I find it hard to believe , but the National Tea Party is nothing but a shill for their Republican masters.
On election night of the New Hampshire primary, a leader of the Tea Party (I won’t mention her name) appeared on Fox News and claimed Mit Romney was a conservative the Tea Party could rally around. Huh? The same Mit Romney who gave his fellow liberal denizens in Massachusetts “Romney Care” the foreshadow of “Obama Care”? The same Mit Romney who fails to take a firearms survey offered by the Gun Owners of America and who supports the banning of semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines. Mit Romney who can find not one single government agency he would abolish? Not the IRS, Homeland (Secret State Police) Security, Education, Agriculture, Medicaid (Socialized Medicine), etc… Not one? This is a man the Tea Party can rally around?
And what about Newt Gingrich. He leads in many polls among “Tea Party” activist.
Last May, he criticized as “right-wing social engineering’’ the proposal of Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, to convert Medicare into a voucher program so seniors could privately purchase insurance. Following a firestorm of protest from conservatives, Gingrich quickly backed off, apologized to Ryan, and said his “words were inaccurate and unfortunate.’’
Newt on firearms? (From Gun Owners of America)
After initially having a Pro-Gun record, his GOA rating quickly dropped to well below the “C-level.” In 1996, the Republican-led Congress passed the “gun free school zones act,” creating criminal safe zones like Virginia Tech, where the only person armed was a murderous criminal. Speaker Newt Gingrich voted for the bill containing this ban.
The same bill also contained the now infamous Lautenberg gun ban, which lowered the threshold for losing one’s Second Amendment rights to a mere misdemeanor.[2] Gun owners could, as a result of this ban, lose their gun rights forever for non-violent shouting matches that occurred in the home — and, in many cases, lose their rights without a jury trial.
While a legislator might sometimes vote for a spending bill which contains objectionable amendments, that was clearly NOT the case with Newt Gingrich in 1996. Speaking on Meet the Press in September of that year, Speaker Gingrich said the Lautenberg gun ban was “a very reasonable position.” He even refused to cosponsor a repeal of the gun ban during the next Congress — despite repeated requests to do so.
Also in 1996, Speaker Gingrich cast his vote for an anti-gun terror bill which contained several harmful provisions. For example, one of the versions he supported (in March of that year) contained a DeLauro amendment that would have severely punished gun owners for possessing a laser sighting device while committing an infraction as minor as speeding on a federal reservation. (Not only would this provision have stigmatized laser sights, it would have served as a first step to banning these items.) Another extremely harmful provision was the Schumer amendment to “centralize Federal, State and Local police.”
Newt on other Issues (Boston Globe)
For years, Gingrich supported the concept of a mandate for individuals of means to buy health insurance, similar to the provision in both the Massachusetts health care plan and President Obama’s health care overhaul. Gingrich favored a market-based cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions in 2007, but two years later said he opposed such a plan.
Gingrich suggested in one debate that Democrat Barney Frank, former House Financial Services Committee chairman, should be jailed for lax oversight of Freddie Mac, the quasi-public mortgatge underwriting giant that many conservatives blame for the collapse of the housing market.
It was later reported that Gingrich was paid up to $1.8 milllion in consulting fees by Freddie Mac. Gingrich insisted he was hired as a historian, but Bloomberg News reported that former agency officials said he was retained to “build bridges’’ to congressional Republicans and conservatives “seeking to dismantle’’ Freddie Mac.
In 2008, Gingrich appeared in a commercial with then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi urging action on climate change. In a recent Fox News interview, Gingrich called the commercial “one of the dumbest things I’ve done in recent years’’ and said “the evidence is not complete’’ to support global warming.
I thought the Tea Party represented smaller government, less intrusion into your life and liberty. Only one candidate in the Republican field represents the Constitution as given to us by our Founding Fathers. Here is a hint: It’s not Romney, Newt, Perry, Huntsman or Santorum.
The talking heads like Sean Hannity and Mark Levine like to taut themselves as “Conservatives”, but what are they really conserving? Do they really want less government? Weren’t these the same two who applauded the Presidency of George W. Bush. The man who gave us more Federal government intrusion into our lives than any other President in history until Obama came along? Will they applaud if Mit Romeny is elected and rest peacefully now that a “Conservative” is in the White House?
Wake Up “Tea Party” you are being hoodwinked! Romney and Newt et al. are NOT conservative, unless it is for conserving the status quo. There is only one choice to restore Constitutional government. Deep down you know who that is.
