Friday, October 15, 2010

The utter impracticality of Tea Party ideas

Rock, meet hard place! Tea Partiers of South Carolina were convinced, convinced, I tell you!!! that earmarks were really, really, just awful and terrible and no good. That was before South Carolina's Republican leadership was confronted the possibility of getting a deepwater port for ships that would use a widened Panama Canal.

All of the sudden, the deeply-felt principles that "Spending is bad, earmarks are bad, taxes are bad" ran headlong into the fact that a deepwater port could bring lots and lots of money into South Carolina.  And gee, wow, amazingly enough, these principles were suddenly being treated as optional, as a "nice to have" sort of thing and not as a critical, mandatory element of a new economy.

The Tea Party folks are having a bit of trouble reconciling their philosophy with the real world.

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