In all fairness, Goob, the opening post asked for opinions regarding the Tea Party. Calling something ****, when you think it's **** is just honesty.
The Tea Party is a movement, established by mainstream Republicans, as a counter to the "grassroots" campaigns of the Democrats. Unlike the Democratic equivilants, though, the Tea Party has gotten way, way beyond the Republicans' control. The GOP got the far right wing of their party so fired up that they're in danger of fracturing the GOP into a right/center-right party and a far right party. The short-term political gains that the GOP has made will likely be lost in the long term, should the general population get a sense of disunity within the Republican party.
The Tea Partiers themselves compose a very, very vocal minority that simply gets more press than it deserves, by all rights. Americans are by and large ambivilant about politics, so when a movement as extreme as the Tea Party emerges, their claims of representing mainstream America are best met with skepticism. Unlike most Americans, though, the press tends to immerse itself in politics, so members of the press corps tend to see (and thus report more heavily on) the viewpoints of these extreme political minorities, rather than the opinions of the ambivilant political majority. They report on the Tea Party and other politically extreme groups as representing America, because, almost like a member of the movement, they become so immersed in the rhetoric that they start to believe some of it. This is why, if you look at raw polling data, you see that Americans rarely stray far from a pretty stable political center, but when you look at political reporting for the last twenty or thirty years, you'd think everybody in the land was a political schizophrenic, swinging from one end of the political spectrum, all the way to the other every two to four years. By 2016, the Tea Party will be forgotten, probably replaced by some analogue on the left, and by 2020, that will be replaced by another group of loonies on the right.
Nobody ever wants to cut taxes or government spending. Nobody.
That's not entirely true. You're right about nobody wanting to cut spending, as they do enjoy having the government services available. Nobody particularly likes paying for those services, though, largely because many think that with a fiver and some effort, you can patch roads, run a school, provide emergency services, etc. Taxes are only necessary because of bureaucracy and lazy government employees!
I wouldn't be surprised if more people nowdays associated that name more with Alice in Wonderland than Boston, and get visions of several mad people running around shouting at each other.
With Sarah Palin appointed to the helm, Alice in Wonderland is probably a better point of reference anyway. [/zing]
