Donald Douglas
American Power
8/2/2011
Actually, as I noted earlier, I’m a little surprised how much clout the tea party is wielding, but this is a great essay from Toby Young, at Telegraph UK, “The real story of the US debt deal is not the triumph of the Tea Party but the death of the Socialist Left“:
Most pundits are crediting this U-turn to the political muscle of the Tea Party and it’s true that President Obama would never have agreed to this deal if the Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives hadn’t engaged in the brinkmanship of the past few weeks. But to focus on the Tea Party is to ignore the tectonic political shift that’s taken place, not just in America but across Europe. The majority of citizens in nearly all the world’s most developed countries simply aren’t prepared to tolerate the degree of borrowing required to sustain generous welfare programmes any longer.
As I pointed out in a blog post last May, tax-and-spend Left-wing parties have fared poorly in election after election over the past two years:
Labour was punished by the British electorate last year, polling its lowest share of the vote since 1983, but not as severely as the Social Democrats were by the Swedes, polling their lowest share of the vote since universal suffrage was introduced in 1921…
The same picture emerges wherever you look…
…For believers in redistributive taxation and egalitarian social programmes like David Miliband, Obama was the last great hope…
'If President Obama ever was a socialist, he isn't now.' Photo: The Telegraph
Read the complete article at American Power.
Also, at American Thinker, “Does This Deficit Make Me Look Fat?”
…In January 2011, the Tea Party came to Washington in the form of a Republican House of Representatives. They immediately started telling the truth:
- America is drowning in debt.
- The deficit is unsustainable.
- Medicare is broke.
- There is no Social Security trust fund.
- The Obama stimulus was a trillion-dollar failure.
- ObamaCare is a job-killing nightmare.
It’s like the freshmen congressmen told the ruling-class elites, “You’re fat!” The response from the president and his party was predictable and boring: the Tea Party wants to take away your health care and kill your grandmother, blah, blah, blah.
What was surprising was the vehement negativity from the Republican establishment. Inside-the-Beltway conservative royalty flocked to friendly radio and TV shows and tut-tutted their disapproval. Mind you, they weren’t bothered over fourteen freaking trillion dollars of debt. Oh, no, it was the Tea Party Freshmen who upset their sensibilities! …
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