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Letter: Tea Party extremes


The Tea Party is made up of well-heeled middle-class people with secure, well-paying jobs with good health care coverage who don't give a darn about anyone but themselves.

What they mean by taking back their country is to win for themselves lower taxes and all government restrictions on business practices that benefit no one but others as self-serving as themselves! Special privilege is their mantra and most certainly not community service and ministry though they like to identify themselves as super-patriots and even devout Christians and Jews.

They are all self-serving to the extreme and exhibit no shame in proclaiming the fact because basically they are to a man all rugged individualists who believe that they have raised themselves by their own bootstraps, with no help from anyone else, to a position of power and prestige.

They want a return to the lawlessness of the Old West with the moral standards that were then available to use their pistols and rifles to attain their ends with no law and order to prevent them.

They see a return to Deadman's Gulch as their goal for a resurrected social order before civilization brought sheriffs and judges, teachers and clergy to establish peace and equality among all citizens to the frontier. But this, of course, required taxes for roads instead of trails, for courts instead of hangmen's juries, for medical centers instead of a slug of whiskey and bowie knife for a doctor's practice. Lay preachers were everywhere and the most booming businesses in town were the local mortuary, the Last Chance Tavern and the brothel upstairs.

This is what they really want and they have Sarah Palin (Annie Oakley) and Michelle Bachmann (Calamity Jane) as their torchbearers. God save us all!

Lee Paulson