“The Tea Party does not have a coherent view of liberty”

Back in 2007, Ron Paul supporters organized a tax protest “tea party” that immediately picked up momentum among libertarians. The demonstrations were geared around small government, sound money, humble foreign policy and individual liberty.

I began to notice some time in 2009 that neo-conservative constituencies were trickling into the tea-party. I didn’t think much of it in a negative light at all. Because I assumed that the entire world took it as a given that the neo-cons ruined America in so many ways during the presidency of George W. Bush, I figured that these individuals who were now claiming allegiance to the Ron Paul movement were simple reevaluating their principles and realizing how wrong they were. I thought it was great that these people were understanding how foolish they had been and were returning to the true Republican roots of small government and liberty. I naively assumed that their ranks in the liberty movement represented an apology for their unyielding support all those years for lies, theft, corruption, monetary inflation, bloated government, attacking of sovereign nations, the trampling on liberty and all the rest that made the Bush presidency the most disastrous eight years in America’s history. I was, more or less, willing to accept this implicit apology.

It didn’t take long for me to see that this was all a farce, and an implicit apology is no longer enough, although I won’t be holding my breath for that apology as America is made up of some seriously hypocritical dumbasses.

I suppose the realization started with the infiltration of the Ron Paul movement by the neo-conservative leadership personalities. In classic political-opportunistic-scumbag fashion, they hijacked the movement for themselves and replaced the libertarian Ron Paul with the likes of Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

Now it is 2010. The Ron Paul movement has been supplanted by the Tea Party: Sarah Palin professes her commitment to liberty while she campaigns for and endorses John McCain, the warmongering socialist. Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh cling onto the liberty movement like pathetic little homeless barnacles. They have since perverted the movement into one which supports the harebrained neo-con policies of preemptive war, torturing, invasion of private lives, socialist dribble that got us into this mess and that is currently being carried out by the current administration which they claim to oppose.

Lew Rockwell describes the Tea Party and what we should expect from it to a tee,

You might as well know right now, however, that the Tea Party, no matter how successful it is at the polls in November, will certainly betray the party of liberty. There are several reasons for this, but the fundamental one is intellectual. The Tea Party does not have a coherent view of liberty. Its activists tend to be good on specific economic issues like taxes, spending, stimulus, and health care. They worry about government intervention in these areas and can talk a good game.

But just as with old-time conservatives, there are many issues on which the Tea Party tends toward inconsistency. The military and the issue of war is a major one. Many have bought into the line that the greatest threat this country faces domestically is the influx of adherents of Islam; in international politics, they tend to favor belligerence toward any regime that is not a captive of U.S. political control.

On immigration, the Tea Party ethos favors national IDs and draconian impositions on businesses rather than market solutions like cutting welfare. On social and cultural issues, they can be as confused as the Christian right, believing that it is the job of government to right all wrongs and punish sin.

The talking heads that hijacked the party are after television ratings and journalistic cash perks. They have no principles and know nothing about liberty. The real problem in my eyes, though, is not that these pitiful book-salesmen have infiltrated the tea party, it is that they have proven in the past that their rhetoric can pervert the notion of liberty in the minds of millions of Americans.

These Americans are easy to spot; As I said, there are millions of them. They call themselves conservative and claim allegiance to liberty. Then the bright lights of Fox News come on and they easily dismiss the torturing of human beings by our government.

These Americans have no real principle. Their assertions are subject to their own whim on any particular day, depending on the weather and on who exactly is involved, what religion they belong to, or what party affiliation check-box they tick. They talk a big game about property rights, but when a man purchases land with his money and decides to build a religious center there, Sean Hannity can easily talk these Americans down from their stance.

They claim allegiance to sound money and limited government, but an ever-expansive empire does not bother them and any reason we can find for attacking and killing people is okay.

Their track record on liberty is also pathetic: It is only Obama and Democrats who can offend them with warrant-less wiretapping. If a Republican did the same–as they have–they wouldn’t make a peep. The violation of our liberties by the TSA is only offensive when Democrats are in office. The TSA’s service is only incompetent when Obama is giving the orders. When the land is ruled by Emperor Bush, or what ever other Republican puppet is installed the TSA is a godsend and any society who is without it is foolish and primitive (including our own, for hundreds of years of our incomparably successful history).

The only thing that is reassuring in all of this is that the true believers in liberty were fighting against the neo-cons all along; It is nothing new for libertarians to battle the warmongering, socialist Republicans and at the same time the warmongering, socialist Democrats.

I guess I am just once again discovering how much more I hate the neo-cons than the Democrats. See, at least with the Democrats you get an honest angle. Obama and Pelosi will come right out and say “we are oligarchists, that’s us. We are the elite, we know what’s best for you, we will rule your lives and organize society the way we see fit.” The lie that they tell is hidden in the ideology of socialism/oligarchism/fascism/statism itself–whatever you wanna call it. That is, statism just simply does not work. It can hardly be called a lie, it is just a fundamental failure of the system they tout; Statism’s promises of utopia can never be realized because the system is fundamentally flawed. But at least the American socialists don’t dress up as capitalists. They call themselves Democrats and they run on a platform of socialism, there is simply no deception going on.

Republicans, on the other hand, bear sole responsibility for the fact that the free market is blamed for our current economic crisis. Anyone who knows anything about economics knows that the American economic system of the past few decades has been getting progressively less capitalistic to the point where it bore way more resemblance to socialism than capitalism quite long ago. If you don’t realize this then you don’t know what capitalism is.

Alan Greenspan operated the Fed like a statist but his rhetoric made everyone think he was a capitalist. George W. Bush claimed that he was a believer in the free market, but he barreled ahead down the road of statism more quickly than any other president before him.

Even the Sean Hannitys, Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world talk about liberty until they are blue in the face. But if we believe these clowns then we are believing that “liberty” means attacking sovereign nations who have done nothing to us. “Liberty” to them is maintaining a worldwide empire. “Liberty” to them is torturing people, allowing an ever-expansive state to disregard the constitution, to bail out failing private enterprises, and all the rest. They know nothing of liberty, but they are more dangerous than the Democrats because they tell all the suckers who listen to them that their way is the way of liberty.

In this situation is it any surprise that half of the suckers tout a desecrated form of liberty while the other half of the suckers think that liberty stinks? These neo-con morons caused the gravitation of Americans towards Obama and the anti-liberty socialists because they fooled everyone into thinking that the George W. Bush dynasty was what they get when liberty reigns supreme.

As for the Tea Party. It stinks so bad of neo-con that there were even Tea Party candidates running against Ron Paul when he was up for reelection in Texas!