I came across this letter to the editor in the Houston Chronicle yesterday. It struck me as the default letter that I – and probably you – have read in one form or another a hundred times since the Tea Party began some three years past.
Weary of labels
I am tired and fed up with being labeled an extremest ideologue, right-wing kook and other labels because I happen to agree with tea party principles, believing in elimination of excessive spending and a return to constitutional mandates.
A fundamentalist, knocking on the door of 80 years of age, I have long believed in our government living within its means just as any well-managed family must do. Outgo that exceeds income leads to downfall.
I cannot understand the mentality of those who seem to want to destroy America.
But then, I remember the late Mr. Ed Erhed, editor of the Kingsville Record in the mid-’60s, who in his weekly column was discussing turning 80 years of age.
“I never thought much about being 80,” he wrote. “But now that I am here, I want to stay around just to see what those damn fools in Washington will think of next.”
Ben Hobbs, Sugar Land
There are a few things worth mentioning in all that. Mr Hobbs is 80 years old and soon to take his anger and intolerance up to Heaven to share with NRA Jesus. And of course there is his admission of being a Fundamentalist. That too is on the wane as the old farts pass on.
But it is the two default talking points we have heard billions and billions of times that is the crap that fuels the whole ugly Tea Party thing. Which Mr Hobbs, and tens of millions like him, get from a steady diet of Fox News and Talk Radio. Debt and the Constitution! OMG!
We must run the country debt free, like a family! This country like every country has never ran debt free. It is not only how governments work, but how corporations work as well. It is how capital is created. Borrowed money to get things built today to make payrolls, investments and to make profits tomorrow. Do you know of a family that is debt free? So all this debt crap is just that, crap. It is in reality just a code to make the poor suffer more than they already do, for after all, poverty is their fault because they are just a bunch of lazy moochers.
If there is too much debt then we should, like any civilized nation, find the sweet spot between spending and revenues. NOT just forever cut spending until we will need to privatize sanitation to pick up the bodies in the streets.
Then there is that never ending thing about the Constitution. It is seldom explained how President Obama is usurping the constitution, but if pressed these knuckleheads come up with some crap about the use of executive orders. Problem with that is Ronald Reagan enacted twice as many executive orders by this time in his presidency as Barack Obama has in his. Or maybe it’s immigration, Ronald Reagan declared full amnesty for 4 million Hispanics. It’s where GREEN CARDS came from. Or allowing a foreign born Marxist to become president? Or a Kenyan Muslim?
The problem the Tea Party and the GOP has Mr Hobbs and his crap are not long for this changing nation or this world. No thanx to Plavix and Lipitor.
BTW, Sugar Land is the home Tom DeLay who recently prayed himself out of jail! Really!