Sunday, September 26, 2010

Wyoming already has its Tea Party candidate in Rep. Cynthia Lummis

David Wendt, Democratic Party candidate for Wyoming's lone U.S. House seat, wrote a fine editorial for Sunday's Casper Star-Tribune. In it, he wonders why Rep. Cynthia Lummis has sided with the Tea Party when that's definitely not Wyoming's cup of tea.

In his words:

Here in Wyoming we didn’t have to wait until the primary election was over to have our Tea Party candidate. This summer Rep. Cynthia Lummis had already signed on as a member within the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives of the 28-member "Tea Party caucus." Others of this group included Rep. Joe Barton, who felt it necessary to apologize to BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Do we really want to marginalize our state by sending back as our one representative in the House of Representatives, a member of this extremist caucus? What does the Tea Party know or care about Wyoming’s interests? On issues near and dear to Wyoming, like keeping the Wyoming Range off limits to drilling, Rep. Lummis has distanced herself from even her traditional conservative colleagues, Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, by opposing this cherished legacy of the late Sen. Craig Thomas.

The Tea Party has reaped a harvest of fear in national politics. They have played upon legitimate fears of economic insecurity, government overreaching, terrorism, and illegal immigration to create a harvest of anti-tax hysteria and religious intolerance. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of God and country, they purport to "take our country back" from their fellow Americans, as if all those who don’t share their views are traitors.

But is fear what we are about here in Wyoming? We pride ourselves on our frontier heritage. We have always brought to our challenges a spirit of self-reliance and courage to face the unknown. Time and again, we have summoned forth the initiative to respond to such challenges as the struggle for women’s equality, the preservation of public spaces and natural resources, and the fulfillment of our role as the nation’s energy workhorse.
Read the rest at http://trib.com/news/opinion/forums/article_6cee1ea1-c2e6-5887-9528-714efe6833e5.html

Read the full list of the members of the Tea Party Caucus at Michele Bachmann's (yes, that Michele Bachmann) web site at http://bachmann.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=199440

Rep. Lummis, the company you keep!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

See if I get this right? You Dems actully think "bonus babies" from Jackson (Ladd, Trauner, Wendt) have the same working class values that you do? I and my father worked union jobs for years - guess who drove the Cadillacs and who drove the second hand Chevys? My father never had a new car; the union guys had a new one almost every year. See through the smoke

Michael Shay said...

Still working on getting my first Caddy, either new or used. I did buy one new car, a little red Ford, and my wife bought a Saturn Ion a few years back. I'm not sure which union guys you knew, but all the ones I knew were Catholics with big families and one used station wagon. "Rich union guys" are in the same urban myth land wherein dwells "welfare moms driving Caddies." Get real.