Tea Partiers are the new terrorists, an American al Qaeda, homegrown and out for blood.
Sound extreme? Look at the facts.
They're fighting hard against raising the debt ceiling. Oh, they might go along with something, if it's destructive enough to the economy. But unless they get that concession--unless they get everything they want, despite the fact that they are a minority part of the majority party in only one house of Congress--they are, or so they say, perfectly willing to crater the American economy. They're ideologically driven fanatics, pursuing a course that leads to some post-apocalyptic wasteland in which they will, they imagine, be in control, and the millionaires and billionaires they've been coddling will look kindly on them from the high reaches of their fortified towers.
Except the millionaires and billionaires have money now, and they don't want to see it vanish in a few days. All the coddling the tea partiers have done, all the protecting of the wealthy from the slightest threat of a tax increase, of anything that might turn around the decades-long trend toward putting more in the pockets of those who already have the most, at the cost of everyone else, won't protect them from the fury of the rich if they succeed in destroying the economy.
Because that's what we're looking at. If we default, interest rates shoot up. Bond ratings are slashed. Billions of dollars disappear from the economy. The recovery, fragile as it is, reverses and then some--2008 will look like paradise from the depths to which we'll plummet.
And they don't care. The Tea-for-Terrorists don't care who's hurt, who's driven into bankruptcy, homelessness, or worse. They have an ideological agenda they don't want to give an inch on, and it's this: they want to strangle government. They want to make it impossible for government to spend. They hate government, and they always have.
Did you vote for them? You'll have another chance, in 2012, and I hope you use your vote wisely. Vote for people who are capable, people who want to govern, not people who want to dance on the grave of a great nation.
They've whipped the debt ceiling debate into a phony crisis. The debt ceiling is about paying the bills for funding that's already been appropriated. The tea partiers are like people who wait at the mailbox for the bills to come in, and then light those bills on fire. The responsible thing to do--what we as a nation have always done--is to raise the ceiling and pay the bills. THEN you have a discussion about deficits and debt and spending and taxes. You do it in a reasonable, responsible, mature way. You don't do it by tying together the issue of future spending with the issue of past spending--an artificial link--and then holding the entire country's economy hostage.
Under the Boehner bill, we might get to avoid the hostage crisis now--only to face it again in a few months. As it is, we have tea partiers who have proven time and again that they'd like to shut government down, they'd like to crush it, they'd like to kill the recovery. They claim--and this is nonsensical on its face--that companies aren't hiring because of uncertainty. Well, passing a temporary debt ceiling bill that just brings the issue back to the table in a few months causes more uncertainty than anything, and they're all for it. They claim that they're worried about deficits, but they were silent when the Bush administration boosted the deficits more than any other in our history (and instead, they blame Obama, who is the one guy seriously trying to do something about it).
Here's a fact they can't face: austerity doesn't create jobs. Tax cuts don't create jobs. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to do the research. Keynes was right--when nobody is spending, government has to. Once we have reasonably full employment again, the deficit problem essentially fixes itself. But to get there, we need government spending. Slashing it now is the worst thing to do. And it's all the Tea Party wants.
They love the rich. They want to make sure the rich get everything. Around the country, they're trying to prevent Americans from voting, to make it hard for anyone but the rich to go to college, to restrict the decisions a woman and her doctor can make about her own health, to make it impossible for people to organize in quest of better working conditions or higher pay. Meanwhile, real salaries in America are declining every year, but if you point that out, they cry "class warfare!"--as if the upper classes had not been practicing class warfare against the rest of us for decades, and very successfully.
It's a perverse vision of America they're fighting for, one I don't recognize. I see America as a land of opportunity, of responsibility and freedom and a long struggle toward equality. They hate all those things. They want to put themselves in charge of our future and deny anyone else the tools to stop them. And to do that, they'll crush the recovery in its tracks and send us sliding down the slope toward fiscal disaster.
I thought they were ill-informed and I doubted their intentions, but I didn't think they would intentionally seek the destruction of our financial futures to satisfy their own agenda. They are worse than I thought, and the sooner they're sent home, the better off we'll all be.
Just sayin'.
