Well sure, of course it does, even if I don’t agree with most of their solutions. I read today about Maine adopting a very conservative platform for the Republican party, due to the attendance and voice of tea partiers. According to the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, “…the convention adopted a platform containing principles of the tea-partiers: Sealed borders and a sharply scaled back federal government.” Christian Science Monitor goes into a little more detail: “a rejection of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, elimination of the US Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, and a freeze and prohibition on stimulus spending.”
There are some pieces of this that I’m confused about. First, what do the Tea Party folks have against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? I can understand not liking the UN as a whole, which has always been a more democratic ideal, but why be so specific about that particular declaration? I certainly hope Maine isn’t planning on returning women and children back to chattel status.
The interesting thing to me about the tea party movement is how much I agree with their criticisms of the system, and yet disagree with the proposed solutions. The Federal Reserve is a crapfest of the first order, but I’m not sure if abolishing it is the right choice. Same goes for the Department of Education, but again, I’m not sure I don’t think some federal oversight into the matter isn’t a bad idea.
Although tax cuts have their place, stimulus spending has historically been a much more sure fire way of stimulating the economy, at least in a real way. Where it doesn’t work is when stimulus spending just goes to things like tax breaks on consumer purchases like homes and cars. That shit just inflates the economic bubble again that got us into this mess. Better to let things shake out a little more slowly.
So all of that is a long way of saying “good for the Tea Party.” I don’t agree with their politics, but the culture of politics is well corrupt, and it is completely within America’s democratic ideals that someone else should get a voice, whether that voice is good or bad for the nation. I worry that if the Tea Party got their way, they might be a little taken aback at the America they would be given, but I’m sure they will realize at some point that some federal institutions grew out of the real demands of the populace and weren’t just some conspiracy to meddle in their affairs. I really wish the Tea Party would have stood up and spoken during the Bush years, when the government was expanding at a ridiculous rate, intruding into our lives to an unprecedented agree and the deficit was rising, but somehow, most of them didn’t seem to notice or care. So goes the zeitgeist.
I’ll close with a line from The Big Lebowski that pretty well sums up my feelings on the Tea Party. “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”
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The opposition to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, why? Simple, it says kids have the right to choose their beliefs. That’s why the fundies who control the Tea Party oppose the UNCRC. What, allow kids to have a say? The fundies even claim that the US signing it will allow kids to say they want to play and not go to school – yes, I’ve read that claim, that is the depth of idiocy these folk descend to. They also moan on about it will mean parents cannot administer corporal punishment, and that it means the end of the family. In case they hadn’t noticed, the family is under stress and the US hasn’t signed it. But there you are, the rest of the world is out of step with the US of A, they all signed up. One asks, in those countries are kids still going to school, is the family under any more stress than in the US and have they all banned corporal punishment? They’ve all signed up, even basket case Somalia says it will when it manages to become a properly run country again. But the Tea Party says the UNCRC is so dangerous they are supporting the campaign for a constitutional amendment for parental rights. America has no other problems to really worry about ….. and its children are all so PROTECTED and free from poverty, exploitation, violence, abuses against their rights. These people have a pretty fascist agenda. Ask them what rights they say kids DO have. Silence, absolute silence.
The teabaggers-who ever dignified such a narrow-minded ignorant bunch of people with something as patriotic as not wanting to pay taxes if not represented–simply follow the same right-wing purveyors of disinformation. The UNCRC has proven for twenty years that it has supported families in raising their children the way the families see fit. It just isn’t true that the UNCRC would “tell families what to do” with their kids.
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.
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