G.O.P. co-opts Tea Party in upcoming elections ... by gimleteye

"The Tea Party has the nation's attention. Now what?" is the header of a Washington Post article this Sunday. It asks the relevant question. I've been asking the same question since the rise of public anger associated with an economic crash of epic proportions-- a crash decades in the making but one that rests securely on the foundation of the modern Republican Party, whose mantra about shrinking the size of government so it could fit in a bathtub was also accompanied by the biggest intrusion of government in individual liberties, in US history.

The other part of the Repubican mantra: privatization of government services. It was expressed in January 2003, by then Florida Governor Jeb Bush of Florida at his inauguration ceremony in the state capitol: “There will be no greater tribute to our maturity as a society than if we can make these buildings around us empty of workers; as silent monuments to the time when government played a larger role than it deserved or could adequately fill.”

The Republican Party response to 9/11 led to war in Iraq and, in a happy marriage of misfortune to perception, the privatization of government services related to national security. In its outstanding investigative series, "Top Secret America", The Washington Post details the costs: "What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest."

In G.O.P. world, there is nothing that the government does that cannot be done better by private corporations; the Party was willing to embrace strategies to hollow out the government from within (as Jeb suggested to his assembled audience of anti-regulatory zealots) to advance its agenda. The Washington Post investigative report asks the question in the context of national security: whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. The answer-- thanks to G.O.P. policies and practices-- is, no.

"Through the federal budget process, the George W. Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought - wrongly, it turned out - that contractors would be less expensive... Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances." So much for libertarianism in the defense of individual liberty.

Today, the G.O.P. is co-opting the anti-government movement that arose in anger to the results that the party and its leaders, like Jeb Bush, sought. The Tea Party now supports candidates like Florida US Senate hopeful Marco Rubio, the Jeb Bush stand-in, whose campaign is funded by special interests that continue to depend on subsidies from the federal government; prominently in Florida, Big Sugar as represented by the Fanjul billionaires.

In the Sunday Times, Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative, Republican strategist confirmed the alliance that does not need to be spoken with the Tea Party ("Rove returns, with team, planning GOP Push"). Viguerie said to the Times, “We’re all on the same page until the polls close Nov. 2.” The New York Times report details how the traditional base of millionaire and billionaire donors, assembled to propel George W. Bush to the presidency in 2000, has been reconvened to raise funds in new political entities where the identity of donors is concealed, in support of Tea Party candidates; from Rubio in Florida to Christine O'Donnell ("masturbation is a form of adultery") in Delaware.

Once again, it takes a comedian-- The Daily Show's Jon Stewart-- to capture the tidal wave of nonsense sweeping across the nation. Watch it, here; you will be as confused, to laugh or weep, as a member of the Tea Party.