Tea Party more powerful than we realised

Image: Lisa Benson 

Harry Reid has claimed that the Tea Party is a powerful group of anarchists who are driving the agenda in the United States for a number of years.

This seems to be at variance with previous statements by the Democrats, Republican establishment, and the media, all of whom have predicting the imminent demise, or serious loss of support for the movement.  Harry though, seems to think that not only do they drive the country but that they somehow manage to hide their ‘violent tendencies:’ 

… “We have a situation where this country has been driven by the Tea Party for the last number of years. When I was in school, I studied government, and I learned about the anarchists,” Reid said. “Now, they were different than the Tea Party because they were violent. But they were anarchists because they did not believe in government in any level and they acknowledged it. The Tea Party kind of hides that.”This week, speaking on “The Rusty Humphries Show,” Reid doubled down on his remarks.“I believe that, my experience with the Tea Party is that they are against government in any form. They throw monkey wrenches into the government,” he said. “It’s evident. We can’t get things done. They don’t want anything to happen in government. We pass laws. They fight funding the laws we pass. They don’t want government to work. I want it to work.”Meanwhile, Tea Party adherents and libertarian-leaning Republicans like Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas continue to gain supporters throughout the Nation who recognize them as something different from the two-Party status quo.Reid’s condemnation of the Tea Party, combined with recent criticisms of small-government junior legislators by the likes of Republican bureaucratic dinosaurs such as Senators John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), should do nothing but make Tea Party lawmakers more appealing to an American public that has been repeatedly screwed by the old guard of both major political parties.

That takes us here in Oz to the 70s where the libertarian Progress Party was formed on principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and social tolerance.  Back then; it was the policy of the Liberals and Nationals to accuse the opposition of being either communists or fellow travellers.

When we came on the scene, a new adjective had to be found to describe a party that believed that the government was too big, bloated, inefficient, interfering, and supported free market capitalism.  They couldn’t believe their luck when they began the tedious job of going through the dictionary, (No Google back then) and didn’t have to go past A.