Sean Scallon wants to heighten the contradictions:

One of the main theses of the Ron Paul 2008 Presidential campaign, where the genesis of the Tea Party movement lies, is the fact one cannot have a large military, national security and intelligence establishments and a small government at the same time. It doesn’t work that way contrary to what the politicians will have you believe. If Tea Partiers are serious ... then they have to call for not just cuts in the Pentagon budget, but fundamental changes in the way the U.S. conducts foreign and military policy, in line with current budget, economic and resource realities. This is the challenge that must be presented to the Tea Partiers and must pushed upon them to meet. If they do so, then the Tea Parties can have a transformative effect on U.S. policy and politics and broaden itself to being a larger movement. If not, they simply pass into history as just another faction, another protest group...

The question is how to engage the Tea Party in this debate. They certainly can't be reached via National Review, or the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal all of which tread very gingerly around the anti-interventionist impulse that still runs through parts of the rank and file. Nor is Fox News willing to cede the cudgel of national security politics, having become so adept at wielding it. The same goes for talk radio. Breaking into the information cocoon is hard to do. But it's what the Internet is there for.

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