Crocodile tears?
(In response to Corbin Smith’s April 26 letter, “A taxing situation.”)
In response to Corbin Smith’s letter to the editor lamenting the fact that only Tea Partiers are apparently able to foresee the coming financial crisis that he claims will result from President Obama’s policies, I have to ask: Where were the Tea Partiers when George W. Bush was overleveraging this country to fight unnecessary wars of aggression in the Middle East? Where were the Tea Partiers when George W. Bush was giving enormous tax cuts to the über-rich but not cutting, and in fact increasing, federal spending?
A Tea Partier I know recently told me that the reason for their prior deafening silence on these issues is that President Obama was the straw that broke the camel’s back and awakened a sleeping giant. Well, that’s a little too convenient.
There’s a reason that people like me (and perhaps Andrew Hedlund, to whom Mr. Smith was responding) don’t take the Tea Party’s message seriously, and it’s not the grammatically challenged and misspelled protest signs or the comparisons of the Democratic leadership to Nazis or the use of racist imagery that always seems to sneak into every Tea Party event. No, the reason why we don’t take the Tea Party seriously is because their complaints reek of partisan hypocrisy.
Thanks to their behavior during the Bush administration, we know that Tea Party patriots only have a problem with what they see as fiscally irresponsible behavior when Democrats — not Republicans — engage in it. So please spare us your crocodile tears.
Jeremiah E. Scott
Graduate student
