As parents know the cornerstone of values is taking responsibility for one's actions. To deny responsibility for one's wrong doing makes the claim to have values hollow and meaningless, The tea partiers
All of this said, there is still a contingent of tea partiers who are doing their part to ensure the movement is not taken seriously. Before the rally, a group of singers was belting out a health care themed rendition of "The 12 Days of Christmas." The last verse went:They must be drinking something besides tea if they're a grass roots movement, Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests
"On the 10th day of Christmas, Obama gave to me:/ High unemployment,/ No end to earmarks,/ Mandating health care,/ Czars with power,/ Bankruptcy looming,/ No Transpaaaaareeeencyyyy,/ Fed printing dollars,/ Big bailouts,/ Welfare for all,/ And the loss of liberty."
"This is gonna be on Glenn Beck!" the organizer, Steve Haimbaugh, promised. The usual silly posters were there, too, including one that labeled the Democratic plan "Gulag Care." And FreedomWorks founder Dick Armey did little to diminish the movement's reputation by referring to cable-TV host Rachel "Maddox."
The movement must also contend with a lack of focus. Tea partiers are generally for small government, against taxes, and pro-"freedom." But they have nothing resembling a platform, and their popular image has been more about opposing Obama than advocating realistic alternatives.
Most of these people were Bush supporters and certainly voted the conservative ticket in the last six elections. The economy sucks, the environment in peril, health care costs are sky rocketing - have the tea partiers been in a coma for eight years or are they in a deep state of denial about being enablers of the policies that got us where we are,
Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.Conservatives continue to lack real values and an appreciation of the historical role of progressive policy that created a middle-class in the U.S. They really should call themselves the Morally Repugnant Party that is running on a platform of ignorance and bizarre urban myths.
Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.
In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
