The Tea Party Disconnect

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The Tea Party Disconnect
by Philip Giraldi, October 28, 2010
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Some have expressed hopes that the tea partiers, many of whom grew out of the Ron Paul movement, will bring about a shift away from American imperialism through their demands for smaller, cheaper, less intrusive, and more accountable government. But it ain’t necessarily so. The tea partiers generally fail to understand that the indispensable element in the explosive growth of big government over the past ten years has been Washington’s failure to craft a foreign and security policy that is commensurate with the nation’s resources and proportional to the actual level of threat that exists in the world. This results in the tea partiers overwhelmingly supporting an aggressive security policy even though they must know that leaving the Pentagon budget untouched and untouchable guarantees deficit spending and continued growth of the parts of government that are allegedly committed to “keeping us free.”

The Republican Party has clearly understood that tea partiers are more-or-less fallen away Republicans based on their dislike of government coupled with unthinking chauvinism and are currently crafting their message to entice them back into the fold prior to November 2 nd. It is amusing to watch John Boehner with a straight face decry government growth and deficits when it was George W. Bush, aided and abetted by the selfsame Republican Party, who started down that road. Boehner is careful not to mention the two wars started by Bush that the nation continues to be embroiled in, nor is he interested in the oceans of red ink that global conflict inevitably produces. Discussion of foreign policy and war has been a no-no for both parties in the congressional elections campaign since both are complicit, and from the tea parties one hears nothing about Washington’s unbridled foreign interventionism. What America does overseas is a matter of little concern to most Americans as long as taxes do not rise to pay for it and one’s children are not drafted to hump a rifle through the Khyber Pass.

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http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/10/27/the-tea-party-disconnect/