A tea partyer in favor of the Boehner plan

There. We said it.

Though we may be in the minority in this respect, we believe it proves that the tea party is far from the monolithic entity the mainstream narrative would have you believe. After the "social issues" dust-up from a few months ago and which remains far from being resolved, one would think the media would catch-on but a diverse and vibrant movement full of competing interests and ideas doesn't square with the meme.

We haven't blogged a whole lot about the debt-ceiling deal because, frankly, we believe it mostly to be bu#@sh$t as we've managed to blow through 2 or 3 deadlines already so now we must be on double-secret probation as determined by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Unfortunately his boss let the cat out of the bag by admitting he simply wanted the debt-ceiling raised for a time period that wouldn't inconvenience his election efforts. Good to know. So, with a somewhat manufactured meltdown on our hands, here is why we are supporting the Boehner deal

First, here's Charles Krauthammer from a couple of days ago urging Republicans and the tea party to take the long view:

Lincoln is reputed to have said: I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. I don’t know whether conservatives have God on their side (I keep getting sent to His voice mail), but I do know that they don’t have Kentucky — they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. And under our constitutional system, you cannot govern from one house alone. Today’s resurgent conservatism, with its fidelity to constitutionalism, should be particularly attuned to this constraint, imposed as it is by a system of deliberately separated — and mutually limiting — powers.

It's all about numbers and we simply don't have them yet. The degree of change we would all love to see with respect to spending and entitlement reform is not going to happen immediately and it sure as hell isn't going to happen when Republicans do not control one half of the legislative branch and do not control the White House. It's that simple.

The liberal-Left has spent decades marching through our institutions slowly exerting their influence and slowly entrenching their power to a near-intractable state. Undoing this isn't going to happen overnight. To wit: look at what happened in Wisconsin. A new Republican governor and a newly-minted Republican legislature attempted to enact a budget that had entirely reasonable reforms with respect to changing public employee bargaining conditions and individual benefit contributions and... a complete nationally-televised freak-out ensued where 14 Democratic legislators abandoned their post, fleeing across state lines and where Madison became ground zero to countless protests by AWOL teachers, union members and smelly hippy wanna-bes. This is what we're up against, gang. Simply returning to some degree of fiscal sanity is going to be met with the harshest and most unhinged and toxic opposition.

The Ruling Class and their water-carriers in the legacy media have been lining-up for weeks ready to blame the tea party if a debt-ceiling deal does not get done. Whether or not that blame is fairly leveled is entirely beside the point. We would hate to see the gains that have been made the past couple of years get smashed against the rocks of public opinion because of misapplied ideological purity. Don't get us wrong - we're all for judiciously-applied ideological purity, though, this would not happen to be one of those times.

Got to take the long view on this one. It's dirty business this politics but getting Obama into the unemployment line come January of 2013 is job #1 and backing the Boehner plan is a positive step towards making this happen.

Out of respect, love and admiration, we present fellow SLOBs Temple of Mut, W.C. Varones, Shane Atwell's Blog and Dueling Barstools whose views differ from ours on the debt ceiling.

And The Liberator Today whose take on it more or less lines up with ours.