It is astounding, insulting, and demeaning for the Jewish Journal to promote overt denunciation of the Tea Party movement in its pages, from "Good Leaders" by Rob Eshman to Steve Greenburg's crass and sophomoric send-up of the movement.
Regarding Eshman's partisan hack-job, that "The go-to assumption of many people on the right is that American Jews follow singly, unthinking liberal line" is the only contemptible and contestable assumption.
There is nothing illogical about forcing government to consider future obligations in light of paying for current ones, contrary to Eshman's contention. The clean raising of the debt ceiling 70 + times over the previous decades without any principled oppositions is the very negligence which is bringing this nation to dire fiscal straits.
It is patently offensive for Eshman to conclude that Republicans made no effort to compromise. The Republicans offered a number of budget plans with spending cuts, the Democrats in the Senate none, and Obama just pouted, threatened, and refused. It was the Wall Street Journal' baseless allegations which tarred the Tea Party as nasty terrorists taking hostage the debt ceiling debate at the expense of the rest of the country. What about the Democratically-controlled Congress which rammed through an unpopular medical mandate and useless stimulus plan which the American people did not want, and went so far as to storm the halls of Congress to prevent?
When Eshman assails the Tea Party caucus' role in debt-ceiling negotiations with words like "hostile" and "ledge", he forgets that these are baseless descriptions leveled by another news organ, not the Tea Party Movement itself!
And then there's farcical sound bite that the Tea Party is "anti-government" . . .The upstart movement blossoming all over the country wants to revert the federal government back to its constitutionally proscribed powers, not do away with government entirely. No one wants to force people to dig in their backyards for water or police their own neighborhoods. Tea Partiers like myself simply want government to stick to doing as little as outlined in the Constitution, nothing more. And consider the track record of the Untied States government in fulfilling extraneous functions. . .not very good, to say the least.
The Tea Party movement–and the Republican Party–do promote "strong, effective, and fiscally sound government that provides for the security of the nation, opportunity to the entrepreneur, and help to the needy." The Republicans are the only ones willing to acknowledge that there will be no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid unless drastic changes are made to the structure, timing, and disbursement of future payments.
As for Steve Greenburg's obscenly blunt political cartoon, the Tea Party does not ally itself with the Republican Party, nor vice versa. Its core mandate of reinstating constitutional government with needed cuts in spending and entitlement reform harldy make out to "Take no Prisoners" and "Obstruct Obama." On the contrary, it is the President's misguided fiscal policies which are obstructing the economic recovery of this country. If the Democrats in Congress were willing face to face the stark reality of fiscaly insolvency descending on this nation in the face of rising entitlement costs and increasing burdensome regulation, then there would have been far less obstruction. Editor-in-Chief Rob Eshmen may not be "knee-jerk liberal", but the offical political cartoonist for the newspaper certainly is, and crassly so. Perhaps an alternative visual viewpoint, like Dennis Prager's verbal one, would be welcome.