I think the US militarism is not explained by Support Our Troops sentiments, but more by the large number of Americans who really enjoy having the US as the world's belligerent bully. International law and the suffering of other people doesn't matter in this imperialistic view.

And the fact that this is working against the interests of the average American, to enrich a relative handful of corporations and individuals, is utterly lost on the war supporters as long as they are emotionally manipulated.

We have become the world of "1984", with continuous warfare and omnipresent government spying -- we can even compare Fox News agitators to the Two Minutes Hate of that novel.

For me, I find their constant talks of cutting spending and slashing budgets annoying, as they never seem to actually say what significant cuts will be made. They just seem really misinformed or wilfully ignorant.

I try and study American politics quite closely, so maybe I missed it, but I have never seen any Tea Partier say they want to cut Medicare or Social Security. Nor, as you pointed out, do they want to slash defence spending.

I really don't understand it myself, but alright, whatever helps them sleep at night.

It is interested how Americans are irked at the rest of the world being judgemental and quick to jump to conclusions while they have been doing(are still doing) the same about every God damn country and religion (most recently Islam) that does not fit into their description of the World.

1) "Liberals have appropriately asked why it did not start with President Bush"

The best explanation of the Tea Party movement is that they are being used to crush what remains of the pillars of liberalism (ie: not much) in the US.

This destruction took place under Clinton, where he basically sold out the liberal support to big business. People are right that all liberals running for office/in office, are basically hypocrites. They can't genuinely represent their support because they are beholden to the same interests as Republicans.

Tea Party is a right-wing movement that there is no effective liberal counter to, it will tear apart the carcass of what remains of the Democratic Party (that does not mean it will destroy the left, but the left itself has nowhere to go now, witness the dismay of the progressive bloc re: the presidency of Obama).

Without Clinton's dismal sellout, the liberals would still have a reason to exist, but they simply don't. In the UK, Tony Blair led a similar process, so there are now three main parties with basically identical corporate sponsors and identical assumptions regarding economic policy, foreign policy, etc.

The Tea Party's economic view is both contradictory, as they supprt 'small government' but permanent war, and, in the case of middle-class Tea Party supporters, will abolish what little security they still enjoy.

2) "For as the United States has moved closer to a European model on health insurance,"

Factually false, the Obamacare bill did no such thing. The moment the bill was passed, stock in the healtchare corporations jumped massively, not the result that a move towards a European model would generate. It was a huge sop to the healthcare industry, end of.

People want the U.S. to be [like] Obama: He's not overly patriotic, he's not talking about his Christian faith all the time, he talks about science." The Tea Party, on the other hand, "is the U.S. we don't want the U.S. to be," Alling said.
Very very well said

The article is good and does as modern journalism generally does, admits that if some group believes something, then their ideas deserve a public hearing with limited or no filtration. The current definition of objectivism. The story also notes to those who would marginalize this group that a full 1 in 5 now self-identify as a Tea Partiers. But what the story fails to point out is that 4 out of 5 Americans do not. These are actually the same statistics that we could have gathered a year ago, or ten years ago, or even farther back, just by applying some other labels popularly in use at the time. Indeed the statistics on liberalism versus conservatism haven’t really shifted at all for decades. So what’s the different today? Only one thing changes – even while it always stays the same – and that’s media coverage. This article is another example of trying to understand a movement simply because it can be named. Well, and because it includes some crazy characters. Crazies are great for drawing attention to a movement.

So who are they really? More than one poll has revealed that the Tea Party demographics are built first and foremost by self-identified Social Conservatives. As Social Conservatives had previously been in the 12-to-15% range, we must admit that the Tea Party has ‘grown’ from that base. But this supposed broadening of appeal is nothing more than the inclusion of additional conservatives who are attracted to ‘fiscal responsibility’ arguments that are more prominent in the Tea Party incarnation. In other words there has been a shift in sub-group identification internal to conservatism. Given the recent and striking failure of policies directly forwarded by conservatives, the fact that they’re squirming for a place to recover their fighting stance is not too surprising.

Thirty years ago when Reagan was elected, self-identified conservatives made up roughly a third of the American electorate. Back in ’93, when the Contract with America ushered in 14 years of conservative rule over American legislation; conservatives were, yes, roughly a third of the electorate. Today conservatives are, you guessed it, still roughly a third. This fact is often lost on Americans and probably everyone in the world given that conservatives have dominated almost everything about American politics for the last 30 years. Despite the emergence of a new self-identification label, now called the Tea Party, conservatism is not growing in America; it is in many quarters quite reviled. If you’re wondering how conservatives have so much access to power when they don’t have the numbers, you should also realize that liberals are only 22% of the electorate.

Self-identified centrists (or moderates) make up the rest or nearly half the voters. This group gives everyone a hearing at election time, but first they must filter through the screaming and other media nonsense. Despite everything that the American right likes to say about a liberal mainstream media, the conservative media system in America is a well-oiled machine that drowns out almost everything else. Remember too that our centrist voter can only pick from the candidates offered and most often this is a stark choice between left and right. Centrist candidates do emerge and generally do well, but then they must pick their alliances within government given the same stark choices. And the media game continues. As detractors pointed out and even Bush staff members have admitted, the Bush administration while in office was more concerned with endless ideological campaigning than it was with the details of actually governing. This shoves everyone on all sides of the political debate into a perpetual media cycle with no escape.

To understand the strangeness of this situation, consider it from the point of view of centrists in America. Some percentage of Americans (we can’t know exactly how many because the media doesn’t cover any viewpoint that is not being explicitly forwarded by a labeled group or interest) recognize that the collapse of the world economy came as the culminating failure of neo-liberal economics. Everything from its abhorrence of regulation to its outsized adoration of markets to its refusal/reluctance to tax income progressively were and are staples of conservative and Republican thought. All of that played a big role in what just happened, but not all Americans understand that. The reporter from China in the story above can rest easily. There is little indication that the Tea Party understands anything about the role of globalism or the trade deficit in the decline of America’s fortunes.

That the rightwing in America considers Greece and Spain as examples of European failure is ironic. The truth is that had America run its business and finances more sensibly during this long (and perhaps continuing?) dominance of conservatism, Greece probably and most certainly Spain would not be facing any crises at all today. This is not to excuse mistakes in either country, but it was the failure of America to regulate business and finance appropriately and to ameliorate capitalism’s handful of self-destructive distortions that put us all in the soup.

For the center in America, yes, the Tea Party is annoying, but it’s also frightening. Not because it’s ‘crazy,’ but because it would seem that it’s largely unaware of anything that matters. The center here believes that real changes need to be made sooner than later to address the real problems, the real causes of failure. And looking at the current incarnation of conservatism from almost every angle it appears to be a well-orchestrated effort to keep any of that from happening. I guess we’ll see once again how much damage a ruling minority can cause (this time 1 in 5?). It is again ironic, that at the outset of the Tea Party movement its supporters claimed they were victims of taxation without representation. In fact this group in its various forms has to be the singularly most over-represented group in American history.

When explaining to the "French" or other foreigners, you are, as this article describes, explaining it to foreign journalists. Journalists are an elite section of society, so explaining it to them is not the same as explaining it to the non-elite news consumers in those countries.

For example, the recent passage of a law extending the retirement age from 60 to 62 in France is a sign that the French public is becoming more conservative and that their politicians (and hence elites) are becoming more conservative (at least fiscally) with them. Sarkozy himself is an example of a trend towards more conservative values. And while the passage of the new retirement age and the election of Sarkozy aren't signs of a Frenc Tea Party, they do share with the tea party concerns over fiscal responsibility.

So it is likely that the French, the Germans, and maybe a lot of Greeks for that matter probably "get it" when it comes to the Tea Party--not all of it, but perhaps better than some of the journalists who cover it for them.

Blair is almost a dirty word in the United Kingdom but highly regarded in the US. Obama seems to be becoming his mirror image.

People are right that all tatil liberals running for office/in office, are basically hypocrites. They sinema can't genuinely represent their support because they are beholden to klip izle the same interests tutune son as Republicans.