Victor Davis Hanson wrote a piece in Pajamas Media articulating extremely well what drives the Tea Party movement. Here are a few excerpts:
There is a growing sense that government is what I would call a new sort of Versailles — a vast cadre of royal state and federal workers that apparently assumes immunity from the laws of economics that affect everyone else.
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There is another Tea Party theme that those who play by the rules are being had, from both the top and bottom. The Wall Street bailouts and financial help to the big banks smelled of cronyism, made worse by the notion that liberal “reformers” like Obama got more from Big Money than did the usual insider Republican aristocrats.
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For some reason, our elite classes either cannot or will not explain openly and without artifice why it is that innately wealthy countries like Mexico or those in the Arab world or in Africa cannot adequately feed, educate, house, and employ their own citizens. Instead, we are to assume that some sort of ubiquitous oppression exists that that makes us wealthy, and others thousands of miles away poor, and requires apologies rather than exegesis. (Don’t dare suggest that the age-old causes of wealth and poverty still apply everywhere: either one ensures the rule of law, private property, an open economy, a free press, independent judiciary, constitutional protections, and religious tolerance, and allows science to evolve free from government and religious interference, or one does not and stays impoverished).
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After 18 months, the people feel they have been had — in the way that a blow-dried mansion living, philandering John Edwards is hardly an advocate for the “other America,” or a green-scheming, instant multi-millionaire Al Gore is hardly a disinterested advocate for welcoming reasonable debate about a sustainable planet. Prophets fall harder, especially when “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” prove to be a reflective of the Chicago way, the snooty ineptness of the Harvard lounge, and the shrill leftism of SEIU.
Rangel, Dodd, Geithner, the Blago mess, the lobbyists, the earmarks, and the political bribes to pass health care together have convinced half the electorate in just a few months that Obama is not merely not a reformer, but perhaps the most ethically compromised president since Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon.
Read the entire piece here.
