Conservative Extremists

Tom Backers has a good post up over at Right Michigan.

The major impression most people get from their preferred form of media these days is that the Tea Party is made up of a collection of racist, homophobic, gun and Bible toting extremists so far to the right that they make Barry Goldwater look liberal; the younger generation will have to `Google' Goldwater, but in the print media, folks in my generation and those older will know who I'm referring to. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

There is so much truth to this--the media has hammered so relentlessly on the tea party and on conservatives that the truth of movement and its people has been obscured.

I replied in the comments.

It is truly an odd set of circumstances by which those who are fed up with a $15 trillion national debt, see troubles ahead for a health care system soon to be run by the same bureaucrats who currently run the postal service, and those who would like to see the departments of Energy, State, Interior, and Transportation collude on something other than how to make energy prices necessarily skyrocket, are seen to be the extremists.

Tea party activists are seen as too confrontational to compromise. We fall outside the mainstream, hate progress, and yearn for the days when choiceless women did nothing but bake pies and make babies. No wonder we are hated.

We hear this sort of drivel on every network news broadcast, on every cable news network (save sometimes FOX), on NPR, read it in nearly every major newspaper across America, and have to listen to it from both Democrat and establishment Republican leaders alike whenever we're unfortunate enough to have one of them find a microphone. As comrade Lenin said so many years ago, repeat a falsehood often enough and soon it becomes the truth.

Barbara Bush in a recent interview asked "when did compromise become a dirty word?" She was lamenting the polar opposites of both political parties, harsh rhetoric, and was largely criticizing the uncompromising desires of the tea party. (For Barbara's sake I'll clarify something...compromise is not a dirty word. The recession caused by her husband's compromise on his "no new taxes" pledge was downright filthy.)

Making compromises has never been the problem of conservatives--our problem has been that those for whom we have voted in the past too often already represent a compromise. In fact, the greatest single motivation I had for becoming more politically active was the selection of John McCain to represent conservatives in the last presidential election. Don't tell me that having that milquetoast bureaucrat sitting atop the ballot wasn't a huge compromise of conservative principles.

Conservatives are asked by the GOP to compromise at the ballot box and then the candidate we poorly select is asked to compromise further for the children or the elderly or the environment or for reproductive rights. This is how we end up with a $15 trillion debt--electing compromise candidates who make very stern faces while compromising even farther from a foundation built on shifting sand.

Perhaps no one wants that $15 trillion debt. But actually wanting to elect somebody up front who will do something about it--now that is extreme.