Of Tea Parties and Tabrett Bethell

As I've been watching the slaughter of the primary season, I continually find myself thinking of a passage from a book series I first picked up about a year ago and reflecting on who's actually living it.

For those of you who have never read any of Terry Goodkind's work, think Lord of the Rings spliced with Atlas Shrugged/The Fountainhead. It was made into a recently cancelled series by Disney, which, despite majestic views of New Zealand and incredibly hot women in leather (there are some good scenes on YouTube), couldn't last to a third season. Anyway, the first book gives some of the back story, and how a great wizard helped the good guys, the Midlands, to defeat the great evil that threatened them. But then, after the great evil was dispatched, the council governing the Midlands ignored the wizard's advice on a bunch of issues, and took some of his authority away from him. Like most bureaucrats, the wizard was furious, and he came to believe that his efforts and sacrifices on the Midlands' behalf had been wasted. So he pronounced his terrible punishment: He was going to leave them to suffer the consequences of their own actions. If they were so smart, he said, they didn't need him anymore, and so he was checking out. He cast a spell so that no one could remember his name or what he looked like, and emigrated to a land without any magic to retire in peace and quiet.

Of course, it wouldn't be much of a novel if that was all that happened, but I won't spoil the ending for you. Regardless, if I were a moderate to conservative Republican, I'd feel a lot like the old wizard. People like Mike Castle, who has been a good and loyal Republican for decades, are suddenly being told that they're not good enough, not conservative enough, by a mob of people whose anger blinds them to any rational analysis of the issues facing this country. Instead, the Tea Party faithful choose a woman whose only claim to fame is having received the endorsement of the village idiot of Wasilla, Alaska. If I were Mike Castle, I'd say something like "Fine; if this is what the party faithful really want, and they're willing to eschew experienced leadership for populist rhetoric, then let 'em. Alpha Mike Foxtrot. Catch you on the flipside."

A lot of these Tea Partiers are going to lose in the general election, which will give people like Castle, Lazio and Specter the chance to sit back and say "see I told you so." For the paleoconservative forces driving the Tea Party, I think this would be the best possible outcome. What would probably be a lot worse, both for the Right and for the nation, would be if people like O'Donnell and Rand Paul actually do get elected: When they can't legislate a balanced budget by bringing back the gold standard or terminating the Department of Energy, their entire house of cards is going to collapse, and repairing the damage is going to be even worse than the 2008-09 fiscal crisis.

The ironic thing, of course, is that Democrats went through the abandonment issues I'm describing ten years ago, with Al Gore in the role of the wizard. Liberals couldn't make up their mind whether to support Gore or the village idiot of Detroit, Michigan, and so ended up giving the country over to the village idiot of Crawford, Texas. Gore, for the most part, said, "Meh. You didn't want my advice; no problem. Americans can just deal with the consequences of their own stupidity." And despite calls from various corners to run again in 2004 and 2008, Gore has largely stayed out of partisan hackery, while making a lot of money in between guest spots on Futurama.

And so, as we enter the final stretch of politicking in the 2010 midterms, I sit back with my coffee and reflect yet again on how often life imitates art.

If only it came with more Tabrett Bethells in MordSith costumes.