A Tea Partier Explains

I've been having a back and forth with several readers on the "tea party" protests. A key issue on my part is why their concern with fiscal recklessness seems to date from January 20, 2009. This morning Glenn Beck insisted that he'd been concerned with Bush's spending spree. He's right about that, although his hysteria was nowhere near as intense as it is now, and, naturally, not on Fox, where conservative principles were routinely sacrificed during the Bush years. But here's one response that seems honest to me:

I was one of those people that was shell shocked for a long time after 9/11. I thought it was all about not being attacked again so spend, spend, spend. Kill all the crazies, I thought. I thought the whole prescription drug thing was stupid. But I was 4 - 8 years younger than I am now, I didn't pay attention to that stuff. I knew wars cost money, but I had no idea all this other pork barrel spending was occurring. It wasn't reported on TV.  I watch the news regularly and the MSM totally dropped the ball on all the spending.

Until I began using the internet and finding things like you, Daily Kos, Drudge, WSJ online to get different points of view, it was already election season in 2007. By then our crappy W was just sitting there with his thumb up his ass waiting to get out of office.

I think his intentions were good, but the road to hell is paved with them. Like I said below, this is the first time I have become involved because it is grass roots and not driven by any paid public relations machine like the whole Obama administration. I'm mad at republicans too. They have all let us down, and that is what I'm protesting. If it were McCain and Palin in the WH proposing the same thing, I would still protesting.

I'm not sure this protest has no professional organizers behind it. But I am glad that many are concerned about the growth of government and the necessary increase in taxation/borrowing/inflation that it must and will bring about. I stick by my view, however, that railing against pork is insufficient. The major issues are Medicare, Medicaid, defense and social security. Until conservatives offer clear alternatives to our current trajectory, alternatives that will indeed higher premiums or fewer healthcare services for middle class retirees, considerable deleveraging of our neo-empire, and unpopular trimming of social security or increases in the retirement age, the protest is theater, not politics.

The good thing about Ari Fleischer's op-ed, by the way, is its breaking the taboo on the necessity of taxes. Realistically, none of the cuts I favor will happen without some attempts to raise revenues as well. I favor a major 1986-style tax code simplification - with special aim at corporate tax shelters and the mortgage deduction - to improve the revenue side. Maybe these protests are a beginning for such a sane conservatism in future. But I fear that, as currently constituted, they perpetuate a kind of childish irresponsibility rather than an attempt to confront the fiscal crisis head-on. That's my issue with them.

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