actually, I am kind of tired of both the main stream and the Patriot types. Either world they envision is going to go to crap. Here is the interesting thing though, when it comes to the the Federal Reserve and the IRS the Tea Party members have a point. I mean seriously, banks get to create money from nothing, charge interest on it and if they are not paid back they can take your house. How is that equitable?
 
tensordyne said:
The Tea Parties are not racist.
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That's a big claim. Every party has some racists in it.

tensordyne said:
They want the Bill of Rights completely unscathed.
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Yet they make it a party platform in Maine that "freedom of religion" does not mean "freedom from religion."

tensordyne said:
They want smaller government. They want the Federal Reserve as well as Fractional Reserve Banking to go the way of the dodo bird.
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Which proves they're stupid.

tensordyne said:
They also believe there is such a thing as the New World Order and do not like it at all.
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Which proves they're insane.

tensordyne said:
Here is the interesting thing though, when it comes to the the Federal Reserve and the IRS the Tea Party members have a point. I mean seriously, banks get to create money from nothing, charge interest on it and if they are not paid back they can take your house. How is that equitable?
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The alternative is they don't create money and you have to buy your house with 20,000 ox carts.
 
tensordyne said:
Here is the interesting thing though, when it comes to the the Federal Reserve and the IRS the Tea Party members have a point.
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Not at all.

I mean seriously, banks get to create money from nothing, charge interest on it and if they are not paid back they can take your house. How is that equitable?
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The same way that it's equitable that a mechanic gets paid for fixing your car, and if he's not paid, he can take out a lien against your car.

Bankers provide a service; if you didn't need a loan to buy a house, you could have bought it for cash. If you did need a loan, you didn't have to buy the house in the first place -- you could have rented. The idea that they should provide considerable service (and take considerable risk) for no reward is ludicrous.
 
tensordyne said:
The Tea Parties are not racist. They want the Bill of Rights completely unscathed. They want smaller government. They want the Federal Reserve as well as Fractional Reserve Banking to go the way of the dodo bird. They also believe there is such a thing as the New World Order and do not like it at all.
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What do you base this on? How do you know this?
 
Travis said:
That's a big claim. Every party has some racists in it.



Yet they make it a party platform in Maine that "freedom of religion" does not mean "freedom from religion."



Which proves they're stupid.



Which proves they're insane.



The alternative is they don't create money and you have to buy your house with 20,000 ox carts.
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Well said.
 
Upchurch said:
Bumping just to see if anyone else can try to pin it down.
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Without Rights sure seemed to be assuming a role of expertise in another Tea Party thread:
Without Rights said:
Media slandering and gross misrepresentation.
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Without Rights said:
...you are talking out your arse.
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Without Rights said:
...you don't know what you are talking about.
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Without Rights said:
...you are just slanderous and unacquainted.
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Without Rights said:
You obviously need to do some homework.
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Perhaps he can enlighten us.
 
cienanos said:
Here's a well written piece on the issue...I highly recommend it :)

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/03/100503fa_fact_lepore
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Good read.

And it reveals another wonderful bit of Tea Party hypocrisy:
Tea Partier who opposes Healthcare Reform said:
My little girl, when she was three, she got real sick. Had to be in intensive care for ten days. Had to have a tracheotomy. I had s*** for insurance. The hospital sent me a bill. Ten thousand dollars. I got a second job; I sent the hospital one hundred bucks a week. That was the right thing to do. This is wrong. People want something, they have to work for it.
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Putting aside the somewhat psychotic notion that people should be forced into indentured servitude to pay their medical bills, I wonder who this guy thinks was assuming the burden of his daughter's medical expenses during the two or so years it took him to pay back the money? It seems to me that a truly principled person would have just let their child die.
 
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Libertarians, like Without Rights, are so desperate for their political beliefs to become relevant they can't see Tea Party as what it really is (at this point), a subset of the Republican Party and in some cases, an ugly subset.

The Tea Party has provided racists and CT'ists a public platform with national exposure along with tacit endorsement by Republican leadership. Racists and CTists may represent a minority of the Tea Party, but as long as the they are allowed to share the stage, people like Without Rights need to take their heads out of their butts and deal with the reality.
 
What I think the tea party is really about is multi-level group selection. IMO, the US has been fracturing for some time. Within our national group there is 'among group' fighting and is evident in politics and religion because thats where our collective moral codes are.
 
rjwould said:
What I think the tea party is really about is multi-level group selection. IMO, the US has been fracturing for some time. Within our national group there is 'among group' fighting and is evident in politics and religion because thats where our collective moral codes are.
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How dare you bring sober, reasonable remarks to a thread in politics? :D
 
DavidJames said:
Libertarians, like Without Rights, are so desperate for their political beliefs to become relevant they can't see Tea Party as what it really is (at this point), a subset of the Republican Party and in some cases, an ugly subset.

The Tea Party has provided racists and CT'ists a public platform with national exposure along with tacit endorsement by Republican leadership. Racists and CTists may represent a minority of the Tea Party, but as long as the they are allowed to share the stage, people like Without Rights need to take their heads out of their butts and deal with the reality.
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I have to point out, that some Libertarians are very critical of the Tea Party movement.
 
dudalb said:
I have to point out, that some Libertarians are very critical of the Tea Party movement.
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The Tea Party is NOT representative of Libertarians at all. Not even close.

The Tea Party is composed of people hell-bent on destruction and not creating--the worst type of people. Maybe if they shut up for a second they could all sit down and develop something they stand for instead of what they stand against. Just when I thought politics could not get any worse...
 
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