Actually, I think the Tea Party movement has been taken over by Republican political operatives. You know things are crazy when Ron Paul — the person who held the first modern “tea party” and more than any politician represents the ideals of small government and fiscal responsibility — has three “tea party” candidates running against him in the Republican primary.
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I think some of the tea partiers are sincere conservatives who want government spending changes, but are blind to the fact that their precious Republican presidents (Reagan, Bush and Bush) are as much to blame for runaway deficit spending as any Democrat; some are racist Obama-haters; some are non-racist Obama haters; some are low-IQ Rushites; and most are Fox News disciples who never bother to question that network’s hosts or the Obama-bashing chain emails.
And some of them just want to make money from the other idiots. The owner of “Tea Party Nation, Inc.” and organizer of the Tea Party conference is quoted here as saying “I want to make a million from this movement.”
There’s very little that’s not ironic about candidates identifying themselves as Tea Partiers running against Ron Paul. The same Ron Paul who’s essentially the most consistently fiscally Conservative politician in all of Washington. I suppose his speaking out against the Tea Party movement has something to do with it. Even if he doesn’t seem to like the Tea Party in its current incarnation very much, you’d at least think they’d want him office, since he’s pretty much is the embodiment of everything they claim to want in a politician.
http://rawstory.com/2010/02/paul-cautions-neocon-influence-infiltrating-tea-parties/ – Story from the same website.
Libertarians have been doing the tea party thing for years (before it became trendy, even) and honestly I wonder if the modern tea partyers choose that as their theme to try and borrow some credibility from the libertarian Party for their movement. Libertarians, however, they most certainly aren’t. They might make a big fuss about taxes, but when they oppose health insurance reform but support medicare, those neocon roots come showing through mighty clearly.