I Got Mine

A long story about the tea party folk was on the front page of the Sunday NY Times.  An interesting study in inconsistency -- the interviewees seemed mostly to live on government largess.  The lead interviewee lives on disability checks, and others got by on their unemployment, Medicaid, and other welfare payments.  It was a striking story, and illustrative of a problem in lots of politics.  Palin is another example -- lots of talk about self-sufficiency and bad government, and so on, but Alaska is and always has been the king of welfare.  The state is the most socialist in the country, and would be in disastrous shape if not for very large federal subsidies.  The behavior is nutty, in the not at all technical sense that there is no way to reconcile the announced politics with the lives led.  It is a pervasive problem.  Big government is bad and can nothing right -- and what about the military?  All that bad government, then why police and where were all these people over the preceding 10 or 20 years?  Time after time, it comes to something like 'I deserve the hand-outs, not those other bums', no matter how it gets dressed up.  But, I doubt it matters.  These people, like most, are not interested in whether their views are coherent or consistent, and do not much care that what they say makes no sense.  For the academic -- think Hume.