It’s an expensive party

Once again, tea party reactionaries have demonstrated that they’d rather burn a dollar than invest a dime, and once again, the Democrats appear about to cave in the face of what amounts to state-sponsored terrorism. I speak, of course, about the temporary partial shutdown of the FAA, forced by tea party-backed conservatives over their demand for $16.5 million in annual cuts to a program that ensures necessary air-travel service to rural communities.

The cost of this partial shutdown in lost revenues (pocketed by the airlines) was $35.7 million. A day. That’s right folks, these “fiscal conservatives” literally gave away $1.2 billion of your money just so they could gut a $16.5 million lifeline to rural America, and the so-called “compromise” on the debt ceiling is even worse.

If these tea partyers want to live in a country with decaying and inadequate infrastructure, a country wherein all the wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of an unelected elite, a country wherein ultraconservative peddlers of some twisted perversion of religion wield inordinate power, there’s a place for that. It’s called the Middle East. (I’ll even help them pack.) But don’t let them turn America into a Third World country.

Brad Thompson

Spokane