The Tea Party started out as a populist movement of people angry about government overspending – specifically when it came to bailing out the banks. It intentionally stayed away from the so-called “God, Gays and Guns” social issues and in so doing got very popular, very fast. It is an agenda that most Americans can agree on, even if they don’t agree about what the government is overspending on. People who bitterly disagree on whether to cut defense or entitlements will hug each other as soon as you mention bailouts.
Although the Occupy Wall Street website is drenched in liberal-speak (”resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions”)[*], the key sentence is this:
The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.
Icing the Tea Party
That’s damn close to where the Tea Party started out, although it has morphed into something far more interested in God, Gays and Guns than anything else. At least according to Karl Denninger, the ex-CEO and now financial blogger widely thought of as the Party’s co-founder. This is how he described the group past and present when he resigned from it:
Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!
So far the Occupy Wall Streeters and Original Tea Partiers have had little to say to each other.
. . .
If they ever figure out that their economic interests are more important than any cultural differences, look out.
