Tea Party Express off track

Last Saturday, Sept. 12, the “movement” known as the Tea Party Express steamrolled into our nation’s capital to protest out of control spending, bailouts, higher taxes and the growth in the size of government as it is now or how they feel that it is headed in the future. According to the group’s Website, teapartyexpress.org, it plans to “take our country back.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with expressing the way you feel, but let’s be serious here. Take our country back from what? Last time I checked, our country is a lot better off than it was just a year ago. This time last year, Lehman Brothers had collapsed, credit was completely frozen and the economy was in a free fall with no end in sight.

These demonstrations aren’t new though. These protests began back in the beginning of the year during the heated debate over economic stimulus legislation. Naysayers proclaimed that “wasteful” government spending was in the bill and that “enough was enough.”

I don’t agree with everything that the government has done with trying to save the economy with regards to the stimulus and other initiatives but I ask this, what exactly would these protesters have done? It was a situation where we had to pick the lesser of two evils. Do absolutely nothing, or implement some type of plan to try to save the dying economy. The stimulus package isn’t perfect, and even some Democrats admit that. No bill is 100 percent perfect. But ask those teachers, firefighters and policemen all across the country, whose jobs were saved because of this bill. Something had to be done to try to save this economy.

Now the Tea Party Express, backed by the conservative Political Action Committee “Our Country Deserves Better,” has returned to protest about health care reform and trying to give the country this delusional image that these angry mobs are the the way the country is feeling about the reforms currently being discussed in Congress. Again, I say, there is nothing wrong with expressing your feelings, but when you are passing out signs saying things like “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy,” you are already giving the notion that you do not intend to have any serious conversation about fixing health care. That type of rhetoric is tasteless and deplorable, and any organization cosigning on something like that should be ashamed of itself. The Democrats did the same thing during the George W. Bush years calling him every name under the sun. Where did it get us? Nowhere.

To give some conservatives credit, there are those who really do want a healthy conversation about the costs of health care reform such as Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Sen. John Barasso, R-Wyo. During the August recess of Congress, they had twice-weekly webcasts to answer questions from the public via Facebook, e-mail, Twitter and “man-on-the-street” videos. This type of discussion is what we need. Not irrational riots.

But conservative “movements” like the Tea Party Express always seem to have a selective memory with these types of situations. Let us remember where all this big government spending started from and under what administration it began. That $700 billion bailout was not under the Obama administration, but under the Bush administration. Where were their protests and rallies then? Nowhere. Because while there might be some in the ranks that are legitimately concerned about the increasing size of our government, it’s really not about government spending, its about political tactics and maneuvers. Just like the manufactured chaos at the town hall meetings this summer, most of them are nothing more than orchestrated noise makers creating senseless uproar with no civil debate.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 18 2009. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry