The Tea Party is nothing more than the extreme fringe base of the GOP; the philosophical heirs to the John Birch Society. Racism is their underlying and motivating force.
Spending, the deficit, taxes, etc. are all smokescreens for their real agenda - hatred for the president and the wish to remove this Black man from their "White" House.
They were not only silent while their president Bush converted a record surplus into a record deficit and spent like a drunken sailor, but they re-elected him with alacrity.
It was only about 30 days after we inaugurated a Black president that they coalesced, picked up and loaded their guns, took to the streets with vile, racist signs and demanded their country back.
Tea partiers are violent, racist, thuggish people who use the rhetoric of sedition. Sharron Angle threatens gun violence ( second amendment remedies), Sarah Palin puts gun scope targets on democratic congressmen, Michele Bachmann calls on her followers to be "armed and dangerous", and Glenn Beck stokes fear and hatred on the air.
These people bring loaded guns to presidential events and call the president a tyrant while their signs threaten to spill the blood of tyrants.
The far right wing has committed heinous acts of political violence and murder in the recent past. They have a record to prove their current threats of violence are not idle talk. Dr Tiller was assassinated; the Holocaust Museum was shot up; church goers at the Unitarian church in TN were murdered; the Atlanta Olympics were bombed.
In the past week they have assaulted and stomped the head of a moveon.org woman; they have arrested a reporter in Alaska for asking too many questions; they have arrested and manhandled a Democrat who simply attended a public event for Eric Cantor; they have mailed a toxic substance to congressman Grijalva's office.
These are vile and nasty people who hate our democracy. They hate democracy because democracy has given America the civil rights act, Roe v Wade, social security, medicare, the minimum wage, the separation of church and state - worst of all - the straw that broke the camel's back is that democracy gave America a Black president. Democracy has not worked out well for their racist ideology.
They want to replace our democracy with fascism so they can impose their will at the point of a gun on the rest of us.
They fear their white privilege is slipping away and they are lashing out. Like cornered rats they are dangerous because these cornered rats have lots of guns and are trigger happy.
When they rant against spending they are referring to social programs they fear help minorities. The thought that one cent of their tax dollars may go to help a minority drives them mad. They don't realize - because their hatred makes them insane and impairs their thought processes - that most beneficiaries of social programs are white.
They support big spending and big Govt for Bush's two wars and for tax cuts for the rich, but they want to eliminate the minimum wage, food stamps, college financial aid - but they vehemently oppose anything that might possibly benefit those lazy, criminal parasitic minorities who live off the Christian white tax payers.
In fact, when they claim America is a Christian nation, they use the word, 'Christian' as code for White. They certainly do not mean Jesse Jackson's Christianity. This is why the refuse to acknowledge president Obama's Christianity and insist on calling him Muslim.
If the Tea Party rises to power, will launch a campaign of persecution against progressives, feminists, Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, intellectuals, environmentalists, labor, artists, academics, Muslims, liberal journalists, etc. And they have guns.
Europeans are dismayed at the spectacle of these people's popularity in the current campaign. They are watching this midterm campaign very closely. I've heard several European politicians say they are absolutely confounded that just 18 months after inaugurating Obama, millions of Americans are comparing him to Hitler -as if Obama were planning the mass murder of 6 million people and world domination.
The world trembles at the thought of a President Sarah Palin and the possibility that these people may actually win the White House in 2012 and control our nuclear arsenal.