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Reflections of a Rational Republican

 

 

 

What does the Tea Party get right?

 

 

Well…practically nothing!

 

It’s not easy to glean a coherent message from the raspy bullhorns of the Tea Party Movement. I get the part about cutting taxes, cutting spending, and reducing the deficit, but beyond those maddeningly contradictory goals all clarity breaks down into a stew of id-driven rants.

 

However, amidst the semi-coherent blather some common themes do emerge.

 

What the Tea Party gets wrong is practically everything it proposes to do about our situation.  Basically, the response to Wall Street corruption is to let bankers do whatever they want.

 

Upset about the financial collapse?  Punish the people who kept the lights on. The corrupting influence of money on our politics can be remedied by allowing unlimited campaign contributions.

 

Worried about crumbling infrastructure?  Slash spending.  And the unchecked drain of capital from ordinary Americans to the wealthy all over the world can be fixed by cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

 

Basically, the Tea Party is a fantastic, principled expression of ordinary Americans’ frustration with our broken politics.  And along the way, Tea Partiers demonstrate with depressing clarity the kind of laziness that got us here in the first place.  In the face of complex problems, they spout slogans.  They propose to fix our collective roof by burning the house down while we’re all left inside.  There’s no problem so complex that it can’t be solved with a can of gasoline and some oily rags.

 

What the Tea Party has demonstrated more than anything is how easily real concerns about concrete matters can in this country be redirected and neutralized.  Facing an angry mob?  Dangle some fear of foreigners and their wicked religions, mix in some resentment of mooching minorities, and you can make them do whatever you want.

 

Perhaps the Tea Party will prove to be a good start, an initial step in the right direction. Maybe it will eventually spur us to care more about the details and look for serious solutions to our problems.  Good things can and do happen.  Or maybe the movement will just cannibalize itself in an escalating spiral of extremism and paranoia.  Maybe they’ll find the “real” birth certificate.

 

We’ll see.

 

ChrisLadd is a Texan living in the Chicago area. He has been involved in grassroots Republican politics for most of his life. He watched with alarm as the Party in his home state grew more and more tolerant of extremes and intolerant of reason. The Republican Party is still the best fit for his politics, but it's an increasingly uncomfortable home. Chris graduated from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas with a BA in politics and economics and earned a law degree from the University of Houston.

 

http://reflectionsofarationalr...ea-party-gets-right/

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Actually, the debt reduction commission suggested a 15 cent increase in the gas tax over three years, so that the federal highway construction fund would be self sufficient. The tea partiers accepted that.  Obama promised nearly a trillion in infrastructure spending and didn't.

 

Washington's quote is about personal charity, not redistribution of wealth forced by the government.  The tea partiers sent about 95 new members to congress and a number of senators.  Get used to even more in the future.

Originally Posted by The Propagandist:

Reflections of a Rational Republican

 

 

 

What does the Tea Party get right?

 

 

Well…practically nothing!

 

It’s not easy to glean a coherent message from the raspy bullhorns of the Tea Party Movement. I get the part about cutting taxes, cutting spending, and reducing the deficit, but beyond those maddeningly contradictory goals all clarity breaks down into a stew of id-driven rants.

 

However, amidst the semi-coherent blather some common themes do emerge.

 

What the Tea Party gets wrong is practically everything it proposes to do about our situation.  Basically, the response to Wall Street corruption is to let bankers do whatever they want.

 

Upset about the financial collapse?  Punish the people who kept the lights on. The corrupting influence of money on our politics can be remedied by allowing unlimited campaign contributions.

 

Worried about crumbling infrastructure?  Slash spending.  And the unchecked drain of capital from ordinary Americans to the wealthy all over the world can be fixed by cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

 

Basically, the Tea Party is a fantastic, principled expression of ordinary Americans’ frustration with our broken politics.  And along the way, Tea Partiers demonstrate with depressing clarity the kind of laziness that got us here in the first place.  In the face of complex problems, they spout slogans.  They propose to fix our collective roof by burning the house down while we’re all left inside.  There’s no problem so complex that it can’t be solved with a can of gasoline and some oily rags.

 

What the Tea Party has demonstrated more than anything is how easily real concerns about concrete matters can in this country be redirected and neutralized.  Facing an angry mob?  Dangle some fear of foreigners and their wicked religions, mix in some resentment of mooching minorities, and you can make them do whatever you want.

 

Perhaps the Tea Party will prove to be a good start, an initial step in the right direction. Maybe it will eventually spur us to care more about the details and look for serious solutions to our problems.  Good things can and do happen.  Or maybe the movement will just cannibalize itself in an escalating spiral of extremism and paranoia.  Maybe they’ll find the “real” birth certificate.

 

We’ll see.

 

ChrisLadd is a Texan living in the Chicago area. He has been involved in grassroots Republican politics for most of his life. He watched with alarm as the Party in his home state grew more and more tolerant of extremes and intolerant of reason. The Republican Party is still the best fit for his politics, but it's an increasingly uncomfortable home. Chris graduated from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas with a BA in politics and economics and earned a law degree from the University of Houston.

 

http://reflectionsofarationalr...ea-party-gets-right/

 

 

 

 

FAIL. Looks like the smart people don't want any of your kool-aid. Huh?

Originally Posted by interventor1212:
Originally Posted by The Propagandist:

JIm Jones, communist preacher, was one of yours Prop, along with the poor deluded souls who followed him.

Does the duck ever post anything that he didn't make up? He has a good imagination, but seems to understand very little. He has almost reached the point where he is no longer entertaining. Mostly boring now.

Originally Posted by JimiHendrix:
Originally Posted by interventor1212:
Originally Posted by The Propagandist:

JIm Jones, communist preacher, was one of yours Prop, along with the poor deluded souls who followed him.

Does the duck ever post anything that he didn't make up? He has a good imagination, but seems to understand very little. He has almost reached the point where he is no longer entertaining. Mostly boring now.

bump

I understand this, and I didn’t make it up.

 

 

Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen.

He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

"You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

"It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8474611.stm?

 

If you earn over $300,000 a year, you owe a great deal to this derangement.

Raise a glass sometime to those indigent High Plains Republicans as you contemplate your good fortune: It is thanks to their self-denying votes that you are no longer burdened by the estate tax, or troublesome labor unions, or meddling banking regulators. Thanks to the allegiance of these sons and daughters of toil, you have escaped what your affluent forebears used to call “confiscatory” income tax levels. It is thanks to them that you were able to buy two Rolexes this year instead of one and get that Segway with the special gold trim. (Frank, 2004, p. 2)

According to Frank, Republicans have been able to successfully appeal to the social

conservatism of blue collar workers and the rural poor on cultural controversies like

abortion, *** rights, immigration, the role of religion in public life, gun control and

affirmative action.Frank sees this as a “bait and switch” tactic on the part of the

Republican Party, whereby working class voters are pushed to vote according to their

cultural values, and are then given economic policies that are harmful to their own

interests.Frank describes what he regards as the consequences of this arrangement:

 

Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes.

 

Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization.

 

Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.

 

Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking.

 

Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization.

 

Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.(Frank, 2004, p. 7)

 

Last edited by The Propagandist

Well Prop, you got one thing right....oh no sorry you didn't....I thought somewhere in there you said you were a douche.

I am sorry, but the people making over $300K a year are not your enemies.  We have as much right to hold onto some of our wealth as anyone else. I assure you my tax rates are plenty high, and they continue to befuddle the mind.  When I pay my taxes on time (every quarter) and usually for more than I owe, and then get a penalty of $661 because the payments were not equal ( here's a clue genius, maybe I made more one quarter than the other...duh), there is something wrong with the tax system in this country. Duya' think?

On top of that I see people who brag about having kids and earning EIC and bringing in more money with their federal return than they paid into the system, agains something is wrong here.  Many of the deductions are phased out as your income increases, yet the tax rate increases as well.

I think it is time alot of people in this country who are currently paying taxes say they have had enough and decide to live off of the government teat like yourself.  Who will they squeeze to get your entitlement check then?

What a moron.

 

Evoking the French revolution as image, even as anti-thesis is amusing.  That was the first of the leftwing's remaking of society. Much blood spilled, a government by terror (their description) that first beheaded the aristos.  Then, anyone who was perceived to be against the government. Finally, the government itself as the revolution ate its children.  Only, to be replaced by an emperor, who almost destroyed Europe.

 

Check out the Forbes 100. Most are Democrats (Forbes not included).     

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