Tea Party in a bit more depth

I've been watching Bill Maher's "Real Time" (which I want to call "Politically Incorrect") when I remember to catch it. I have to say, Maher makes a habit of having conservatives on, such as Andrew Breitbart sometime one, two weeks ago. Unfortunately since he usually has celebrities on, whether left or right, the discussions never resolve anything.

This past Friday (yesterday) Maher had a young woman on who was in charge of the St Louis Tea Party. Maher had evidently been looking for a Tea Party person to come on this show and somehow connected with this young woman. At the risk of being sexist or giving offense I will say she is an attractive young woman (whose name totally escapes me) but also, I was perhaps as curious as Maher about what she would have to say.

So I remember maybe the first thing Maher asked her concerned why all the Tea Party candidates are Republicans. Personally I think it is to get the votes of people who wouldn’t vote for a third party candidate or for a conservative unless the only other option was a liberal. But this woman’s response was, as I remember, to say that she had been a Democrat in college, and was an independent before joining the Tea Party. In other words, se simply didn’t answer Maher’s question. He didn’t press enough, but the rest of the program also went like that. When the Stimulus was brought up, she said it failed, she said we spent more on the Iraq war than on the stimulus, she threw in the phrase “out of control spending”. In other words, whether she was making points or defending herself, she simply used little Republican/Tea Party phrases.

A lot of politicians give interviews in sound bites, but I thought the Tea Party was/is supposed to be the antidote to politics as usual. It was/is supposed to be a breath of fresh air, a cleaning out of the old boys and bringing in people who might not be operators in the political world, but are good honest folk looking out for the little guy.

That’s saying nothing of how the Tea Party manifesto states that the Tea Party doesn’t trust or intend to obey the Republican party. Except that they really are identical to them.