The Tea Party doesn't have a GUILLOTINE but it is chopping off the heads of prominent and respected "Old" Republicans :
The Tea Party has a Big desire and intent to purge the Republican Party of those that are moderate and less dogmatic and doctrinaire. They are seeking to impose a simplistic doctrine in all circumstances without regard to practical considerations. They live inflexibly attached to a theory without regard to its practicality, stubbornly holding on to these obsessive ideas without concern for practicalities or realities. And this Tea Party can do Great Harm to the Republican Party and to the nation if they ever reach power.
I wrote the above note after reading the British Magazine "The Economist" that has this phrase : "Republican candidates have been falling over themselves to invent tax proposals that look bound to squeeze the poor and reward the rich even more". The magazine tells us about the "Hostile takeover" of the Republican Party by Tea Party and about their regressive and absurd tax policy proposals.
I loved this article in "The Economist" because it sounds like writing History :
The Economist
Republicans may be in for a shock :
Despite becoming more extremist and obstructionist, the Republicans triumphed in the mid-term elections. Next time round, they may be in for a shock
Nov 5th 2011 | WASHINGTON, DCThe Republicans in a dangerous game
Some excerpts :
And yet its very radicalism may become the party’s Achilles heel. It could enable Mr Obama to win a second term by proclaiming that to vote Republican in 2012 is to opt for a reckless experiment that will tear down all the social protections Americans have come to take for granted.
Mr Obama is already pushing this line. One of his chief exhibits is the Republicans’ comportment during the past year of divided government.
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They are now woven tightly into the Republican grassroots, co-ordinated nationally and plugged into a variety of deep-pocketed small-government outfits, such as the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which feed them with policy ideas and help them organise.
In a forthcoming book (“The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”), two Harvard University academics, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, say that the emergence of the tea-partiers was “just what the doctor ordered” for a group of billionaire ideologues, such as brothers Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, who lost no time exploiting the movement’s anger and energy. Dick Armey, the founder of FreedomWorks, and Matt Kibbe, its president, have been candid about their efforts to turn the tea-party movement into “a permanent grassroots army” and mount a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party.
The new Jacobins
This is code for a merciless purge. Seniority in the party and length of service in Congress are no protection. In the primaries before last year’s mid-terms, tea-partiers helped to scalp long-serving Republicans, such as Senator Bob Bennett of Utah, who used to be considered solid conservatives. Now the Jacobins are on the warpath again. FreedomWorks is hoping to unseat Senator Richard Lugar, who has represented Indiana admirably for six terms, by throwing its weight behind Richard Mourdock, “a reliable, consistent supporter of limited government”. Mr Lugar stands accused of spending his 34 years in Congress “voting to spend too much and to expand the federal government too far beyond its constitutional limits.”
Campaigns such as these push the party in Congress to the right. They have also coloured the search for a presidential nominee.
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Above all, the whole Republican field has embraced the mantra of small government. To judge by their promises, a Republican victory in 2012 would see a night of long knives in Washington, DC. On his very first day Mr Gingrich would abolish 39 White House “tsars”. In his first year Mr Paul would lop away $1 trillion in federal spending and abolish the departments of energy, commerce, interior, education, and housing and urban development. Mrs Bachmann would do away with the department of education and have the “doors locked and lights turned off” at the Environmental Protection Agency. Whoever wins, Obamacare—and who knows what else?—will be on their way to the chopping-block. Mr Perry has called Social Security, the pension system on which millions of Americans depend, not only unconstitutional but a Ponzi scheme.
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But the party is also seen as the party of the rich. In a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 69% of respondents said that Republican policies favoured the wealthy, while only 28% said that of Mr Obama’s policies. This is not a plus at a time of stark and rising inequality.
Rich v poor
The Congressional Budget Office reported last week that the top 1% of earners had more than doubled their share of national wealth over the past three decades.
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Maybe not. Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who has studied election results since the recent great recession, concludes that they are seldom decided by ideology. “In periods of economic crisis, as in more normal times, voters have a strong tendency to support any policies that seem to work, and to punish leaders regardless of their ideology when economic growth is slow,” he says. That is bad news for Mr Obama. But the Republicans still need to unite around a plausible candidate—and a programme that is not so scary that voters will decide to stick with the president they know.
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