What do they stand for?
I've been talking about this pretty much since last summer. It's obvious what the tea party types are against, but as Steve Benen notes today, in the aftermath of the Beck's grand theft of MLK's dream rally, what they're for is still murky.
I occassionally ask the cons in my comment section myself. What liberties have they lost? What freedom do they need restored and so on. They never really answer, but it's pretty obvious to me what they want to freedom from tolerance, the liberty to dictate tax dollars don't assist anyone they consider unworthy and the imposition of their "Christian values" on the rest of us by dint of government mandate.
I don't really think of most of them are bad people, especially the elderly ones who have been frightened and manipulated into fighting against their own best interests. Yet, they are part of the problem and if we're to save civil society, sadly, these are the people we must battle.
[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]
I occassionally ask the cons in my comment section myself. What liberties have they lost? What freedom do they need restored and so on. They never really answer, but it's pretty obvious to me what they want to freedom from tolerance, the liberty to dictate tax dollars don't assist anyone they consider unworthy and the imposition of their "Christian values" on the rest of us by dint of government mandate.
I don't really think of most of them are bad people, especially the elderly ones who have been frightened and manipulated into fighting against their own best interests. Yet, they are part of the problem and if we're to save civil society, sadly, these are the people we must battle.
[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]
Labels: society
posted by Libby Spencer at 12:51 PM
12 Comments:
You ask what freedom needs to be restored. It is a long list, but let me make a brief start.
We need an end to the lies of political correctness, the practice of saying the very opposite of the truth. We need an end to "hate crimes" laws; there are no crimes committed out of love, so there is an element of hate in all crimes. The "hate crimes" laws simply make for unequal prosecutions.
We need the actual enforcement of the laws that are currently on the books, laws such as the immigration laws that the DoJ has publicly stated it will not enforce. The DoJ has no authority to select what laws it will enforce; it is charged with enforcing ALL of the laws. We need the removal of politics from the DoJ.
We need a much, much smaller government. Most government workers do little or nothing. I know this; I am a retired GS-13 from a government lab, and I know the immense waste the US government is. We could easily remove 3/4 of the US government (outside the military) and see no loss at all in useful services to the people of America.
We want less regulation so that small business can be free to innovate and generate jobs. The current regime is killing small businesses entirely. Things like the Cap & Tax legislation will be the end of American industry and will drive our living standard far down as well, all to no point.
We want tort reform to control our out of control litigation problem. It is very hard to get because most legislative bodies are made up of lawyers and heavily lobbied by trial lawyers. But this is what people urgently need for relief from predatory lawyers.
We want to be left to make our own choices about medical care, rather than forced into a massive government controlled system. There were problems that could have been fixed with far less draconian measures than what has been done. What we have is guaranteed to destroy American medicine and diminish health care for all (except for the elite).
The list goes on and on. We want less government so that individuals can be more free to make their own lives as they see fit. This used to be the American way until the ideas of socialism took root in the 1930s and thereafter.
n the aftermath of the Beck's grand theft of MLK's dream rally,
You didn't happen to actually ask MLK's niece if she was hijacking anything, did you? I mean, you know it for a fact, don't you? Absolutely positive, right?
Oh wait, she spoke there. Ohhhh.
Sooooo....
Did you know Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican?
Yeah......a little inconvenient tidbit for ya. But hey, good luck with your lightbringer. Hear he's on vacation again, lucky pup. I was going to take a vacation,
but......
damn the bad luck, lost my job.
Yeah....well good luck with the whole political wilderness thing. I'm sure there'll be a 7/11 around close by.
OK, gotta run...my health care premium went up again this month and I can't seem to get a bailout. See, I wasn't in a union and I wasn't a teacher.
Guess I'll sit down to a good hot cup of....... tea.
What do they stand for? How about reducing the budget back to 2007 levels instead of putting us $1 trillion plus in additional debt each year for the indefinite future?
Look, Obama seems like a decent fellow, but he's the typical over-educated elitist idiot who can't conceive that he could possibly be wrong. I mean, it's not like we spent almost $1 trillion on a stimulus bill that failed to live up to its proponents' claims (unemployment under 8%, etc.)... oh, wait. We did. And it didn't work. Now, Obama wants another stimulus. Can you say, "Stuck on stupid?"
And, don't blame this on "Bush's wars" either. The 2009 deficit alone was larger than all the money spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since 2001, and so is the 2010 deficit... and the 2011 proposed deficit.
Fixing our country's problems is simple, but not easy. It will require some harsh medicine, but if we keep on putting it off, the cure will only get harsher. We have to cut spending to a level that is lower than the current tax receipts. That means we're going to have to kill a lot of government programs, starting with ObamaCare. We're going to have to means-test Social Security. We need to look at all of the unsustainable entitlement programs that have been put in place since the 1960s and either make them budget-neutral, or get rid of them. We're going to have to shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It all comes down to shrinking government, and yes, it will hurt, but not as much as when the whole thing collapses in a few years, when other nations stop buying our T-bills.
I really believe that Obama's advisors thought the recession would take care of itself, and in the spirit of 'never letting a crisis go to waste' they passed a huge spending bill with a decade's worth of Democrat frustrations wrapped inside... and then the economy DIDN'T fix itself, and so now what? It's also clear now that Democrat politicians opposed to tax cuts really believed that there was no economic benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. So, now we're in an America after 18 months of our leaders ignoring reality, and going all-out, damn the torpedoes, full-tilt boogie on getting their agenda passed. And the people have woken up and they're scared, not because of Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, but because of Greece, and how that will be us in a few years if we don't change course.
Ordinary Americans get it, the ones who know that spending more than you make never gets you out of debt. Those who are calling for more spending, or who supported the first stimulus and are insisting it's worked, don't get it. The disconnect between the two is what is causing the unrest. You can call us stupid, but we see Asian banks choosing to go off the dollar, gold reaching new heights, our neighbors unemployed for more than a year now and there is no solution on the horizon. Obama is reduced to telling us to have patience and "It's working." BS it's working.
So, in a few months, we're going to give the keys back to the other party, and if they don't get it we'll fire them, too, and get a new bunch in.
Dr D, since you admit you were a useless gov worker, I'd suggest as an act of conscience and as a real American, you immediately give up your government pension and demand all former govt workers do too. That will reduce the deficit a lot.
As for the rest of your complaints, sadly, you all mostly believe misinformation that's easily disproved, for instance, more illegals have been deported under Obama than Bush, but I'm not going to spend time showing you proofs you'll refuse to accept.
Ans so what if King was once registered as a Republican. That era's racist Dixiecrats are today's racist GOPers. King certainly wouldn't be a GOPer today.
Libby, your response above is more illustrative of the gulf between those who attend Tea Party rallies and those who decry them than anything you've written in your post.
Why is it that you can't make a substantive argument, but instead resort to ad hominems? Or wander off topic?
Is it that you still don't understand what Tea Party supporters want to see, or is it that you don't want to understand it? Because maybe the Tea Party supporters have a point, and then you'd have to start questioning the "Democrat good/Republican bad" reflexive response?
How do you know MLK wouldn't be a Republican? Is J C Watts a racist? Bobby Jindahl? John McCain? Michael Steele? Clarence Thomas? The race card has been played so much over the past few years that it no longer works; instead it has become indicative of a refusal to address the issues by dismissing philosophical opponents as evil.
Could it be that maybe the people you claim to fail to understand really DO have a point, but you absolutely refuse to acknowledge it?
It's a damn shame that people keep posting anonymous comments because one can't know which one said what and when.
It's also a deliberate and rather tawdry tactic to dump a list of claims too long to address ( there's a name for the technique, but I can't remember it) in an attempt to make your opponent stutter with frustration. It's quite possible to befuddle an Einstein with this technique, you know, but he'll only seem confused to a far lesser mathematician and that's what your seem to be trying here. It isn't working and just comes across like someone trying to impress me with his rented Ferrari.
Political correctness? That's your invention and its the hollow crown you wear while trying to dictate how others should think and talk. If you think this childish nonsense has currency here, you can take your side show elsewhere. It's insulting.
Yes, sure, government is wasteful, but our problems simply don't stem from the kind of waste you decry, but from the malignant persistence of certain policies that have a history of producing recessions quite regularly. Sure, if we're going to return to some past utopia, why not the Eisenhower administration, with its steady growth and 90% top brackets and a balanced budget and a president who knew how to say no to the Pentagon?
If one would refrain however from making claims about ad hominem arguments while calling the president and other people who may have more than your folkloric grasp of reality idiots, you might get some basic respect. Is there anything more obnoxiously elitist than your posturing here?
All your credos have, in great detail, been well dealt with by people you don't read or listen to. Yes, sure, it's easier to call them elitists and to dignify your crusade as being more than a peasant uprising directed by feudal lords, but that's just what I think it is.
The same goes for that mawkish "race card" cliche' which of course smells the worse for all the accusations that Obama is a racist and people who support him are racists. I think the "he who smelt it" principle applies here.
If the majority's prima facae reaction to the tea party phenomenon is of stunned disbelief and abject despair for the future, it's precisely this sort of thing, and the bold assertions that you're not doing what you are doing while feathers of denial still stick to your lips, that makes people think it's just egoistic delusion.
It's fine with me if you think the US was prosperous and a great place to live before those "socialist" things came about, but I think you're monumentally wrong. It's fine with me if you carp egotistically about all sorts of things but forget the the most wasteful sector of our government: the military and department of Homeland Security. You forget the largest part of our debt is the 8 trillion shortfall caused by the Bush tax cuts.
To make this short, none of your claims really are worth reading without some accurate comparative documentation, which you don't give and which might just make clear that you are distracting us with your own politically correct minutia.
A point to the teabaggers? sure they have one, but it's full of so many things that can be shown nugatory or distorted or simply invalid that there's no point in refuting them one by one and I can't find my rubber gloves anyway.
Fogg, brilliant response as always.
The one thing I've been meaning to address is the claim that criticizing Beck's little egofest is playing the race card. Only people I see trying to connect to skin color are the TPs. It doesn't matter what color Beck is or MLK was, they stand for completely different visions of society and it's just obsence that Beck is trying to co-opt MLK's legacy to promote his own self-interests.
@Fogg, I'm the same commenter that has posted twice before.
I have to wonder if you even read what I wrote, because your response surely didn't address any of the points I made. However, I will do you the courtesy of addressing one of the points you made.
You claim that Bush added $8 trillion to the national debt. Actually, the figure is just under $5 trillion added during his two terms, including the FY2008 and FY2009 budgets which Bush didn't sign! I would also point out that despite the recession that was underway before Bush took office and that was exacerbated by the 9-11 attacks, Bush and the Republican Congress had turned the corner on spending and were on the way to a balanced budget... until FY2008, the first budget set by the Democrats after their 2006 takeover of Congress (the outgoing Congress set the budget for FY2007). Note also that Bush didn't sign the FY2009 budget (he did sign some of the continuing resolutions that funded FY08 so he does bear some responsibility here); the Dems postponed action on the budget until after Obama took office to avoid Bush's veto threat. So, the Dems own the federal budget since FY2007 onward, inclusive. So, how do the deficits under Obama compare to Bush? Here's a link for a quick look... it's the OMB report as charted by the Heritage Foundation. Let's take a look....
Hmmm... looks like Obama's actual deficits for '09 thru '11 will be about equal to all of the debt added by Bush during his 8 years.
Can you actually look at that graph and say that Obama and the Dems are more fiscally responsible than Bush and the GOP? Can you look at that graph and understand why the same people who were pissed at the GOP for spending too much are absolutely furious with the Democrats? Can you see why they might honestly be concerned about the future of the country?
Ah, yes, The Heritage Foundation which "Promotes Conservative Policies and Principles by marrying the best in policy research with the day's current events" or in other words they select and filter the news through doctrine with a stated goal other than objectivity. Quite a marriage, that.
Projections are projections and perhaps they reflect that goal as well. It's true that Obama has lost some supporters who object to the spending although some of that spending could also be called investment, depending on your prejudice. Was this, however the result of an attempt to repair the damage done by "conservative" policies of borrowing, making war and excusing the elite class of responsibility for paying for what they supported? Ok, only a 5 trillion shortfall. It was supposed to be a windfall, wasn't it? So do you suppose maybe there was some flaw in the reasoning? Do you suppose those who bankroll the Right made some trillions from that flaw?
Is it sort of like blaming the fire department for getting water all over your floor trying to put out the fire you set yourself?
Perhaps, but since I can't forget that I was called all sorts of names by smug conservatives for predicting ruin back when only "Libs" were saying we were on a dangerous path and Conservatives were claiming a wild success of trickle down theory -- I can't agree and I can't get too excited about your predictions of ruin when considering the source.
I'm sorry, you can't assert, like Cheney and nearly every Republican in the last 30 years, that debt doesn't matter and then complain that it does. You can't run the country into the ditch and complain about the cost of getting it out - not if you want people to take you seriously.
Libby -
I'm not sure how you can claim to know that Dr King wouldn't be a GOPer today.
I'm not sure Dr. King would support either party directly but would advocate for people to be involved, help each other, educate themselves and make their opinion/presence known.
But I will not claim to know or guess what Dr King would do today. It would have been something to watch and listen to though!
Capt Fogg -
People need to post as anonymous or Libby might not respond to posts on her own blog items. I have watched her on the Detnew.com blog. I wanted to post there but she doesn't respond when people make some valid points or if she does, it is personal attacks just like both you and her did in this thread.
I can only assume that both of you are passionate about your beliefs but that passionate only seems to show as pure contempt for people that disagree or even question your position.
That is unforunate as good thoughtful disagreements and true debates are hard to come by anymore. Guess I'll be off to another site to try and find that.
But thanks for the entertainment!
If that was an attempt to save face, it didn't work and sorry, nobody is required to be nice to an obvious troll.
You didn't disagree, you insulted. You didn't question in any fashion resembling the way a sincere and objective and informed person does and if you think you've had the last word -- you haven't.
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