Tea Party: Still Alive?

I don't know about other areas, but I think I can say with a good amount of certainty the Tea Party is dead here in WNY.

I managed to find one of their internet hangouts, courtesy of some Google-Fu after having an encounter with a stumper for one the local Tea Party darlings:  Mike Madigan.  I was, shall I say, less than impressed by his supporter.  I did chat with Madigan a bit personally, and he comes across as sensible, even though my political views differ from his somewhat (Actually, a lot).

I still have yet to find out what his platform is, however.  Except "Democrats bad!  Vote me!"  Sorry, that kind of nonsense just doesn't fly with me.  Anyone who knows me knows that I don't bother voting for someone based on the ballot line they sit on.  I want to know actionable plans that a candidate is working towards.  Madigan has shown me very little of any plan, other than "Whatever a democrat has done, I want to undo".

So, as I was saying, I meandered over to their internet hangout.  It's over on Meetup (meetup.com/TEA-New-York/).  The place is a ghost town, with only one person really posting "News".  Their last even had 5 people attending.  Hell, I think the Green Party is more active, to be honest.

So, I can say with some certainty, the Tea Party is just as well dead here in WNY.  And, I think the reason being is they vote labels, and not substance.  While, I'll admit so do many voters here in WNY, but they seemed to support contradictory labels, and refuse to examine it.  That, and they seem to have some whackadoodles gravitating to them, like Jim Ostrowski (A subject of another blog post, on another day).

I have to admit, I am kind of sad about this.  When I first got wind of the Tea Party, I thought, "Hey!  This is pretty good!  Maybe they'll affect some change in the GOP, and I could start considering GOP'ers again!"

Reality was, less than expected, shall we say.

What we got, was the extreme fringe of the right, that up to know, was basically ignored (With good reason.  Same reason the extreme left fringes are ignored).  They were then embraced by the GOP, pushing them even further out into right field.

Head over to that Meetup, and see if you can make any sense out those folks, and come back and let me know what you think.