| Just over five months to go before the mid-terms and the wheels appear ready to fall off the Tea Party Express. The ensuing bus wreck should be fun to watch.
The wobble was particularly noticeable late last week when Kentucky candidate for U.S. Senate Rand Paul admitted that, while he would not seek the repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he believed that private businesses have the right to discriminate, placing property rights above civil rights.
Few of us can know the humiliation of being turned away from a restaurant or a restroom just because of who we are — and I hope we never return to the days where such discrimination is an all too common occurrence. However, Paul said that, while he personally finds such things abhorrent, he believes our country should allow that kind of stupidity.
That stance (along with a statement early this week that defended BP in the oil disaster in the Gulf), revealed the sordid underbelly of not just libertarianism but the Tea Party itself (whose support pushed Paul ahead of the GOP’s chosen candidate).
Meanwhile, in North Carolina, GOP candidate and Tea Party darling Tin D’Annunzio has brought such a heaping sack of crazy into the race that even N.C. GOP chairman Tom Fetzer said earlier this week that D’Annunzio was “unfit for public office at any level.”
Apparently, aside from believing that the federal government should eliminate a dozen or so departments and agencies (not unusual for Tea Party platforms), he also believes that, according to court documents, that “God was going to drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid” on Greenland and that he had found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona.
Finally, in a speech recorded on video yesterday, FreedomWorks (one of the most prominent Tea Party organizations) head honcho Dick Armey stated that states should “start seceding from the union again,” should white people become the minority.
Hell, it’s not even June and the sound of candidates shooting themselves in the foot is making a Fourth of July fireworks display sound like a Kindergarten nap hour.
Whether blatantly plagiarizing Obama speeches or suggesting, completely straight-faced, that medical care can be arranged by trading chickens, or suggesting, without a hint of irony, that this country would be better of resorting to Jim Crow laws, it’s becoming apparent that what may have seemed righteous and relevant a few months back and is now stepping firmly into the Twilight Zone.
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