Frank Rich: The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party

[babylonsister]

The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 30, 2010


ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.

What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.

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What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.

Perhaps the campaign’s most telling exchange took place on Fox News two weeks ago, when the Tea Party-embracing Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, was asked seven times by Chris Wallace to name “one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” in order “to extend all the Bush tax cuts, which would add 4 trillion to the deficit.” She never did. At least Angle and Paul have been honest about what they’d slash if in power — respectively Social Security and defense, where the big government spending actually resides.

That’s not happening either. McConnell has explained his only real priority for the new Congress with admirable candor. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Any assault on Social Security would defeat that goal, and a serious shake-up of the Pentagon budget would alienate the neoconservative ideologues and military contractors who are far more important to the G.O.P. establishment than the “don’t tread on me” crowd.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31rich.html?_r=1&hp

[flpoljunkie]

1. Tea party co-opted by corporate shill GOP. It's going to be ugly if they take the House.

[Recursion]

2. I think people fundamentally don't get earmarks

Earmarks do not add one cent to Federal spending; they're the Congresscritters' way of telling the executive how the appropriated money should be spent. Now, of course there's cronyism and nepotism and all other sorts of shenanigans involved in there, but I think actually ending the practice entirely would be a bad idea and put too much power in the hands of agency and department heads.

[Faygo Kid]

3. He nails it, absolutely nails it - again.

The Tea Partiers are a bunch of boobs, dittoheads who have put a billion dollars into Rush Limbaugh's pockets.

Beck will disappear when he has outlived his usefulness to the Koch brothers. But for now, they are loving it.