Not two weeks into the Tea Party Era in Washington and we already know the basic tenets of the TP are untenable, or at least unsellable in practice.
For instance--Jim DeMint, Tea Party's own pre-elected Senator from the South, has already said the debt ceiling shall be raised (even though the Tea Party insists it cannot be, or else they will sweat blood until we are drowned in it); and Rand Paul, that intemperate enemy of Pork, has realized that his own district might like a taste of bacon now and then, and that this in fact is what gets folks re-elected more than anything else; so he's going to get some earmarks for his hometown crowd, lo and behold. Finally, when confronted on television (by Chris Matthews) on what exactly would be cut from the budget, a lame-looking TP spokesperson said "discretionary spending" which meant nothing of course, and promptly exempted the military, social security, medicare and pretty much everything that costs all the money.
One can almost feel sorry for these electees, now they are stuck with the promises they made. The trouble is not that "across the board cuts" are a bad idea.
The trouble is that Americans won't tolerate cutting any real spending. And they also won't tolerate taxation.
It is the American people who have made themselves ungovernable. Mainly this is through an almost exquisite flavor of economic hipocrisy comprised of the belief that we are a nation of self-reliant pioneers in need of unfettered "freedom"; while in fact we are a nation of slack, subsidized, overprotected, aggressively militant, pie-hole-stuffing crybabies who want what we want when we want it and who collectively stop our ears with our fingers when anyone talks about the real sacrifice needed to achieve this so-called "independent spirit" none of us really want (except to bray about it in town halls).
The states that get the most subsidy from the Feds crow loudest about taxes. This is because, since they are small in population and relatively uneducated in general, they have become cheap, easy pickings for spindoctors employed by the cynical megawealthy who court these simple voters with utterly false notions that there is solidarity between the no-tax desires of the billionaire and the food-on-the-table needs of the slogger and his wife and kids and pickup truck and dog and ATV and rifle(s).
We are in this mess, at least partly, because since the days of the Reagan Administration, intelligence itself has been attacked as somehow a betrayal of American values; therefore it is more American to be dumb. And how well this has worked for the wealthy elite! They have created a polity so easily manipulated they can actually win time after time in elections against candidates who might benefit someone besides the no-tax megawealthy.
Tea Party--go ahead and try to govern. You will soon find that we are where we are because the wealthiest manipulators want us here: jobs being performed overseas at a tenth of the pay (boosting profit quite magnificently); giant military to protect the interests of the wealthy everywhere; no costly safety net for the wretched and the screwed in this country; and enough existing subsidy for homeowners and corporations so that not one small thing gets changed in a land too big to fail. Oh and the other thing--the government just keeps borrowing from China to make it all go-round. And when it collapses, the megawealthy will have their gates and their military and their foreign accounts and la-de-da.
Let me finish, however, with optimism. In the end, we always seem to pull a trick out of the hat. We come up with something nobody's ever heard of before and that everybody wants. It's happened many times in our nation's history. The good, smart and driven people here, despite all, will probably make it happen again.
But it won't be thanks to the Tea Party.
