The Tea Party's Weimar Tinge

One of the weirdest aspects of TP ideology is that Obama deliberately created and facilitated an economic and financial crisis in order to allow the government to take over the entire economy to turn the US socialist. Bush, of course, did TARP - as any responsible president would have. A stimulus package which even AEI concedes help put a bottom on the economy and a bank bailout during a potential financial crisis that, if allowed to spiral down, could have begun a Second Great Depression: these are obvious, debatable but mainstream measures to cope with crisis. Somehow Tim Geithner does not come off as a Leninist to me. But the invaluable Weigel - a sane libertarian last time I checked - noticed something truly disturbing:

On Friday night, Andrew Breitbart introduced “Generation Zero,” a splashy documentary that argues that the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues.

Footage of dancing hippies and pictures of Saul Alinksy the radical organizer who has become a household name among Tea Parties were intercut with conservative writers like Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, historian Victor Davis Hanson, and Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, explaining how left-wing theorists had long wanted to bring down capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. In a breakout session on immigration policy, Tancredo explained to Tea Partiers that Democrats wanted immigration reform in order to enfranchise millions of new voters to put them in perpetual power.

“Remember when Rahm Emanuel said ‘You never let a good crisis go to waste?’” said Lisa Mei Norton, a Tea Party activist and singer who opened the convention on Thursday night. “Now, what did he mean by that?”