I was reading some of the comments posted on the News Times web site in response to their story on the Ridgefield, CT tea party. This comment from “poo poo the self pitiers” in particular caught my eye:
GOP hypocrites. Unbelievable gall. Now all of a sudden, the party that brought you the endless money pit that was and is the pointless Iraq and Afghan wars, at a cost of already over 2 trillion dollars during the past 8 years, now wants us to be financially conservative when it comes to helping out Americans?! Where was your self-righteous indignation when the GOP Congress year-after-year rubber stamped every foreign policy boondoggle during the last administration? Where was your ‘question everything’ attitude when banks were reporting billions of dollars in quarterly profits? How come you never stopped to ask the tough questions then? Because you were too busy reading your own financial statements to be worried about the greater-good that’s why.
No, I do not support your tea party. I do not support your questioning of the government. All I see is a vindictive motivation of a GOP completely out of fresh ideas and unable to look in the mirror and face the truth about their own past.
First you’re confusing the Republican Party with grassroots conservatives; they are not one in the same… George W. Bush may have been a lot of things but he was not a conservative, in fact one of the reasons his approval numbers were so low was that he had lost the support of grassroots conservatives.
Second a great many of us did question the Bush Administrations handling and even the necessity of the war in Iraq.
Third the mortgage mess didn’t start with the Bush Administration it is the result of policy and regulatory decisions made over the last 30 or so years starting with the Community Reinvestment Act. Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, Wall Street and at least 3 presidents are all complicit in creating this mess.
Finally the tea party movement isn’t about Democrats or Republicans, or liberals or conservatives. It’s about commonsense, it about restoring responsibility and accountability to a government that, with rare exceptions, looks on we the people as either wards of the state or a revenue stream. The tea party movement is about the restoring the type of fiscal responsibility and limited government envisioned by the framers.