Tom Toles for December 03, 2014

Sheesh. So they say it’s government that’s the problem and the GOTP, and those who elect them, intend to see to it that it remains so! Confirmation bias, I say. The Tea Party can go orbit somewhere between here and Mars along with Russell’s teapot.Oh, and here I’ve been thinking all along that they want to drown the government in a bathtub.

Warren Buffet says that, “Of course there is class warfare in the United States. It has been waged for years, and my class, the rich, are winning hands down.”

And he was even more correct than he realized in opposing the supposed goals of the more extreme tea party types. What they really want to do is not just to limit the federal government, but destroy it entirely.

Why, you might well ask? Because (and this is true, especially in the southern states) those damn yankees preserved the union of the USA back in 1860-1865 while freeing the African Americans from their slavery by winning the Civil War, and the hard core southern tea party hotheads are still seeking revenge for that. And now, we have even elected an African American as president!!

What is truly ironic to me at least is that in gneral those very states give the federal government less in tax revenues than they get back in federal benefits! Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Heck, they want to gut their legs off at the knees!!

The GOTP is not in favor of either limited or smaller government; that is just one of the many lies it tells. It is in favor of limiting government spending for things its social Conservative wing doesn’t like: entitlements, healthcare, education, infrastructure, etc. It’s gung-ho for increasing spending on things it likes: weapons the military doesn’t even want, tax cuts for the rich, border fences, incarceration, etc. It is also in favor of injecting government into the lives of the people at every possible level if they make decisions the GOTP doesn’t favor. So neither in terms of spending nor in influence is the GOTP in favor of smaller governement.

Old1953 sorry to burst your bubble but it has been the democrats that keep expanding the social programs

Anyone who runs for government office with an anti-government platform is a con man. Anyone who votes for that person is a fool.

Most of what is wrong with government is lack of accountability. This cannot be fixed with money, either adding or removing. Government needs significant improvement, but Tea Party methods will not accomplish those ends.

The right and left have been bringing up “stupid voters” a lot lately. Maybe the Founding Fathers were onto something.

Read most of the article and (again) it gets libertarianism wrong..Libertarians believe that better solutions are the ones that are closer to the problem. Liberals believe that benevolence only comes from the central government.

Hmm – might’ve been metaphorical, like that guy who said “if they bring a knife, we bring a gun”

" the intent of the party was to blow up the national debt to the point where all social programs would be eliminated out of necessity. That this would cripple Democrats in such a way that they’d be forced to act as Republicans do and never manage to increase any such program again, no matter the need. And this was necessary to weaken the Federal government. "-They call it ‘starving the beast’.

It’s still at the core of Republican strategy and applauded by Fox “news” viewers everywhere.

Some of the “tax reform” folks in the start of the TEA party were actually fairly reasonable in what they were looking for. Those folks aren’t looking for anything reasonable from the TEA party any more. They left some time ago, shaking their heads.

Apparently when you look in the mirror you see a completely different image than the image of Goofy the rest of us see.