June 26th, 2012, the voters of Utah will vote for candidates to be the standard-bearers for their respective parties in the run for many federal and state offices which will take place this November. The most contested of all of these primary races will apparently be the primary race for the Republican nomination for United States Senate in which Senator Orrin G. Hatch, who has held the seat since 1977, is being challenged by Tea Party-backed state legislator Dan Liljenquist. While certain polls predict that Hatch might succeed in holding off Liljenquist and so avoid the fate which befell his former (or soon-to-be former) Senate companions Bob Bennett and Richard Lugar, Liljenquist will still be able to claim a moral victory in the primary, even if it does not include winning the Utah GOP’s nomination for United States Senate.
Liljenquist will win a moral victory in his challenge against Hatch by the fact that his candidacy has exposed the extent to which big-government neo-conservatives have sought, and in many cases succeeded, to infiltrate and claim leadership positions in the small-government-demanding Tea Party movement. Hatch has backed many laws unpopular with the Tea Party movement during his time in the Senate, among them the TARP bailout, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (which he co-sponsored with the late Senator Edward Kennedy), the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bridge to Nowhere, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, Medicare expansion, raising the debt limit and many other laws of that nature. Yet, despite all of Hatch’s support in favor of these things which the Tea Party despises, there is a very large lineup of so-called “Tea Party leaders” who have backed Hatch’s re-election bid and that should be disturbing to the grassroots Tea Party organizers. The list of these supposed “Tea Party leaders” includes names such as Tea Party Express co-leader Sal Russo, two members of the neo-conservative “talk radio mafia”: Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, and, most disturbingly of all, former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. With such Tea Party-oriented names as these lining up against Liljenquist, is it any wonder he is trailing in the polls to Hatch?
Win or lose, however, what Liljenquist has done by challenging Hatch in the primary and so forcing these so-called “Tea Party leaders” to choose sides in the primary battle between himself and Hatch, is expose the neo-conservative infiltration of the so-called “Tea Party leadership positions” for all to see. This fact had originally begun to show during Congressman Ron Paul’s 2012 candidacy for President, but many tried to dismiss it as evidence of the Tea Party being infiltrated by the neo-conservatives by following Rush Limbaugh’s lead when he proclaimed “Ron Paul is NOT the Tea Party and he is not the founder of the Tea Party”. Limbaugh is wrong of course as evidenced by the fact that the Tea Party movement arose “from the ashes of Paul’s 2008 Presidential Campaign” to quote one political commentator and the evidence to support this lies in the fact that Ron Paul organized the fantastically successful “Tea Party Moneybomb” on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in 2007 which is the first recorded Tea Party protest. All that aside, however, no one can dispute Liljenquist’s Tea Party credentials as opposed to where Hatch has stood over the past several years and so in a primary such as this, the true Tea Party supporters would be and should be endorsing, supporting and voting for Liljenquist. As people such as Levin, Hannity, Russo and Palin have failed to support Liljenquist, this shows them for what they truly are: neo-conservative infiltrators of the Tea Party movement.
Liljenquist’s moral victory in exposing these infiltrators for the rest of the nation to see makes a victory by Hatch in the primary a pyrrhic victory for the neo-conservatives in their attempt to infiltrate the Tea Party. Their opposition to Liljenquist has shown them for who they truly are and the news should be shouted from the rooftops to the many Tea Parties across America that the Tea Party members must no longer look to these neo-conservative infiltrators for leadership, but to the people who actually stand for the true principles of the Tea Party and will back those candidates who are going to stand by those principles of limited government both at home and abroad.
© 2012 The Subsidiarity Times. All rights reserved. This material may not be re-published, re-broadcast, re-written or re-distributed without written permission from blog author.
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