Thomas Friedman thinks the tea baggers can be useful and Steve Benen disagrees:
Thomas Friedman has a column today suggesting Tea Partiers strive to “become something more than just entertainment for Fox News.” Specifically, the columnist recommends that these activists start taking energy policy seriously and endorse “a $10 ‘Patriot Fee’ on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt.”
To Friedman, such an approach seems consistent with the Tea Party’s purported goals — taking a progressive approach to energy policy would help lessen our dependence on the Middle East, lower the deficit, improve our security goals, leave future generations with a better environment, etc.
Friedman isn’t entirely naive. He concedes, “Yes, I know, dream on. The Tea Party is heading to the hard libertarian right and would never support an energy bill that puts a fee on carbon.” And to be sure, on a substantive level, his suggestion has merit.
But I think Friedman, like many establishment observers, doesn’t fully appreciate how ridiculous the Tea Party effort really is. John Cole summarizes the situation nicely.
They don’t care about the deficit. They care that a Democrat (and a black “Muslim,” to boot), is in the White House. They don’t care about fiscal restraint, they care that a Democrat is in the White House. They don’t, as some foolishly pretend, care about the Wall Street excesses. Certainly Cenk Uyger is not the only one who has noticed that the tea party bubbas could all be shipped to protest HCR, but the big money boys aren’t running the buses to protest Wall Street. They care that there is a Democrat in the White House.
This is the point I keep trying to make about Nicholas Kristof and the religous groups in Africa, they don’t want to stop the suffereing as people who are in pain are easier to convert, and it is easier to take natural resources from desperate people, but they can’t admit that, so they pretend to help when in reality the religous groups in Africa are happy to see AIDS orphans.