Tories, Tea Partiers, Nazis: Chris Huhne lashes out at the forces of evil

‘What’s worse than the Nazi Party? The Tea Party!’

When he lays into the ‘Tory Tea Party tendency’, I’m guessing that Chris Huhne means me. I am, as far as I know, the only elected Conservative actually to have organised a Tea Party – that is, an anti-tax rally (see here). Not that the Environment Secretary seems to have our views about tax in mind. Rather, he is using ‘Tea Partiers’ in the sense that most British Lefties do, to mean ‘horrid people’. The Environment Secretary usually claims that his opponents are like Nazis. This time, though, he’s taking off the gloves. Never mind Adolf Hitler; these Right-wing Tories are like… like… Sarah Palin!

The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the ‘Yeah, but what they’re really saying…’ tendency. The ‘tea’ stands for ‘Taxed Enough Already‘ but, if you relied on the BBC and the Guardian for your information, you might not know it. Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it’s against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They’d much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda (see, for example, this unintentionally hilarious Grauniad piece).

Despite having been told in no uncertain terms what to think, most Americans remain stubbornly of the view that the Tea Party’s central contention is moderate…..

(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk …

via Tories, Tea Partiers, Nazis: Chris Huhne lashes out at the forces of evil.