TO CORRECT MY LIBERAL FRIENDS: You may have noted that a number of my liberal friends enjoy bashing the Tea Party, and try to shift every criticism of the President to an argument about the Tea Party. Yet their comments reveal a huge lack of understanding about what the Tea Party stands for. Here are just a couple of examples: 1. War My liberal friends think that a Tea Party Repúblican is like any other Repúblican, but more extreme. One of the áreas in which their ignorance has been most evident on my wall is war. The Tea Party grew out of Ron Pauls 2008 Presidential campaign. Ron Paul (and his son Senator Rand Paul) opposed the Iraq War and have generally been for a much less militaristic foreign policy, even than that advocated by President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Tea Partiers in general demand that the President ask Congress for a Declaration of War before committing troops and want to do use war much more sparingly than traditional Republicans or Democrats. Yet Ive heard my liberal friends bash Rand Paul on defense issues as if he was a neocon like Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz. This may be the most obvious example. 2. The Tea Party wants to revive Fascism Again, this idea comes from the perception that a Tea Partier is just a Republican who takes a harder line. The Tea Party is fundamentally libertarian. Senator Rand Paul has concerned himself a lot with things like the NSA spying on our own people--and that is consistent with a principled libertarian approach, which always views government power with an eye of suspicion. I shoukd say this next part carefully. But a lot of Tea Partiers subscribe to a variety of conspiracy theories and FEAR a revival of Fascism or something like it. As a result, they are proponents of decentralization, states rights, and they have a robust view of privacy under the 4th Amendment. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not identify myself with the Tea Party, though I have some libertarian sympathies. But, if youre going to talk about the Tea Party movement, you might want to avoid making such obvious mistakes about what it is.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:34:01 +0000
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