What I said

Peter Beinart at The Daily Beast says the tea party movement is a fraud.

This fall, a group of kamikaze conservatives, terrified by mounting debt, outraged by excessive government spending, and unafraid of hard truths, are rallying to save their children and grandchildren from a future mortgaged to the central bank of China. Too bad they live in England. ...

Tea Party types are quick to say it’s not just Barack Obama’s deficit spending that bothers them; they were outraged, outraged by the Bush deficits too. Really? Where were the folks with flags, muskets, and mutton-chops when Bush masked the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars, year after year, by funding them through supplemental appropriations that fell outside the normal Pentagon budget? Where was Rush Limbaugh when a Bush appointee threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he disclosed the true cost of Bush’s prescription drug plan, which according to the Congressional Budget Office costs more over 10 years than Obama’s bailouts, economic stimulus, and health-care reform combined? Where were the tears for America’s debt-saddled grandchildren when Bush pushed through tax cut after tax cut without any corresponding spending cuts? Oh yes, I remember where the Republican base was in 2004, when the prescription drug bill passed and the wartime spigot was going full blast—they were reelecting Bush with the largest grassroots conservative turnout in American history.

I don't argue with much he says. If the tea party is a genuine grassroots movement, and I think it is, I agree with Beinart that they are awfully late to the party. As for me, I wrote in late 2003 that I could not endorse G. W. bush for reelection because of his domestic policies.

I do not believe Bush’s domestic policies are in the best interests of our long-term freedom. I do not think that Bush’s domestic legacy will, in the long run, be good for the country.

Hence I cannot urge anyone to vote for Bush in 2004. ...

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

I re-emphasized this stance only a month later.

I am far from persuaded that tea party marchers are truly serious about shrinking government anywhere close to the extent required, nor are they actually willing personally to bear the pain that meaningful federal budget cuts would mean for them.

There is no shortage of voters who say they want the federal budget cut and the size of government reduced. What they (okay, we) really mean is, "I want the federal programs and agencies that benefit me to stay intact and the ones that benefit someone else to be slashed like it's Halloween night in a horror movie." ...

The reason is, I think, that we voters ideologically approve cutting the budget but operationally don't want it done on our own backs.

I hope I am wrong but I fear I am not.