Thursday, March 04, 2010

Oh, Leonard, so close...

...yet so far away...

Some of us after all, have argued all along that the tea parties were about as “conservative” — insofar as that term has traditionally been understood — as ladies night in a trendy bar. Indeed, some of us made the same point about George W. Bush, the putatively conservative president who nevertheless presided over an expansion of the federal government and of a federal entitlement program (Medicare), a costly war of choice in Iraq founded on a shifting rationale and financial mismanagement that turned surplus into deficit seemingly overnight.
...
they have yet to figure out that to protest everything is to protest nothing.

Pitts is actually right when he said George W. wasn't all that conservative; many on the right side of the aisle made the same determination over the last few years of his term. But I fail to understand this "to protest everything is to protest nothing" shibboleth. To say that would imply that everything the tea partiers are protesting cancels each other out, and even a casual glance at those protests will clearly show that is not the case. Everything they're protesting goes to the fact that government is expanding and taking more of our money and freedoms. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that Pitts cites the New York Times here, as they have the same agenda he does; but as the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Come to think of it, that phrase could explain most of not all of Pitts' columns.