American Politics 3

Tea Party:

To be quite truthful, I am not quite sure what the Tea Party is. I think the Tea Party is where all the conservatives go when they cannot quite identify themselves as a fiscal conservative, libertarian conservative, classically conservative or neoconservative.

First of all, I don't think Michelle Bachmann is really anything other than a religious conservative, but as a religious conservative, she believes in limiting government's power so that local communities can determine what to teach in schools or whether or not to have school prayer. Whether she's all that patriotic or not is hard to know for surely she knows that the founding fathers were Deists, who do not believe in a Christian God, but a rational Enlightenment God who made the world and is mostly transcendent, not actively imminent in time.

She often refers to God as guiding her, but is not very knowledgable about the issues or anything else for that matter. What shocks me is the support that neoconservatives are giving her.
Now, my experience in conservative churches is that they are extremely anti-Jewish although they may not explicitly say so. Actually, not just anti-Jewish but anti-Greek also. They seem to view Greeks and Jews mainly through the Bible as if no changes have occurred in the personalities of these races for 2000 years. In one church, the pastor kept on referring to the Jewish rabbis who condemned Christ to death as "these people." But the way he said it seemed as though he were referring to all Jews as being responsible for Christ's death. In another church, when Christ condemns the olive tree to be cursed, I actually answered that he was condemning Israel and the assistant pastor agreed. But when I thought about it, I really wondered what that meant. Later listening to another person preach about Jessie's tree or trunk being cut down, I began to wonder again what was meant. Are they trying to say that the Holocaust was necessary to bring Jews to Christ? I don't know, but soon, I left the church. If I were a Messianic Jew, I would never listen to this shit.

Neoconservatives, many of them Jewish, support her. She is not one to step out of her religious shoes though. She sounds more like a prophet than anything else. But if she succeeds in gaining momentum and getting power, I think it is the Jews that she would attack first, although not blatantly. She would attack the Jews first because I think many conservative Christians blame the Jews for contesting school prayer, contesting "Intelligent Design," and many other measures that has limited the role of fundamentalist Christianity. In some ways, I think the fundamentalist Christians see Jews as either their best friend or worst enemy. Also, Jews need to be Christianized before Christ comes back?

Of course, I am glad that Christianity is not in schools, etc. After all, Christ himself said that a Christian's world is not this world. He also said give to Caesar what is his and to Christ what is his. But again, I really do not understand why Neoconservatives support Michelle Bachmann. Religious conservatives feel like they've been used by Reagan and by Bush. They are not about to be used by Neoconservatives for their own purposes.

Sarah Palin. I have no idea what this woman is about either, and she has been thrown into the Tea Party. I really think she's a very patriotic American. That's about all I can say about her. She's conservative in the sense that she wants to renew the respect for the Founding Fathers, and I really can't think of what else to say about her. She defended a woman radio host who said the word "man." If she defends that, she better be ready for a radio in which all racial slurs are allowed on the radio or maybe she thinks that white people can say that and not any of the colored people?

The conservative libertarians are the ones who are supporting the Tea Party financially and philosophically. The Tea Party sees Ron Paul, a conservative libertarian, as the "godfather" of the Tea Party philosophy. What appears to be a grassroots, popular movement is actually being funded by billionaire conservative libertarians like the Koch Brothers.

The Koch Brothers are interested in limiting the power of federal government and increasing individual liberties. They use their money to support groups and think tanks that support these interests. This is one of the main problems in the United States now. Very wealthy people are using their money to influence politics directly. They do not come in as a group, but as individuals.

The Tea Party site lists "individual freedoms" as one of the issues that they believe in, but I don't think that they would support gay or lesbian rights in the same way that libertarians have. And although Tea Party supporters want to limit the federal government, I can't imagine that they would start attacking Medicare, S.S. Security which many of them receive. Lastly, the Tea Party site says that they are interested in "returning power to the states and the people."
How are they going to limit the power of the federal government though? Are they going to start paying taxes to the state government instead of the federal government? So many states are broke or near broke and they get their money from the federal government. How are they going to make that work?