The tea party can be a baffling thing. What started as a loose aggregation of local activists and others who decided to become active back in 2009 has since spawned self-appointed national groups, complete with spokesmen, PACs, agendas and all the other trappings of semi-permanence. One of those national spokesbeings has decided that the GOP will be primaried within an inch of its life in 2012 for what he sees as the congressional leadership’s unbending fealty to compromise:
“Everybody knows that the debt ceiling deal was a completely fraudulent deal,” Mark Meckler, national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, told The Daily Caller. “We were told that if we passed this deal we wouldn’t be downgraded, but we were still downgraded.”
Meckler warns that Republicans and Democrats could both face an electoral bloodbath in the 2012 primaries if they do not do more to hold the line on taxes and spending.
“What we have here in Washington, D.C. is, one, people who are just stupid, or two, they are lying,” Meckler said. “I think it’s both. They don’t understand economics, and they’re lying.”
Meckler criticized House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for throwing away bargaining chips with the White House in successive partisan fights going back to the spring tussle over a government shutdown.
There’s much more of this at the link. It’s all quite familiar territory and rhetoric. But what was refreshing was to see one Republican who has long fought the good fight against the overweening state say “enough”:
…South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint, also a significant player in tea party movement, dismissed Meckler’s cautions.
“I think ‘bloodbath’ is the wrong term,” DeMint said. “There will be some healthy debate in the primaries, but there are a lot of tea parties. I’m getting tired of one person saying they speak for the tea parties.”
Amen to that.
