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1.5 Cheers for the Tea Partiers!
I did indeed attend the Tea Party last weekend with my esteemed colleague Karl, which inspired the following thoughts.
One particular meme that I’ve seen cropping up among the Tea Party circles is those signs with pics of Bush and Cheney, along with the line “Miss Me Yet?” This is something that never fails to send the vomit shooting up the back of my throat. I won’t recount, yet again, the multitude of sins against limited government and fiscal sanity that have been promulgated by the Bush-bots and their neoconservative counselors. Sure, as Karl pointed out to me this weekend, for all his wretchedness, McCain probably wouldn’t have been foisting socialized (or cartelized) healthcare on us, at least this year (although it’s not inconceivable). Nevertheless the prominence of these die-hard Bushie fanboys among the supposedly revolutionary Tea Partiers is the number-one piece of evidence that the movement has been co-opted by amoral GOP set and its talk-radio enablers.
Depressingly, Ron Paul types and associated libertoids, apparently, were completely non-existent among this crowd. In fact, I would guess that, say, a Ron Paul Revolution t-shirt would get some hostile attention from these guys. That’s too bad, because the hard-libertarian forces are younger, more geographically diverse, and are much more serious about pushing back at against the growth of the state. This is not to criticize the undoubtedly fine and dedicated middle-American family men who seemed to make up the bulk of the Partiers, but a broad-based coalition is becoming increasingly essential.
