LIBERADIO(!)

It seems that the worse part of the Tea Party movement is its underlying philosophy: when it comes to the free market, unintended damage is OK.

After Katrina, I had a conversation with a conservative friend about price gouging that ended abruptly when we realized our fundamental difference in our assessment of the situation: I believed that if one person died because they couldn’t afford to buy a $5 bottle of water on their way out of the Gulf Coast area, that was one person too many to sacrifice to free market principles. He didn’t see it that way.

Fast forward to today’s “Tea Party” demonstrations and my friend’s philosophy – the Philosophy of Collateral Damage – is everywhere. So what if people are unemployed, not able to feed their kids, without health care, losing their homes? “Stay away from my free market,” they say. “We’re not all in this together,” they say. “Running up the national debt for the military industrial complex is A-OK, but doing it to stimulate the economy and get the American people back to work? Hell, no!”

Even worse is the manipulation of the “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” folk by the media elite. Let’s face it, Glen Beck really hates them [mp3] and Neal Boortz thinks they’re lazy and uneducated:

More on the Tennessee Tea from around the State and around the globe:

• Tennessean Woos Tea Party with Friendly Publicity Rather than “Liberal” Media Blackout
• Cocke Co. high schools urge students to attend tea party
• The Homework Assignment Conservatives Need to get to, and Soon
• Tea bagging for governor
• A Mad, Mad, Tea Party
• Tea bag Day! & Who’s The Craziest Of Them All?
• Fake Teabaggers Are Anti-Spend, Anti-Government: Real Populists Want to Stop Banks from Plundering America
• Teabagging – The Awful Truth
• The peasant mentality lives on in America
• Media Matters Report: “Fair and balanced” Fox News aggressively promotes “tea party” protests
• Tea Parties Forever (Krugman)

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