Or maybe not. Via John Cole, this might be the most ridiculous tea party story you've read in quite some time.
For others, a total spending freeze and a small, short-term limit increase was acceptable, provided it came with guarantees of deep spending cuts. For Tea Party Founding Fathers chairman William Temple, a reinstatement of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and keeping women out of combat roles would also be acceptable.
Temple, who addressed the audience in his trademark colonial garb, is organzing the Tea Party Freedom Jamboree this fall in Kansas City. He railed against Boehner and the GOP leadership in his speech, calling them “wimpy RINOs” and even attacked Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicare-destroying plan passed by the House last month as a “so-called ‘courageous’ budget”
Temple is 100% opposed to raising the debt ceiling, and said that how members vote on the issue will be the sole item on the tea party scorecard when it comes to rating candidates in 2012. Vote for the increase, you get a zero. Vote against it, you get a 100. Apparently it’s that simple.
But even Temple said he understood a compromise might be coming. So he offered a long list of things the Republicans could do that would lead the “tea party movement as a whole” to “possibly forgive Boehner and the House Republicans a small bump in the debt limit.”
On the list was keeping the front lines of America’s wars as free of openly gay people and women of any sexual leaning as possible.
Temple said that “if the House Armed Services Committee and the Pentagon slow down on injecting open homosexuality and females into forward combat roles,” tea partiers might be able to put up with their new Republican House voting to ensure American government services are paid for with more borrowed cash.
As John pointed out, yes, this guy was dressed in colonial military drag representing a movement purportedly about lower taxes, lashing out at gays and women for being inadequate soldiers. The contradictions and ironies are too numerous to list.