Is government the enemy of the people?

So the Tea Party came and went on Tax Day, and yes, the nation survived. Of late, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this movement. What is it, precisely?

Its leaders, whoever they might be, claim to be nonpartisan. Yet at every turn, there’s Sarah Palin, a hyperpartisan Republican, showing up at a Tea Party convention here, a rally there. It’s her usual shtick. Barack Obama is bad for the country. The government is too big. We must fight.

The question is, fight for what? I checked out the Tea Party Web site. A pop-up asking me to donate $10 a month to the cause appeared. Thanks, but no thanks.

I looked for a mission statement, a raison d’etre for the group. There was none — no core belief system, only vague statements about making government smaller.

How? Who knows? I found no concrete suggestions for limiting the size of government.

Many political pundits have tied the Conservative Party to the Tea Party. Are they one in the same? That is, is the Tea Party truly a grass-roots movement, or is it an “Astroturf” movement, one sponsored by a well-funded, mainstream organization like the Conservative Party that is trying to make it appear that the people have suddenly risen up in anger?

Obama was elected to the White House in 2008, and suddenly Tea Partiers were mad as hell and couldn’t take it anymore. They didn’t seem to mind when President Bush ballooned the size our government, though.

I’m tired of Tea Party activists and arch-conservatives like Rush Limbaugh presuming to know better than the rest of us what our constitutional framers were thinking when they sat down to form this great nation.

The thinking by Palin, Limbaugh & Co. is that government is the enemy of the people. It steals our money. If only the government left us alone and let business do its business without ramming regulations down its throat, then we’d all be rich. We’d all be living the so-called good life in oversized mansions, flying in private jets, driving luxury cars and smoking cigars, just like Rush.