Tea Party Apologist

Andrew,

You're probably getting a lot of email in response to the letter you reprinted from the tea party apologist, but here's my take on it, from a fiscal conservative.

Your letter your reader sent you is most notable for what it doesn't say. The reason that the tea partiers aren't taken very seriously is not that they aren't looking "backwards" but because they haven't even attempted to explain why they made no objection to the debt piled up during the Bush Administration and what has changed for them since the election on this issue.

I keep looking for a "we thought the debt was less important than the War on Terror but now we see we lost our focus" or "we believed Bush that the increased debt was managable over time but the economic downturn makes us more scared than ever" but there is nothing even close to that. They are cynical budget deficit flip-floppers, whose refusal to come to grips with good vs bad debt makes it appear that they believe all our economic problems should be laid at the feet of Obama.

Your letter writer is, indeed, looking forward. But while another 3 1/2 years of blaming Obama for every problem, real or imagined might be forward thinking in the temporal sense, it isn't in the connstructive sense.

Your pal,

Fred