THE NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY - TEA BAGGERS!

Before we give any credit to the “new” Tea Party, what apparently the Republican Party is destined to become, let’s remember just exactly who these people are and what their politics have historically been. Before your friends embrace this new political force remind them of what their actions have been in the past. At the core, they are against government, taxes, and they’re for war and U.S. bullying of foreign adversaries and allies. One might say they put the “con” in conservative. To be accurate, they’re fooling themselves as much as anyone else. I think they actually believe their hype. They’ve just really never examined the end game of their policies. They ignore history and reality.

These are the folks who labeled the Clinton 1993 Budget Reconciliation Act, which raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans, as government intrusion and the catalyst that would lead to a seismic recession (the sort we’re seeing now after the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest in 2001). They are anti-government, anti-regulation (the kind that led to the financial meltdowns in too big to fail banks, and too big to fail corporations), the sort we’re now dealing with because of the excesses during the Bush free-market years. They were the same folks who were trumpeting the need to convert the Social Security Trust Fund into stock investments (just before the crash of 2007). They’re all for engaging in war (for any reason) in Iraqi, Iran, Viet Nam, Korea, Central America, South America…wherever there is a government (whether elected through a democracy or not) to illustrate that WE ARE the only military superpower. They are the champions of pre-emptive war. It’s good enough for them to justify an aggressive military action just because they conceive threat from any source, justified or not. “Walk softly and carry a big stick” has been replaced with “shoot first and ask questions later.”

The Tea Party has its roots in the South, where they believed slavery was worth initiating a civil war, where as late as the sixties and seventies they were standing in the doorways of public universities to prevent African-Americans from attending schools of higher learning with white students. They are of the political continuity of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, John C. Calhoun, Bull Connor (the Alabama Sheriff who turned fire hoses and dogs on civil rights protesters) and Dick Armey.

They have an unblemished record as being wrong on civil rights, evolution, stem cell research, climate change, and if we could transport them back a few centuries I believe they would have been the same people who thought the sun revolved around the earth, and that the world was flat.

They’re bad judgment has been duly illustrated to have been drastically wrong. Had they prevailed in redirecting the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market in the George W. Bush second term millions of senior citizens who would have planned on retiring in the last three years would have had their futures irrevocably changed. They’re prediction that the fiscal policies invoked by the Clinton Administration would lead the country into a recession proved to be 180 degrees incorrect. Those policies led to the longest period of expansion in history. Whereas the free-market, laissez-faire, cut taxes for the wealthy policies of the Bush administration led to banks making ill advised loans and the payment of massive undeserved bonuses, along with the deepest recession since the Great Depression. By the way, only the last minute intervention of the Bush Administration, followed by the massive stimulus of the Obama Administration along with the vigorous re-installation of federal regulators like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Reserve prevented this “Great Recession” from becoming a “Greater Depression.”

As Nobel Economist Paul Krugman put it in his December 28, 2009 New York Times Op-ed, “now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is – tax cuts and deregulation.” Or, as a good friend of mine once described his hunting dog when he said, “he has lighting speed but, no since of direction.” If we ever follow these revisionists with their “charge backwards” philosophy we’re going to find ourselves in the same place. With the rich getting richer, the middle class disappearing, and the poor among us swelling. True, a rising tide lifts all ships…but, the rising tide is the base of the economy, not the apex. If we ever learn to lift the poor and middle class the wealthy will discover it will improve their lives too.

Before anyone joins this merry band they better recognize exactly where this group of drunken soldiers is leading them. And, it’s not to a better or higher standard of living that we’ve become accustom to. It’s a direct route to returning to the also-rans. These folks are as dishonest with themselves as they are with the rest of us. They ignore the benefits of an organized society where a democratically elected government oversees the activities of its members (citizens) to insure everyone plays fair and respects each other. If we didn’t need government regulations we could do without street signs, speed limits, air traffic control, paved streets…at least streets that weren’t controlled by trolls collecting tolls for passage.

What they purpose is to “water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots”…but, to follow them will lead to something totally different!