Why am I picking on the Tea Party all the time?

I've always considered myself a middle-of-the road voter - fiscally conservative and socially liberal.  When the Republicans replaced "tax and spend" with "borrow and spend" from 2001 through 2009, they totally lost me.  And it's hard to love the Democrats; they're disorganized and irresolute, and, let's face it, most of the time they can't find their asses with both hands and a Boy Scout troup. But I find the Tea Party just plain offensive.

For the most part, the Tea Partiers seem to be a fairly homogenous group: older, mostly white, affluent or at least financially comfortable, and defensive.    They project an air of self-righteous entitlement; they believe that they've earned everything they have (including Social Security, Medicare, pensions, disability, health insurance, etc.) all by themselves, and they're not going to contribute one cent of what's "theirs" to help anyone else.  They seem to believe that sharing responsibility for the common welfare is socialism.  Most of them appear to be morally offended that the President is black; they're disrespectful and seem willing to believe that he's a racist, Muslim socialist with an anti-American agenda.  They don't seem to like anyone who doesn't look and think exactly the way they do, and they want "their" America back.

The Tea Partiers believe that Obama and Pelosi have saddled our grandchildren with a crippling deficit attributable to Wall Street bailouts, bank bailouts, car company bailouts, and useless economic stimulus programs.  They are self-described deficit hawks who claim that they are motivated by a desire to save their grandchildren from the burden of the Federal government's enormous debt.  I would be willing to applaud their concern, but for the fact that ALL of their deficit solutions involve eliminating Federal agencies, programs and expenditures that benefit those less fortunate than themselves.  Meanwhile, they are unalterably opposed to paying higher taxes to increase government revenues (which seems like a necessary part of any plan to reduce the deficit).  In fact, their entire purpose is to keep their taxes at the current historically low rates put in place by the Bush tax cuts.  Their name says it all:  they are the Taxed Enough Already Party, a party of smug, comfortable hypocrites who don't really give a damn about anyone else.

And that's why I'm always picking on the Tea Party.