DN Editorial: TEA & NO SYMPATHY: The fringe right has pushed us to 'a new low in American history'

THE LAWLESS rebels that have disrupted governments in Rwanda, Libya and Syria, to name just a few, are not much different from the lawless rebels who have not only disrupted the U.S. government, but may do far worse.

In fact, the tea party conservatives that helped shut down the government earlier this month may be more dangerous, because they could cause trauma around the world if the United States is unable to borrow and starts defaulting on its loans; that could happen tomorrow if agreement is not found on a new debt ceiling.

Yesterday, the battle over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling lurched forward, then back, as both Senate and House tried to find agreement.

As if the damage they inflicted wasn't enough, tea partiers actually sank to new lows when Larry Klayman, founder of tea-party group Freedom Watch, told a crowd at a veterans' protest in Washington this weekend: "I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience . . . to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up."

Fringe Queen and King Sarah Palin and Sen. Ted Cruz were in that crowd of military veterans who were trying to enter memorials closed because of the government shutdown; Palin claimed that Obama was using veterans to make a political point.

In fact, the opposite is true: It is these fringe conservatives who have forced the shutdown of government, including not only war memorials, but medical research and NASA, and caused the furloughs of hundreds of thousands of government employees.

They say that they want no more government spending and that Obamacare - a law passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court - must go.

We're not alone in our despair over this nonsense.

Noted historian Joseph Ellis, who, as biographer of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, knows a thing or two about our government's early days, claims that this dysfunction is "a new low in American history. This is not what the founders had in mind."

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Ellis lamented: "I cannot recall an occasion when a minority of elected representatives with such an absurdly partisan agenda was capable of stopping the government of the United States in its tracks. . . . Such mindless political and economic devastation is unprecedented.

"Clearly, most of the tea-party radicals in the House of Representatives come from gerrymandered districts, which function as cocoons that resist penetration by alien ideas, like Keynesian economics, Darwinian evolution, global warming and, yes, the potential popularity of Obamacare. They live in a parallel universe in which a rejection of any robust expression of government power is an unquestioned and unexamined article of faith."

The tea-party members in Congress and elsewhere fancy themselves as freedom fighters. But they are clueless as to the first tenet of freedom: that it comes with great responsibility.