Is the Tea Party a Good Thing or a Bad Thing for Republicans?

Yes. Mr. Kelly, politics isn’t boring. And it can be hilarious and scary at the same time. I’ll elaborate.

Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter at Alice’s tea party reminds me of the Tea Party people who keep showing up in the media, at the ballot box, and, should they along with their extremist neo con kin, the extremist “Repugnantlicans,” take over Congress, America may be headed toward even a greater tyranny than exists today, a tyranny known as Fascism.

The Tea Party people come across as “Half-Mad Hatters,” half mad” because some of their candidates seem to be downright loony, half mad because they are mad at the tyranny of big government but not mad at the greater tyranny of government’s stronger partner, namely, powerful corporate interests that have nearly total control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Consider, for example, Carl Paladino, the millionaire candidate who, with the Tea Party’s backing, recently won the Republican Party’s primary for governor of New York. He reportedly wants to imprison welfare recipients so they can learn personal hygiene. Ever been in a cell’s bathroom? Or take Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party’s darling Republican Senate candidate from Delaware. Need you know more about her?

Unlike the Half Mad Hatters, the tea dumping colonists of 1776 were fully mad about being oppressed by both the King and his chartered corporations and they were soon to overthrow the “Crown’s Corpocracy,” the first corpocracy on our shores. Four corpocracies later (e.g., the Robber Baron’s Corpocracy (1865-1901) comes the Current Corpocracy, far more powerful than all the other corpocracies combined.

I doubt the Tea Party people know the true meaning of freedom in a real democracy. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman Consul and Orator (106BC-43BC), said that freedom is participation in power. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were heavily influenced by Cicero’s writings. Power means control and a free people in a real democracy have more rather than less control over whether and how much health, happiness, and prosperity they have.

The Tea Party people care only for their own health, happiness, and prosperity. To them social welfare is socialism. They don’t know or want to admit that corporate welfare dwarfs social welfare. They don’t know or want to admit that most people living in poverty don’t live there by choice. They also seem not to understand that the Constitution, supposedly so sacred to them, was meant by its framers to “promote the general welfare.” That means the welfare of all citizens. The Constitution is also intended to “establish justice.” There can be no social and economic justice in America when the welfare of all her people is so uneven.

See why the Tea Party people and their neo con kin are scary? The November elections are pivotal ones. Their outcomes could conceivably turn us further to the right and further into the clutches of corporatism.

Gary Brumback

Gary Brumback of FL 7:41PM September 26, 2010