Valley Forge Americans
By 
The Tea Party isn’t through tying their own insanity to Revolutionary War touchstones.
A member of the conservative caucus that effectively forced House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) out of the speaker’s race said Friday one of the GOP’s true “Valley Forge Americans” should succeed John Boehner.
In an interview with MSNBC, Freedom Caucus member Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), offered a roll call of acceptable candidates for speaker. He named Reps. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Jeff Miller (R-FL), Tom Price (R-GA), and Jim Jordan (R-OH). He even mentioned Newt Gingrich, who was speaker from 1995 to 1999.
“I hear a lot of names. All of those men are Valley Forge Americans that would serve this country very well,” Franks said, referencing the winter military camp where more than 2,500 of George Washington’s troops died of starvation and exposure during the Revolutionary War.
Franks also said Ryan “is somebody that I have great respect for and believe could be a magnificent speaker.”
And really wouldn’t be sad if these Republicans decided to camp out in Pennsylvania this winter without proper shoes and clothes in a camp with no public health planing where they would get dysentery and starve? That would be very, very sad.
But then again, Valley Forge is a pretty appropriate reference for where the Tea Party wants to take us. Under an utterly inept central government with the Articles of Confederation, the new nation was completely unable to feed, clothe, or pay the troops fighting the war designed to make the nation free from British control. It got so bad that different states were supplying their own troops, leading to major disparities in supplies within different units of the army in the same place. Meanwhile, a lack of knowledge of basic public health created a lot of unnecessary deaths at Valley Forge and a return to 18th century notions of science and health seems about right for the Tea Partiers, although admittedly there may be too much of that fancy pants Enlightenment knowledge in there for them. If the new Republican Speaker is not pro-typhus, it’s hard to see how he (of course) has the true Valley Forge spirit!