I don’t know if the tea party that tea partiers say exists really does exist. They say it does but then take offense when they’re characterized as a pitchfork-and-torch mob chasing down the Frankenstein monster.<\/p>\n
Despite the portrait provided by The Bee in last Sunday’s Forum, many reader comments illustrate the near-irreversible problem for tea partiers: They don’t control their message.<\/p>\n
Proponents work overtime to describe tea partiers as average Americans frustrated by a politicized, calcified government apparatus. Why? Because the perception of tea partiers is one of wild-eyed loons spewing allegations of socialism, evocations of Nazism and admonitions about keeping government out of Medicare.<\/p>\n
Birther lawsuits twice have been tossed as meritless by the U.S. Supreme Court, yet one-third of Californians are convinced the president isn’t an American citizen, and they identify with the tea party, according to a recent Field Poll. Birther theories received prominent play at the recent Nashville gathering of tea partiers, further cementing the movement to tinfoil-hat wearers.<\/p>\n
It’s a movement where reason cedes to irrationality, civility gives way to petulance and provocative inquiry is drowned out by agendized hucksters looking to co-opt a movement while inflammatory carnival barkers demand that we take our country back.<\/p>\n
Back from whom? Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks special-interest group finances much of the tea party movement, admonished activists to rail against government-run health care.<\/p>\n
Yet Dick Armey has been on the public dole nearly his entire career: 13 years as a college professor in the taxpayer-supported University of Texas system (free health care), followed by 18 years as a member of Congress where he enjoyed and continues to enjoy a government health care program supported by you, the taxpayer.<\/p>\n
We should give the country to him?<\/p>\n
Not a week after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, radical conservatives attacked him as a RINO – “Republican in name only” – because they were shocked to learn he’s pro-choice, has no intention of challenging the state’s gay marriage law and supports the state’s government-run health care system.<\/p>\n
This puts Brown squarely in line with the independents who elected him but out of step with a conservative fringe that sees him supporting Obama’s agenda, and a socialist who must be replaced as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
For a crowd that crows constantly about less federal government and more emphasis on states deciding their own fates, do these people not respect the will of the citizens of the Commonwealth? Why? Because Brown doesn’t think like “we” do.<\/p>\n
Republican National Committee members at last month’s winter meetings were presented with a 10-point “purity test” that would have enforced party loyalty by separating “true” Republicans from so-called RINOs; if you didn’t agree with eight of the 10 planks, you’d get no endorsement or campaign money. (Ronald Reagan would have failed the test, but Meghan McCain passes.) The idea was rejected.<\/p>\n
The chief sponsor of the proposal, committeeman James Bopp, defended his purity test, saying critics “will attack any effort to reassure voters that we are serious about restoring our conservative bona fides.”<\/p>\n
Here in our region, the Placer County Republican Central Committee goes after GOP officeholders who aren’t conservative enough. When five registered Republicans on the Rocklin City Council supported the extension of a park tax, county committee chairman Tom Hudson issued a call to “take out” those “liberal RINOs.”<\/p>\n
Residents passed the tax by an overwhelming 83 percent, which begs the question: What happens when ideologues are out of step with the body politic, as they are in Massachusetts?<\/p>\n
Unapologetic, Hudson is absolutist in his scorched-earth defense of ultraconservatism against what many of his ilk call “liberal Republican ticket-switchers.” Those are people who’ve left the party to become decline-to-state or even Blue Dog Democrats, further reducing the GOP brand to a manic wolf pack of unyielding, uncompromising ideological purists, something entirely anathema to the founding principles and resultant pluralism that has always defined America.<\/p>\n
Are these the leaders of the tea party movement? People touting ideological purity and intolerance to dissent as party mantras, something entirely anathema to the founding principles and resultant pluralism that has always defined America? Or are they opportunistic politicos manipulating the movement for their own selfish gain? <\/p>\n
Dick Armey told RNC gatherers that the GOP can’t win without tea party voters. Yet voters in Rocklin are dismissed as misguided while the choice of Massachusetts voters must be replaced without haste.<\/p>\n
It’s sad to see reasonable middle-class Americans with heartfelt and genuine beliefs misrepresented by distorted images of kooks and all-or-nothing ideologues, or milked by manipulators who seek only a return to power in Washington, prepared to abandon their supporters once they do.<\/p>\n
And therein perhaps lies the tragedy of the tea party movement: that a sincere ambition may ultimately and invariably be doomed, and that its practitioners, like the Frankenstein monster, may have all the staying power of a folk legend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t know if the tea party that tea partiers say exists really does exist. They say it does but then take offense when they’re characterized as a pitchfork-and-torch mob chasing down the Frankenstein monster. Despite the portrait provided by The Bee in last Sunday’s Forum, many reader comments illustrate the near-irreversible problem for tea […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}