re: #14 Logician

Might it not merely indicate that how conservative he is matters less to supporters of the tea party movement than whether he believes in low taxes, low spending, and low government involvement in the economy generally?

If so, wouldn’t this be a good thing? Since those are among the more rational aspects of conservatism.

The teabaggers aren’t motivated by rationality, and know shockingly little about their supposed core issue, taxes. I’ve posted this before but it’s worth a repost:

The Misinformed Tea Party Movement: For an antitax group, they don’t know much about taxes.

Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses—a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people. (Survey results are here.)

….
Takeaway:

n short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family.

Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president.

It’s not a movement based on facts or rationality.