Sen. John McCain, Barack Obama’s former presidential rival, certainly scored a few points with the White House yesterday, blasting the tea party and current Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann on the Senate floor.
McCain, who accidentally gave birth to the modern tea party phenomenon when he picked extremist Sarah Palin as his running mate, tore into the group at the U.S. Capitol. He labeled them as “foolish” to believe that a balanced budget amendment could pass before the Aug. 2 deadline.
He also read verbatim an article from the Wall Street Journal that referred to the independent activist organization as “tea party hobbits”; a reference to the little people who inhabited Middle Earth in the blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy.
McCain then trained his sights on current GOP presidential front-runner Michele Bachmann for trying to impede the progress made to come to a debt-ceiling agreement with Democrats and the Obama White House.
Hold off, however, on thinking that McCain is an Obama supporter or anything in proximity to an ally. McCain, a former military fighter pilot who endured many years of torture in a Vietnamese prison, was more than likely taking a principled stance. However, Obama may want to grease McCain’s palm for delivering blows to Bachmann and the tea party members that Obama could not.
Tea party activists were not amused and struck back quickly. Staying with the “tea party hobbits” theme, Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, told CNN that “clearly he’s been corrupted by the ring of power,” Meckler said. “What Republicans should be doing is pushing all the way to the line” the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
The Arizona senator is an equal-opportunity blaster. He took Obama and Dems to task, saying Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s operating methods are “full of smoke and mirrors,” and he feels that Obama is leading “from behind” by not offering “a specific plan that perhaps could be considered by both bodies.”
The latter comments did not sting Dems because a conservative Republican is expected to trash everyone on the other side of the political aisle at regular intervals. It is clear, however, that McCain is not very fond of the tea party. But he made his bed when he chose the brunette bubblehead from Alaska as his 2008 running mate. So he’s going to have to lie in that bed from time to time.
–terry shropshire
