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Why the tea parties don't matter
The "Tea Party" movement is a symbolic failure.
The original tea partiers engaged in criminal acts and risked arrest and imprisonment to destroy product from a company being propped up by unfair reduced taxes by the government, at the expense of what, at the time, amounted to "small business:" the domestic importers of tea who competed with the East India Company.
The current teabaggers are buying tea and throwing it around. That's it. When the DC teabag crew showed up with a truckload of tea bags (yes, I'm serious) to dump in Lafayette Square (because dumping in the Potomac is illegal, can't do that, after all) they were informed that they didn't have the correct permits to dump their load.
So they took it away. They're a bunch of pussies. "Civil disobedience" and "protest" are just words to them. They'll always cave in to authority rather than take a risk for their alleged principles. Samuel Adams would have dumped the tea right then and there.
If they wanted a real symbolic connection with the original Boston Tea Party they would be stealing Chrysler and GM cars and trucks from distribution centers and dumping them in the drink.
But they're not.
Pussies.
The original tea partiers engaged in criminal acts and risked arrest and imprisonment to destroy product from a company being propped up by unfair reduced taxes by the government, at the expense of what, at the time, amounted to "small business:" the domestic importers of tea who competed with the East India Company.
The current teabaggers are buying tea and throwing it around. That's it. When the DC teabag crew showed up with a truckload of tea bags (yes, I'm serious) to dump in Lafayette Square (because dumping in the Potomac is illegal, can't do that, after all) they were informed that they didn't have the correct permits to dump their load.
So they took it away. They're a bunch of pussies. "Civil disobedience" and "protest" are just words to them. They'll always cave in to authority rather than take a risk for their alleged principles. Samuel Adams would have dumped the tea right then and there.
If they wanted a real symbolic connection with the original Boston Tea Party they would be stealing Chrysler and GM cars and trucks from distribution centers and dumping them in the drink.
But they're not.
Pussies.
Re: Consistency Fetish
Well, that sounds like some highly rationalized waffling to me.
I have no problem with someone changing their views when faced with fact. I have no problem with a politician stating one thing and then, when the situation has changed, changing their policies in accordance with the new reality.
I do have a problem - a substantial problem - with politicians who state one thing in order to "play to their base" and gain political power only to turn right 'round and do 180 degrees the opposite.
That isn't Obama simply being "pragmatic" it is instead Obama lying through his teeth. A couple of times is one thing. Particularly for a guy with _zero_ executive experience and a political horizon no bigger than Cook County. But as frequently, as deeply, as widely, and as shamelessly as Obama has been doing it? No, that's not some naif becoming learned in the ways of the world. It's an oily lying hypocritical politician "doing it the Chicago way" writ large.
And it worries me deeply that this same glibly lying sleaze is putting those same "principles" to work with his economic policies.
Madoc