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In the face of several electoral challenges from tea party-connected candidates, Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul cautioned in a recent interview that "neocon influence" is "infiltrating" the movement he is often credited for creating.
Speaking to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night, Paul first took up for the tea parties as a natural reaction of the people when they are unhappy with government. What they are not, he explained, are entirely adherent to his ideas. Paul suggested that the group only "sometimes" represents his views.
Here is my take on this: Today's tea partiers rant about the elitists in Washington, but these statements come not without a certain irony. Those who are leading the tea party movement, at this time, are themselves elitist. Ron Paul, like him or not, invented the tea parties, as they are known in modern times, and they consisted of everyday people - Not Joe the plumber, but real plumbers. Not Sarah Palin, but Joe Sixpack. Not Tom Tancredo, but Joe Average. And there is the difference.
You can disagree with many of Paul's stances, and that is OK, but Ron Paul's tea party movement represented American citizens, not corporations, extremist religious organizations, PAC's, or other interest groups, but the people themselves. And that is the difference between the original tea parties and the perversions that pass themselves off now as the same thing. They are not. They are quite different, and yes, they DO have an agenda that is not Conservative, but attempts instead to fill the void left by Neocons of the past with Neocons of the present. They are not Conservative, and they are not American in spirit either.
Today's tea partiers are the last gasp of a radical faction of a bastardized version of Liberalism on steroids, attempting to hold on to something they never possessed in the first place, and will never get. The vast majority of Americans are just too intelligent to buy what they are shoveling.
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