Campaign for What, Erick Erickson?

by Smitty

Erick Erickson picks up Mark Tapscott from The Examiner. The question at hand is where to channel the Tea Party enthusiasm.

Now, Allahpundit has a clip that kind of shows us what were up against, in the form of Pete Stark. Note that the F-bomb at the end is perfectly SFW, since Congressmen are above anything like an FCC regulation, or a tax law, or any other such minutia.

So, as I was saying earlier, the concept of debt is outside my ken. Apparently, personal debt and government debt are completely separate things, and if you don't have a PhD, you're unfit to converse with Pete Stark on such an important topic as economics.

Now, I have a couple of academic credentials, though no PhD among them. Maybe I'll pick up that challenge again later in life. The really big, galactic questions like the universe, and the really small questions like particle physics, are indeed outside current understanding. In between these bookends sit relatively trivial economic questions.

To Rep. Stark I say: let's call your bluff, and see if you're nothing more than some cheap Oz hiding behind a sneering attitude instead of a curtain. Bleg: what's a good book on these financial questions written at between the Dummys and graduate level?

Returning to the Tea Party question, Mr. Erickson, if we just

...sign up for your local political party, encourage and support like minded candidates, and throw the kleptocrats out of office.

my fear is that we get nothing more than a pack of Starks for the trouble: apparatchicks whose lips support conservativism, but, like the Starks, have a slit up the back of the suit for the hand of the plutocrat. Frum doesn't seem to be attacking incumbency very much on his site, but the un-American concentration of power in DC has to be seen as the malignant tumor that will metastasize into tyranny in X decades.

None of the GOP hopefuls (that I've heard of) seem to be much more than cut/paste replacements for the party in power. Is the National Funk Congress waiting for the adrenaline to wear off before it simply declares victory?

And that, concluding, is the dilemma of the GOP: is it going to play American, or political class? Geniuses like Stark, apparently, can play drums, bass, guitar, and sing at the same time. Those of us in the mortal category think this band would rock a little harder if it was other than the All Pete Stark Review. Because even these PhD weenies do miss a note here and there.

If the GOP takes the political class route, then it really is time to say "screw the dumb stuff" and morph the Tea Parties into an actual second party. The GOP and Democrats represent a return to a parliament, of the sort this country was founded to escape. Only this new parliament couldn't find its funk with a flashlight: