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What IS the tea party?
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Anonymous
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Balance the budget by cutting spending, not raising taxes. Deficits are due to high spending, not to the Bush tax cuts.
Not my personal opinion, but that's how I read the tea-party. |
Anonymous
I think that is the theoretical undergirding, but I think the anger is due to the much more emotional feeling that the government is taking MY money and giving it to THEM. Like PP, I am not expressing my own opinion. |
Anonymous
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cut spending. stop being the wold's policeman. more individual freedom and liberty. smaller govt. smaller defense. get out of foreign wars.
smart, smart, smart, smart, smart. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Unless that individual liberty involves your body or who you marry. This is Tea Party's issue #1, they don't care about liberty itself as much as some liberty. Or the wars, because only some tea partiers want to cut defense and get out of international conflict. And this is issue #2, some people badly want them to be Ron Paul, but the rank and file of the tea party is not Ron Paul. And that's the problem of the tea party. It doesn't really stand for what it says it stands for. They vote just like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. They just try not to advertise the less attractive pieces of that. |
Anonymous
It's the political party that the Teabaggers started. Putatively it stands for less intrusion by government, and fiscal responsibility. They exhibit these characteristics by fighting to elect politicians who are fiscally irresponsible Jesus freaks, who will break into your bedroom and confiscate your vibrator. |
Anonymous
| They're the folks who claim the mantle of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson--even though they despise everything the two men stood for, and would've proudly voted against them if they'd been alive. |
Anonymous
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The Tea Party started around the time of Rick Santelli's rant on CNBC and I think it has stayed pretty consistent since then. It's an economic argument first - Let's stop spending and running these deficits we can never pay for. Second let us return to a limited Federal government as envisioned by the founders.
Just as anti war rallies may attract loosely affiliated groups there are some overlaps with the libertarians and Ron Paul supporters. But I think too many liberals are projecting when they make claims of racism. I have seen all races and types at rallies and to dismiss the group as racist is facile and disingenuous. I thin k comments about wanting their country back are meant more along the lines of you work hard and follow the rules and things should turn out. Instead we have trillion dollar stimulus, 9 percent unemployment, loss of manufacturing jobs, and an unresponsive admin and liberal Congress that forced through Obamacare clearly against the will of a majority of the American people. That arrogance fuels the Tea party. As iti si generally libertarian and economic I don't see the social issues playing a major role, nor do previous posters' comments about wanting to control other's bodies make much sense. The tea party argument would be let the states decide on these issues if they arise. I think the origins of much of the movement go back to Ross Perot's candidacy when people started focusing on the debt and recognizing that the establishment of both parties just wanted more of the same spending in various degrees. As for the claim that we could cut defense spending and balance the budget is ludicrous. Thevproblem is the exponential growth in entitlements - Medicare, social security, etc. This will get worse with the retirement of the baby boomers. |
Anonymous
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The two problems with your post:
1. The racism issue is not projecting. WaPo polled tea party organizations and 16% said Obama's race played a significant factor in attracting members. 2. While the platform is libertarian and economic, the actual positions of tea party members are heavily social conservative. That data comes from Pew Research. |
Anonymous
I'd add that there's a significant possibility of under-reporting when you ask folks whether their political movement is racist in nature. 
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Anonymous
| My guess is that most of the expert opinions being voiced here on the who and what of the tea party are based largely on ignorance. Ignorance of the teaparty and ignorance of the basics of the federal budget. Some facts and history are needed. Bush inherited a recession in 2000 and 9/11 caused a huge negative impact on the economy. Without the tax cuts we might never have come out of the recession and the debt and deficits would have been far worse. Believing a graph without knowing the assumptions behind it is foolish. Bush did start the Iraq war which was a huge mistake. Cheney was wrong. Deficits do matter. Obama inherited a reeling economy and a bursting houseing bubble. How did he react to it? He decided to devote most of his first 2 years to healthcare "reform" which was euphemism for trying to fix Medicare. The fact is that Social Security and Medicare have been horribly mismanaged by the Feds for decades. His answer to the old wefare state problem is to the old socialists answer: Yes we screwed up but that's because we need control of the whole system to make it work. The teaparty's instincts are right, the debt is largely to to an exploding federal spending. We can't tax our way out of our problems any more than we can eat our way out obesity. |
Anonymous
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Wow a whole 16%? So by all means let's tar the other 84% as racist, even assuming that the statistic is accurate. Remember the line - there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
But if we're going to go there, and claim that the 16% represent the entire movement, someone explain to me the recent comments at a Common Cause (liberal/progressive organization) rally against the Koch brothers where members of the audience suggested that Clarence Thomas should be "lynched" or "sent back to the fields." http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/03/video-koch-protests-include-calls-to-lynch-clarence-thomas/ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/07/naacp-double-standards-on-common-cause-rally/ But I know it's easier to just go with the "racism" argument and dismiss those that disagree with you. That's what's great about so many liberals, to them conservatives aren't just wrong they are evil and can't possibly have arrived at a different conclusion on a rational basis. Where are the suggestions that the Tea Party members are Nazis, or is that coming next? Very "tolerant." |
Anonymous
Given that no decent human being wants to be called a racist, I think it's actually pretty significant that 16% of the movement had no problem with the label. Most racists consider themselves to be advocates of "racial parity for whites" or some such nonsense. |
Anonymous
I think it's pretty funny that when evidence of institutional racism is demonstrated among organizations of the far-right, and their leaders, the inevitable response by far-right advocates is to break out the video camera and record anonymous people on the street saying inappropriate things. Hey, Senate Whip Trent Lott may have pined for the days of Jim Crow in a public speech in the Capitol building, but, you know, there was this 20-something on youtube one time who said Clarence Thomas' toes should be cut off and fed to him. Equivalence!! Just so sad... |
Anonymous
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Back in days of yore there appeared to be a political movement of people opposed to the Viet Nam war. Many believed that their cohorts were like-minded people. In fact, it turned out that opposition to the war did not mean there was necessarily much other agreement, substantive or tactical.
I was OP on this, wondering whether there was any more cohesion to the tea party, or whether the only common bond is being anti-Obama. After reading the responses, I still think the entrance exam for being a tea partier is the willingness to say you are one, and the Ron Paul types, the Jim DeMint types, and the Jesse Helms types can't stop each other from saying they are too. |