Has the Tea Party movement been unfairly characterized by its political opponents to deflect attention from the truths that it exposes? Once again, a newspaper in Spain has mounted a rare international defense of the what has now become a major force in the Republican Party. You might recall an article headlined How Spain Can Build its Own ‘Tea Party’: Copy Sarah Palin from the publication Hispanidad.
This editorial from Spain’s ABC says in part:
Up until Monday, not a single public opinion survey has improved on the diminished image of the president, from whom his party comrades have fled this campaign season as if he were a biblical plague.
Confronting this evidence, as is often seen in the Spanish media, the easiest recourse is to discredit political movements that have managed to galvanize the campaign. Notably in this case, the Tea Party, which is usually characterized as an ultra-right movement. How easy it is to argue based on labels!
Assuming it was true that this great anti-Obama electoral galvanizer had been a far-right movement, we would have to ask ourselves what went wrong over the past two years for such a movement to emerge out of nowhere. Why, three months after Obama presented his first budget, did this movement in the form of “tea parties” emerge like mushrooms all across the Union to denounce the increase in public spending by 8.4 percent and the federal government’s willingness to subsidize large corporations? And one that is, according to Anglo-Saxon terminology, a libertarian movement – liberal to us – that does nothing to threaten the solid foundations of the great American Republic.
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