Someone responds to another thread where this screed is posted:
Dave Nalle on September 08, 2011 2:25 AM:
As someone from the political right and active politically in the Republican Party it’s almost surreal to read the comments on this article. The portrait they paint of the Republican Party as seen through the eyes of the political left is very different from the reality of the party as seen from within - and seen from a clearer perspective than Lofgren’s evident tunnelvision.
The Republican Party is nowhere near as unified or homogeneous and most here seem to assume. It is a very diverse party with powerful internal struggles and factions which barely manage to work together. In particular the perception of the tea parties and the forces of “conservative” resurgence we have seen in the last 3 years are being critically misunderstood.
The newly politically engaged elements in the party are not part of the Bush-Gingrich-Rove-Cheney-Boehner party establishment and they do not support them. The party insiders and movement conservatives like the Neocons are as much an enemy of grassroots Republicans as the leading Democrats and President Obama.
Although establishment forces are trying to corrupt and coopt it, the Tea Party is not a movement in support of old Republican strategies and isn’t interested in increasing party power. It wants to overthrow the GOP leadership and reclaim the party and the government for a populist conservatism which would likely be easier for Democrats to work with than the current power-politics elite which runs the Party.
The same corrupt powerbrokers against whom Lofgren is reacting are among the main enemies of young Republican activists and disgruntled older Tea Partiers who feel that their own party has deeply betrayed them. This is not an overnight development. It took a long time to come to a head. It goes back to a deep dissatisfaction with the failures and bad intentions of the Bush administration which behaved in what is perceived as a very un-Republican way - arrogant and unresponsive and irresponsible.
Just as the GOP isn’t unified, neither is the Tea Party. It’s a diverse movement which has a lot of internal problems. Perhaps a third of the members are indeed “crazies” as the political left and many on the right would define them. They’re obsessed with high intensity but largely irrelevant issues, conspiracies and fantasies. Another third are long-time party members who just think the party has gone off the rails and are angry about the economy and the job situation and the failures of party leadership. The other third are the libertarian Republicans who are often younger and new to political activism, very volatile and extremely hostile to the party establishment.
These groups don’t agree on much, but they do agree that the party needs to be reformed, that the leadership has failed the members, and that fiscal reform should be the absolute first priority of the party if they can get any kind of control. Yes, they want to take control of the government away from Obama and the Democrats, but they certainly don’t want to give that power to the GOP establishment who they see as indistinguishable from the Democrats.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the media, for all their laziness and incompetence, is to convince the political left that the Tea Party is a raving, bigoted mob bent on their destruction. That’s far from the truth. Polls show that the Tea Party movement has a substantial component of Democrats (about 15%) and an even larger component of moderate independents. Yet the media coined the term “teabaggers” and directed the ire of the left at a group which could be their natural allies against the Neocons and the political establishment.
It’s a classic example of divide and conquer. Before the unhappy progresives and the angry Tea Partiers could find common ground against the elite class which rules both parties, they turned them against each other, making sure that they could never make common cause against their real enemies at the top of both parties. This protected the big government bureaucracy, monopolistic unions, corporate welfare recipients and military industrial complex which finance and own the political establishments in both parties and which should be the natural enemy of grassroots voters in both parties.
The comments here show how badly the left has been duped, as you lash out at the Tea Party as if it is a tool of the establishment, just the way the media and your own exploitative leaders want you to.
Dave Nalle
Republican Liberty Caucus
http://www.rlc.org
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_09/mike_lofgren_leaves_the_cult031989.php
The Tea Party is not a "party" in the political sense but a movement comprised of diverse individuals who share a common understanding: the Ruling Class of both parties now routinely urinates upon their backs (figuratively speaking) while insisting that it is raining - and that it is their fault, besides.
The American Left knows that such a movement threatens their goals far more so than those of the Right (as liberals truly believe in Leviathan government, while the GOP only fool themselves that they can employ it to better effect). That is why establishment Republican types pay lip service to the Tea Party (distancing themselves both subtly and cautiously via disclaimer), while Democrats treat them like the Plague, the contagious carriers of which they gleefully identify as GOP partisans, when frequently they are nothing of the kind.
Dave Nalle’s post provides a very good view of what is really going on in Washington DC. We here in DC can tolerate either party as they have been. What we cannot abide are those who want to cut back the role of the federal government in pork-rolling and telling everyone what to do.