What is it about Tea Party Republicans?

These are the same peo­ple who turned town hall meet­ings into near-​​riots through­out 2009. They are the ones who were big on car­ry­ing guns to polit­i­cal ral­lies. They fan­ta­sized about armed rebellion.

There seems to be a pat­tern here of pol­i­tics through intim­i­da­tion. It was repeated in the  bud­get talks last week. Shout­ing “Cut it or shut it!” they nego­ti­ated Fed­eral spend­ing as an ulti­ma­tum, try­ing to alter our national pri­or­i­ties on mat­ters such as med­ical care for the poor, clean air, Health Care Reform, NPR, finan­cial reform — and threat­en­ing to shut down the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment if they didn’t get their way. (more…)