Tea Party Crashes, Fizzles
While I’m sympathetic to those who believe our government is acting beyond its intended functions and wasting the wealth of the American people, it is hard to not laugh a bit at how the Tea Party movement has been jerked and led around by the Republican party establishment that is most guilty of unconstitutional expansions and unnecessary military spending.
Not long after Ron Paul’s supporters came up with the idea for a Tea Party donation event, conservative PR specialists have been trying to find a way to co-opt the growing anger on the right side of things.
Within a few months of the donation Tea Party, a new “Tea Party protest” was being planned for tax day. Suddenly though, anyone who had participated in the first grass-roots movement would have sensed that something was wrong. Whereas the first Tea Party event had been organized exclusively by individuals without political connections, the second one was funded by all of the Republican operatives and front groups you might have come to expect.
When it was announced then that Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo would be headlining the Tea Party convention and that tickets would cost almost $600 a piece, it should have been clear to even the slowest political analysts that this was little more than the old nativist neo-cons trying to regroup following the epic disgrace known as 8 years of Bush.
I don’t know what they talked about there, but I can take a guess. Tancredo is one of those who seems to think that all evil in America came here from across the Mexican border, and Palin is so out there that we’re not sure she’s thinking about anything at all. So frankly, I also don’t care what they were talking about at the Tea Party conference, because as far as I’m concerned this is just the new euphemism for neo-con.
But there’s still a downside here … is it possible for a legitimate opposition to form against the government that’s otherwise out of control? If voter anger can so easily be corralled into a new establishment font group, what hope is there of reform coming from voter movements?