some tea party thoughts

[veronica_rich]

Things that have occurred to me about the "tea party" protests going on across the U.S. today, random and possibly contradictory in nature:

1. A friend pointed out she didn't understand all the fun being made of the tea party protesters, since everyone has the right to an opinion. I don't understand it either. I mean, the GOP and Fox News (along with some mainstream media, at first) either made fun of, reviled, or refused to cover war protesters for several years. But that doesn't mean an answering wrong from the other side makes any of it right.

2. I DO, however, understand making fun of the self-labeled "teabagging" thing. Does nobody in the planning arm of the GOP have even a tenuous relationship with pop culture of the past two or three decades? Didn't somebody's kids hear the term and start sniggering? Do none of them watch "Sex and the City?"

3. I am puzzled by the tea party protesters who happened to be Bush supporters. So, they were OK with how their money has been spent on wars (vis-a-vis a great bulk going to contractors who have been shown to not have been doing a very good job, and very little going toward war gear the troops might actually need, i.e. body armor, tough boots, proper weapons, etc.) and giving the very rich tax breaks for taking their manufacturing and customer support overseas for the past eight years - but they're against putting money into our own economy in the form of less taxation on the lower and middle classes, and in venues where the money is supposed to be recycled back into spending in this country?

4. There's a deficit in the new proposed national budget. We've had one since after Clinton left office.

5. I'm not sure if the GOP-led protests are anti-Congress or anti-Obama, or a bit of both. I'm not even sure specifically what they're protesting. The original Boston Tea Party was done by people angry at "taxation without representation." They had no Congress, no president, and no Supreme Court. But we have all those things. And history books. And yet, we still managed to start two wars with money provided by a majority of taxpayers who were against spending to finance said wars. And Republicans have held majority power in Washington for more than 20 of the past 29 years. And the financial problems we have weren't created overnight. So again, I ask ... if these people were happily content with all this congealing at the same time over the past seven and a half years, why are they just now protesting?

6. The self-labeled "teabagging" label is hilarious. Trufax. ETA: For those of you not in the know but too embarrassed to ask, THIS is teabagging.

7. In completely unrelated pondering, is Norm Coleman going to become a "sore loser" like Al Gore and fight for an office he thinks was stolen from him all the way to the Supreme Court? Inquiring minds ...

Comments

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

This response is not political. It's not meant to be.

But I think this tea party stuff is meant to be political - which is why I brought up #3. Someone who's been to a war protest and today's tea party could, IMO, be consistently concerned about their tax dollars and govt. spending. My purely unscientific guess is that you will not find the same people at these tea parties as at the war protests.

From a purely fiscal POV, a lot of people saw Afghanistan and Iraq as an opportunity to profit the nation a la WWII. While I wouldn't necessarily expect anyone under the age of maybe 70 to understand why WWII helped better the U.S. economy, I do expect the 540+ elected people - not to mention their highly paid and educated advisors - running our country to KNOW it was for two major reasons which were not present in 2001 or 2003:

1. American manufacturers and farmers profited off of supplying other nations with clothing, machines, food, and weapons before 1941 - when we were not yet involved and throwing money at the war - and then from selling to their own government between 1941-45 for the same purposes. We came in toward the end (and got a major boon from Hitler being deterred by that good ol' Siberian winter) to do cleanup, which doesn't cost nearly as much as starting a war.

2. The Marshall Plan. People yelled then about all the credit we were "giving" overseas nations for reconstruction - until they realized the stipulation was that those countries had to spend that money with American suppliers. (I sort of see the current tax reduction and stimulus plan in that light; time will tell if I'm massively wrong. But at least it's not going into Cheney's, Bush's, and Rumsfeld's pockets through private contracting.)

Both of these were predicated on America having the capability to meet manufacturing needs. We had plants, tools, and personnel in 1935; now we just have an excess of potential personnel and defunct plants. My point is that THIS is the lie a lot of war supporters were resting upon, and why they've become so disillusioned and puzzled in the past three years by our going deeper into the hole and getting nothing for it.

(As for the moral aspect of the wars? At least in Iraq, our actions were based on lies. I'd love to be noble and stick around and help finish rebuilding what we tore apart, but unless someone can come up with a way to magically make all our manufacturing plants jump back into production, I don't see how we could possibly avoid sinking even more money into the effort with no return. And we have so many problems here at home we need to fix - we cannot break our own economy to fix somebody else's. (It's the same principle as fastening on your own oxygen mask in a plane that's lost pressure, before you help the child next to you do the same thing - if you're passed out or dead, you're not much help to them.)

So, yeah. If I thought all these people were consistent between presidents/parties in their protests, I'd look at them a lot less critically.