What a credulous piece of reporting. No mention of Tea Party being a Koch-seeded astroturf, no mention it was animated by racist hostility to Obama and black people and immigrants in general, no mention of its contempt for women. Complete doofus brain shit nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/…
Except the Tea Party got EXACTLY what it wanted because it’s nominal opposition to deficits was a PR cover for standard anti-poor partisan GOP politics. The net result of 2010 takeover was gerrymandering, anti-abortion laws, anti-environmentalism, taking healthcare from millions.
“Tea Party failed because deficits are high” is supposed to be some cool liberal gotcha but it glosses over how astroturfed and phony the whole thing was.
NYT has incentive to keep buying the transparently bogus line the Tea Party cared about deficits b/c their reporting in 2009 ate it up. They didn’t spot a Bircherism Koch job at the time and think it best to simply ignore it now and view it all as organic “populist” uprising.
Imagine in the year of lord 2019 still thinking a bunch of foaming lifelong republicans—virtually all of whom now back tax cut and spend happy Trump—were animated not by the election of the first black president but a sudden, genuine and race-blind concern with “deficits”.
In Dec 2017—of the 30 remaining representatives who composed the initial 2010 Tea Party caucus—every single one of them voted for Trump’s deficit-bloating tax cuts. They never cared about deficits and we have proof because they voted that way for 9 years. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u…
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