30 April, 2011

Bloomberg Reports on Mourdock, Makes Stuff Up About Tea Party

Interesting article in Bloomberg this week on Richard Mourdock, who is attempting to unseat Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) in next year’s Republican primary for the Senate seat. There are some interesting quotes, such as:

At this point, Lugar “has to be regarded as the underdog,” and his decision to take time off during Congress’s April recess is surprising, said Stu Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report. “It seems to reflect what I see as a failure to understand the environment out there, and possibly his unwillingness to see the difficult political shape that he’s in.”

With all due respect to Mr. Rothenberg, Lugar has about a gazillion dollars in his war chest, and is owed political favors from practically every organization in the state. With 16 months to play, he’s not the underdog. Yes, Mourdock has momentum right now, and has been saying all the right things to all the right people, but it’s going to be an uphill battle, regardless.

I have a couple problems with some other points in the article as well.

In a new era that stresses confrontation over compromise, Lugar is a top target of a Tea Party movement that last year ousted three-term Utah Senator Robert Bennett and fielded a winning Republican primary opponent to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

No, we do not stress confrontation over compromise. We stress winning over losing. There’s a big difference. Most of the “compromises” the right has made with the left over the last 50 years have turned out to be disasters for both the country and the GOP. We have to get away from the idea that it’s ok to compromise with people who want to take the country in a totally different direction than that envisioned by the Founding Fathers (yes, I still say that, not the PC “Founders”).  If you compromise with someone going the wrong direction, you still end up going the wrong direction, just slower.

And here we see an example of the media “just makin’ stuff up”:

The Pike County results provide a glimpse of the challenge that Lugar, 79, faces from the influence of anti-government, anti-tax Tea Party supporters.

The Tea Partiers are not anarchists. They are not anti-government. They are pro federal government and pro republic. Over the last two hundred years, we’ve forgotten what the words “federal government” mean and have re-defined them to mean this large monstrosity out of Washington, D.C.

Federal means that the states were to be a federation of independently self ruled entities. These entities gave up limited power to a central government in order to become “united states”.

Republic means that we don’t vote on everything, we vote on people to represent us. True democracy results in mob rule, something that liberals want, but something that every thinking person should fear.

So, Tea Partiers want rule that is close to home, and don’t believe “that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves”.

And Tea Partiers are not anti-tax either. TEA stands for “Taxed Enough Already”. Tea Partiers understand the need for taxation, but also understand when we’ve reached the point of excessive taxation. Tea Partiers face fiscal reality. They know that we can’t tax our way out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. We can only grow our way out of it, and even then, only if we face the facts that our government growth is unsustainable.

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