I attended the April 15th 'tea parties'. I also attended the July 4th tea party in my town. Even then, I couldn't help feeling that they had been hijacked- slowly, carefully, but quite effectively.
They have been hijacked by the Republican party.
Lest we all forget, the tea parties began because of Bush and his bailouts. They were not all about Bush; the issues were as varied as the people who attended. And it is not now just about Obama.
But it seems like that is what most of it has become now. Sarah Palin is going to be the keynote speaker at the 'Tea Party Convention'. That in itself shows that people are no longer getting the point of the tea parties- they are against the intrusions of both sides, not just Obama or the Democrat party.
So, this is just a short rant about it. ^.^ Excuse my lack of lucidity- it's rather late. :P
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4 comments:
I'm not entirely convinced that they've been hijacked. I think they are simply gaining more support. As for Sarah Palin, I think that while she's still a republican, she's much more different than any other republican, and is more in line with the tea party movement than many people want to admit.
The parties are gaining support from Republicans whose main purpose is to bash Obama. They, in turn, are alienating the Democrats and Libertarians that originally subscribed to the movement. Not good.
Yes, Sarah Palin isn't the same as other Republicans- that's why she's endorsing Rick Perry for Texas governor. SUch a fine, upstanding, amazing, freedom-loving individual, Rick Perry...
Palin doesn't have any core ideological beliefs. End of story. How we can evaluate her ideas and practices as governor of Alaska and VP candidate and somehow correlate them into the Tea Party narrative is a ridiculous intellectual exercise. She is a "populist", which yes, much of the Tea Party narrative is about populism (which incidentally is why it is both a huge success and eventually a monumental failure, because it lacks a coherent ideological stance on anything at all. It has become a massive group therapy session rather than a movement with serious political goals).
However, "populist leader" is a huge oxymoron. She is ultimately about manipulation to achieve power for herself, same as the people the populists and Tea Partiers oppose. I respect more the people who exercise that power openly than the ones who ride a wave of intense feeling in order to do whatever the hell they wanted to do (rather than whatever it was the wave of intense feeling was built on) because such snakes as that can be opposed openly and freely on their goals and issues. Palin, by contrast, doesn't have goals and issues that are easily defined. It's entirely a rhetorical logic used to define her as a "conservative" or as a "tea partier" and that logic totally ignores what she actually did while in power in Alaska (ie, her oil program for Alaskans that she was so proud of was precisely the form of socialism that she was decrying Obama for trying to do). No reasonable intellectual exercise should come away with the idea that she should be taken seriously as a political ideologue or as anything other than a celebrity figurehead who will distract a political movement from forming and framing issues in a meaningful and instructive way.
Good point Sun Tzu.
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