Almost without exception, 'tea party' advocates are arguing that there's a campaign to belittle and trivialize their cause, which is essentially true. That said, some of the damage is undoubtedly self-inflicted. Associating their supposed movement with the term 'teabagging' is quite ill-advised, and the entire tea party analogy has shaky foundations (let alone the fact that their taxes haven't actually gone up and that it's impossible to find a poll showing this self-described 'silent majority' as anything approaching a majority). Another angle, though, seems a bit more serious, and it's been interesting to take a look at the Tax Day histories of prominent conservative commentators now leading the 'tea party' charge.
Michelle Malkin had only one April 15, 2008 post that involved tax returns. It ridiculed Senator Ted Kennedy by, of all things, asserting that he doesn't pay a lot of taxes. She linked to a Wall Street Journal story about the alternative minimum tax on 4/15/2005. Her archived posts from 2006 and 2007 appear to indicate that her tax refunds were substantial enough to distract her from complaining about filing.
Glen Beck is a big tax day tea party cheerleader, but his blog had nothing at all to say on April 15, 2008 and doesn't go back any further. In fairness, he hasn't been in the limelight too long.
Laura Ingraham's blog seemed so genuinely surprised that anyone would want to know anything from the past that the pages barely loaded, and she had no old April posts about taxes.
Bill O'Reilly's April 15, 2008 blog post is written by some other person and is about Chinese geography. His archive goes back to April of 2006, and his other tax day posts were either nonexistent or unrelated to taxes.
Michael Savage's website is incomprehensible and structured like a bottom-tier British tabloid.
Rush Limbaugh's web archive only goes back four weeks. He has a newsletter, but it costs (a presumably tax-free) $35 a year.
Drudge's archiving system isn't chronological and therefore isn't worth the effort, but simply searching 'tax [year]' yielded nothing substantive and Drudge is known to have a bit of a reactionary reputation...
The takeaway message, though, is this: the current all-encompassing tax protest movement shows the symptoms of a freshly-concocted fiscal responsibility bandwagon that didn't exist until long after the Bush administration had broken the national debt clock, taken its ball, and gone home. It's strange to think of taxes and spending as fringe issues over the course of the last decade, but that is truly what they had become. The Bush Administration's embrace of neoconservative ideals prompted spending that hovered around the four trillion dollars annually mark, handily outpacing the Clinton administration's spending.
Bill O'Reilly's April 15, 2008 blog post is written by some other person and is about Chinese geography. His archive goes back to April of 2006, and his other tax day posts were either nonexistent or unrelated to taxes.
Michael Savage's website is incomprehensible and structured like a bottom-tier British tabloid.
Rush Limbaugh's web archive only goes back four weeks. He has a newsletter, but it costs (a presumably tax-free) $35 a year.
Drudge's archiving system isn't chronological and therefore isn't worth the effort, but simply searching 'tax [year]' yielded nothing substantive and Drudge is known to have a bit of a reactionary reputation...
The takeaway message, though, is this: the current all-encompassing tax protest movement shows the symptoms of a freshly-concocted fiscal responsibility bandwagon that didn't exist until long after the Bush administration had broken the national debt clock, taken its ball, and gone home. It's strange to think of taxes and spending as fringe issues over the course of the last decade, but that is truly what they had become. The Bush Administration's embrace of neoconservative ideals prompted spending that hovered around the four trillion dollars annually mark, handily outpacing the Clinton administration's spending.
But spending wasn't the issue. Elections were won and lost primarily on wedge issues like gay rights, abortion, and immigration; all of which united Republicans and divided Democrats. Nationalism in the wake of September 11, 2001 and the run-up to the war in Iraq created a political environment that left little room for perceived indecisiveness or over-intellectualism. Firm and immediate Republican national security policy gave the party an edge well before the failings of that policy played out. At that point, it was anti-war protesters who were marginalized as overly-idealistic, naive, and holdouts of the 1960's (after all, even a decorated Vietnam veteran could lose patriotism points if he questioned the value of the conflict).
That era has ended, and the Republican party has discarded a platform that brought it success in 2004 and total failure in 2008. It's fairly obvious that the American political Right is now doing everything possible to position itself once again as the standard bearer of fiscal conservatism if nothing else, governance and public opinion consequences be damned.
That era has ended, and the Republican party has discarded a platform that brought it success in 2004 and total failure in 2008. It's fairly obvious that the American political Right is now doing everything possible to position itself once again as the standard bearer of fiscal conservatism if nothing else, governance and public opinion consequences be damned.
The trouble is: the vast majority of today's protesting teabaggers and their teabagging pundit figureheads (they really are calling it 'teabagging') had no real issue with Bush's immense spending all those... year ago... which also came at a time when no one budgeted for bringing a decrepit financial system and aging national infrastructure up to date. Perhaps it's Obama's specific policies that illicit the outcry more so than spending as a practice, but if that were the case then images such as this one:
Courtesy: Associated Press
would likely read "don't touch my piggy bank other than to pay for foreign wars and cut taxes for the people who need it the least," or "don't touch my piggy bank to fund education and health care," or "my piggy bank is irrelevant because I'm too young to pay taxes and I should probably be in school instead of out in the rain getting mercilessly indoctrinated with my parents' political beliefs."
If it really is federal spending that is the issue here, regardless of where it comes from or what it's for, then the least the bulk of this 'movement' can do is own up to its own inconsistency. Failing to even mention acquiescence to recent astronomical and wasteful Republican spending during the Bush Administration, let alone making no attempt to reconcile that acquiescence, completely undermines the credibility of the protest and of the political position far more than any hilarious sexual innuendo ever could. To be fair, many libertarians and true fiscal conservatives have done their best to point out this inconsistency, but it remains to be seen if a great many Republicans and conservatives have any awareness of their own economic stances just one year ago. Acknowledging and learning from this disparity would do the conservative movement a great service in its current quest for legitimacy. It's not as if spending didn't count before 2009.
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