Tea Parties and Patriotism
The tea baggers are raising their flags and screaming about loving this country and saving it for their children; what about the last 8 years when the Rethugligans were running up a 10 trillion dollar deficit. Where were the demonstrations then.
Charles Richardson of the Macon Telephaph writes:
During the Ronald Reagan years our debt went from about $85 billion to $255 billion. Not a tea party in sight — as a matter of fact, Reagan is viewed by some as the greatest president of the 20th century.
When Bush 41 took the deficit up to $399 billion during his final year in office, he hailed it as a victory. The year before the deficit hit $432 billion. Still no tea parties.
The Clinton years saw the deficit morph into a $128 billion surplus. No tea parties. No dancing in the streets. No waving of signs and rejoicing that our children’s futures were secure. That’s a good thing because the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency that surplus turned into a $133 billion deficit. We hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Last September the deficit had ballooned to more than $10 trillion. In eight years, no tea parties; hardly a mumbling word until the bailouts began last September. No one complained that a lame duck president, who kept war spending off the books — just like Wall Street accountants fiddled with their derivative Ponzi schemes — had royally screwed up.
So here we are. Folks are upset. Why now? The answer is simple. The people twirling tea bags and making signs and creating a big fuss — inspired by talk radio mavens — are really mad because they lost the November elections — and they lost to Barack Obama.
They feel disenfranchised and abandoned by the Republican Party who they swore their allegiances to. Much of that anger should be redirected. After all they didn’t pitch a fit when they saw the Republican Party train wreck. They didn’t march down the street and wave signs when a Republican-controlled Congress and president broke the bank and threw the ideal of small government out the window. Their silence is one of the reasons the reins of government now sit in the hands of Democrats.
Unfortunately, for those who wish differently, the enthusiasm of the Tea Parties of ’09 will quickly fade. Did you see the crowds? What did they look like? They reminded me of the attendees at the Republican National Convention last year, where minorities made up a whopping 1.5 percent of the delegates. Don’t they get it? America no longer looks like that. If Republicans don’t figure out how to attract people to their message who are non-white, they are doomed to second-class political status and will be relegated to hosting tea party-like affairs that in the end mean nothing.
No one was screaming while the Republican Party put us in the financial crapper; so shut up and let someone intelligent who truly cares about “The People” fix this shitty mess.
As always, be well
CF
Ps: TEXAS, please secede and give the money back
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