The Tea Party Failed

Bankrupt Solyndra asked a bankruptcy judge to approve 24 bonuses averaging around $500,000 a piece. This incredible request comes after the company took over half a billion in tax money and squandered it. I suppose when you have the never to take that kind of money and waste it you also have the nerve to try and pay bonuses to employees rather than your creditors. The whole situation is absolutely absurd but it fits right in with the mentality that one should expect with venture socialism.

Mitt Romney defended Bain Capital the other day by suggesting that what Bain did was little different than what Obama did when he took over the auto industry. On some level he’s correct. Bain buys companies on the cheap, restructures them and sells them for a profit. Obama took over the auto industry, restructured it and handed it off to unions. They’re similar but in so many ways they’re different. It is foolhardy to believe that they’re one in the same. Yet Romney suggests that they are and never acknowledged any of the differences.

In comparing Bain and the government takeover of the auto industry, Romney accepts the premise of the auto take over. He didn’t criticize the auto takeover, he didn’t suggest that Bain was better because it used private capital rather than the power of the state. He doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with what Obama did. And therein lies the problem with Mitt Romney. He sees no problem with the sort of venture socialism that gave us a massive auto takeover, restructuring and handoff to unions. Sure, he might say that it could have been restructured better. But he accepts the premise of government takeovers.

It makes one wonder if Romney is really opposed to venture socialism deals like Solyndra. No doubt Romney would criticize Solyndra and the other failed venture socialism loans. He may even criticize the idea of funding green technology via venture socialism. But you’ll never hear him criticize the idea of venture socialism. He generally seems to support it.

Meanwhile Romney is fending off attacks from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, who have spent a week calling Bain a capitalist vulcher. Conservatives are left wondering whether Obama has been successful at moving the country to the left. Here we have the presumptive GOP nominee who supports auto takeovers and all sorts of socialist intervention, we have his opponents attacking capitalism and the one candidate who stands for free markets takes the Obama position internationally even further to the left. Obama’s policies have failed the American people but they’ve been successful at moving even the GOP to the far left.

For all the rallies, for all the blogs and for all the phone calls made to Congress the Tea Party has been an abysmal failure. It was successful at winning the GOP the House and it was successful at making Obama unpopular. But it has utterly failed to move the GOP to the right. We have a nominee who is a moderate, his GOP opponents are attacking capitalism. Is that not the sign a failed Tea Party? The end result of this failure is that we’ll end up with a President Romney or Obama’s re-election and thus we’ll have more Solyndra’s, more wasted money and no conservative change. In four years we’ll be sitting around reading a story about another failed venture socialist company handing out bonuses and we’ll wonder where it all went wrong.