IS THE "TEA PARTY" REALLY A POPULIST MOVEMENT?

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

You appear to very complacently accept the notion that these self-interested professional legislators know what's best for us all.

Are you so naive as to suggest that this does not describe Republican politicians? Or is it matter of believing that we are that stupid?

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Quote:

If by adults you mean the likes of Pelosi, Reid, the corrupt luminaries of the "Black Caucus" and the assorted authors of health care and financial reform bills replete with unforseen omissions and very bad side effects passed with the sleaziest of payoffs and side deals to other Democrat luminaries, then I do indeed believe we can do better - and the evidence suggests that many others feel that way as well.

Not withstanding the fact that your screed has only a small resemblance to the truth - the current congress isn't a tenth as corrupt as when the Republicans ran the place, and you know it - the point is that these people who think we can 'do better' have no idea what 'better is. And they aren't selecting candidates who do either.

So, yes - nobody gives a **** about your partisan carping when the alternative is no plan at all. There is no replacement plan. So why should anyone take someone with no plan (and plenty of crazy and stupid statements) seriously?

Cycloptichorn

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:
You appear to very complacently accept the notion that these self-interested professional legislators know what's best for us all.

Are you so naive as to suggest that this does not describe Republican politicians? Or is it matter of believing that we are that stupid?

He pretends there is a difference between the Republican party and this new 'Tea party,' when it is plainly obvious that there is not. That's the whole point of the Tea Party: it allows Republicans to forward extreme versions of their ideology while simultaneously washing their hands of responsibilities for the failures of that ideology and their party in the past.

Cycloptichorn

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That explains a lot. Out of my native charitable character, i'm just going to assume that he is naïve.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

You appear to very complacently accept the notion that these self-interested professional legislators know what's best for us all. Many don't see it that way.

So does that mean you won't vote for anyone that belongs to a party? Or does it mean you think your self-interested professional legislators know what's best for us?

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I think this describes the problem nicely. The majority of Americans want "change", but they differ on what that should mean. The "tea party" folks have numerous factions who define what they want in different terms -- some of them at odds with others. Sarah Palin? "Yes!", say some. "Hell, no!", say others.

Quote:

From NBC's Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Ali Weinberg
*** What change do voters want? With our new NBC/WSJ poll showing that 59% think the country is on the wrong track, that 65% believe the economy will either get worse or stay the same in the next 12 months, and that a whopping 73% disapprove of Congress, it’s clear that voters still want change. But what kind of change? The most acceptable outcomes: reducing influence of special interests (70% acceptable), electing political outsiders (69%), Republicans taking over the majority in Congress (52%), Democrats continuing to hold the majority (51%), and repealing the health-care law (51%).

*** What change do voters NOT want? And here are the most unacceptable outcomes: Palin becoming the GOP’s leading spokesperson (55% unacceptable), Pelosi continuing as speaker (51%), the Democrats continuing to hold the majority in Congress (42%), and the Tea Party becoming a major force in Congress (41%). If some of these results seem somewhat contradictory, well, they are.... More

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@JPB,

Quote:

73% disapprove of Congress

I wanna know what the other 27% are smokin'.

1 Reply

As Mark Twain said: "Suppose I were a member of Congress; suppose I were an idiot--but then, I repeat myself."

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@Irishk,

Irishk wrote:

Quote:
73% disapprove of Congress

I wanna know what the other 27% are smokin'.

I don't disapprove of Congress. I do wish they would change some of the rules to make it a little more effective in the Senate.

But then again I spend 10 hours a week studying this stuff. I can see what the problems are, and it isn't that the people who are in the place are incompetent... it's that there aren't easy answers for the issues we face today, and both parties are so polarized right now it's hard to get anything done.

Cycloptichorn

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@JPB,

Another snippet from that link...

Quote:

*** Making sense of the Tea Party: The poll also gives us a better idea of the Tea Party, with 27% saying they support the movement. These folks, it turns out, are more conservative and bigger watchers of FOX News than your typical Republican. Per McInturff, Tea Party members are simply re-branded conservative GOP primary voters -- not something completely new. “These are conservative Republicans who watch FOX, and who are very ticked off,” he said.

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

I don't disapprove of Congress either. I think as a concept Congress can do great things. I do disapprove of political parties. Oh... this Congress? I disapprove of anyone who is a party loyalist and is more concerned with playing the gotcha games they play and his/her own reelection than making unpopular decisions. That would be just about all of them.

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@Cycloptichorn,

I'm a little more cynical--i'd say only freshmen truly want to get something done for their constituents, and that fervor doesn't last long. The rest are only interested in getting things done for the special interests which support them, and appearing to the public to be hardworking and to share the same "values" as that public. What they want is to get re-elected, and to conitnue to ride the gravy train.

The Senate's procedural rules (which they are constitutional empowered to write themselves) are written to benefit the party in power--so nobody wants to change them, because the party out of power always hopes to take over some day, and they want those advantags for themselves when they do.

In the House, those hypocrites say that when a member of the House gets elected to the Senate, the intelligence of both bodies rises.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

I generally agree. The Senate rules also serve to make the legislative process take longer and be more uncertain in outcome. In a narrow sense this can be thought of as making government less efficient. However, more broadly that itself can be a public good. There are many problems out there that government can't really solve without doing serious harm in other areas of our lives. Indeed I believe that, for many, the desire for less government and less government intrusion into our lives and economy is one of the key motivations behind the tea party phenomenon. Arguably it is the preference of "progressives" for government designed and mandated "solutions" to problems that distinguishes them from others.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

I don't see how that distinguishes them from anyone else. "Progressives" (as you prefer) want welfare for poor people; the Cheney administration, as was the case with the Reagan/Bush administrations before it, wanted welfare for corporations, especially defense industries and corporations with which the members of those administrations had been associated. Name your poison.

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@JPB,

JPB wrote:

Another snippet from that link...

Quote:
*** Making sense of the Tea Party: The poll also gives us a better idea of the Tea Party, with 27% saying they support the movement. These folks, it turns out, are more conservative and bigger watchers of FOX News than your typical Republican. Per McInturff, Tea Party members are simply re-branded conservative GOP primary voters -- not something completely new. “These are conservative Republicans who watch FOX, and who are very ticked off,” he said.

Yep. That's my theory too. It's the wacko fringe extremists that the Republican party has always paid lip service to and tried to keep in the background so as to have any chance at all of getting elected. I guess all those years of being fucked over by the Republicans has really pissed them off. So what do they do? Like George W. Bush with Iraq, they go after someone who has nothing to do with the people who actually fucked them over.

The tea party is the idiot fringe of the Republican party, unbound. Actually, that's not totally true. That's what they started out as. The racists, the religious nuts, the libertarian literalists...they were all mad as hell about Obama being elected, and voicing it loudly, looking like exactly the assholes that they are.

Now they've been co-opted by corporate scum and are showing less and less of their radical side, but make no mistake; at their core, most of them are just a bunch of angry stupid extremists.

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I like the last line of your post (before you edited it) so much, i grabbed it for my sig line. Nyah nyah . . .

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Cool!

1 Reply

@kickycan,

I have a couple question for any tea party people here.

1. A lot of you seem very pissed off at our current president. What specific things, not including things that were done to stave off another depression, have they done that's got you so pissed off?

2. I hear alot of you attacking the mainstream media. Isn't Fox News a mainstream media outlet? I mean, they're the most trusted name in news, aren't they? So tell me, what do you mean by "mainstream media"?

1 Reply

@kickycan,

Quote:

2. I hear alot of you attacking the mainstream media. Isn't Fox News a mainstream media outlet? I mean, they're the most trusted name in news, aren't they? So tell me, what do you mean by "mainstream media"?

I am not a teapartyer but I will take this one...Mainstream media is ANY corporate owned and controlled media, to include Fox. The Tea Party relies on the internet, mostly Blogs and email push, for much of its news. There has been a couple of studies on what the tea party crowd is using, but I dont know where they are on the net off hand.

The Tea Party runs off the grid, and it runs by people linking to other people with out any top down organization, which is why it is difficult to either attack it, control it, or monitor it.

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@hawkeye10,

ohhhhhh.... like double-secret handshake stuff, eh?

Why am I not surprised?

1 Reply

IS THE "TEA PARTY" REALLY A POPULIST MOVEMENT?

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