As we have amply demonstrated, the French have a particular disdain for the Tea Party. Along the lines of that short tradition, this article from Le Monde by Jean-Christian Rostagn takes a crack at explaining the ‘Tea Baggers’ to French readers. According to Rostagn, the Tea Party’s obsession with the deficit is ‘only because it’s a convenient vehicle for expressing resentment against a president who they suspect of being guilty of the worst sins’ – or at least what they consider sins.
For Le Monde, Jean-Christian Rostagn writes in part:
The Tea Party is also, and probably most of all, a libertarian movement – although it’s a cushy kind of libertarianism: freedoms of course, but especially those that suit them. In the Tea Party, they want to protect American liberties while Washington seems to want to regulate everything, as in the hell of socialist Europe. In the Tea Party, they want to be left alone, to be free to live as before, when everything was going well, when America lived under an Anglo-Saxon status quo, when the Taliban was in the pay of the CIA, and neither the Chinese nor al-Qaeda opposed the hegemony of Uncle Sam.
It’s interesting that the Tea Party program includes the disappearance of the Department of Education – this of course to reduce the deficit. But where was the Tea Party when George W. Bush exploded the deficit to finance his foolish wars while cutting taxes, especially those of wealthiest people? Isn’t it telling that the “tea baggers” want to eliminate the Department of Education in a country where educational standards are already lamentable? This is to say nothing about the “Defense Department,” which alone has a budget equaling that of the next thirteen most militarized nations?
This demonstrates that these obstructionists are obsessed with the explosion of the deficit only because it’s a convenient vehicle to expressing their resentment against a president who they suspect of being guilty of the worst sins, including: wanting to eliminate some of the privileges of the establishment; maintaining the legality of abortion; or restricting the sale of firearms to citizens, whether they’re poisoned with testosterone or not.
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