Medea Benjamin Goes to a Tea Party...

and lives to tell about it — Tea and Empire. Depressingly, the Code Pink foundress found that "the hawks--many of whom were retired military or have close family in the military--outweighed the doves," that "most... were not disturbed by our statistic that every taxpayer had already paid over $7,000 for the wars," and that "when it came to Israel, 80 percent wanted to keep up our $3 billion in aid."

On the bright side, she reports that "the non-interventionists said we could join forces on the broader issue of our military footprint overseas." She writes:

Cong. Ron Paul's message of cutting the welfare/warfare state has attracted an enthusiastic following within the Tea Party. While progressives are turned off by his call for ending all kinds of domestic social programs, his anti-war/anti-empire message and consistent votes against war funding is a refreshing turn from liberal Democrats who decry war but always vote to fund it.

At the Tea Party Tax Day gathering, Cong. Ron Paul was one of the last to take the stage at the evening rally. He began by chastising liberals for their social spending, and then took on the conservatives for wanting to be the policemen of the world. "We're stretched too far with all this government spending overseas," he said to fans who had waited all day to hear him. "We should just mind our own business."

New York Times/CBS Tea Party poll showed Ron Paul lagging far behind the popularity of hawkish Sarah Palin (only 28 percent had a favorable opinion of Paul, 15 percent unfavorable, and a surprising 56 percent said they hadn't heard enough about him). But Paul won the presidential straw poll at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference and in a time of soaring deficits, his anti-empire message may be catching on.

He certainly seems to have influenced Tea Party darling Glenn Beck. The day after tax day, Beck announced that he was ready to take on his own sacred cow--national security --and that he was moving more and more towards a Ron Paul position.

It was shocking to hear the right-wing Beck talk about out-of-control military spending.

"I'm tired of being the world's policeman," he groused, complaining about the decades we have been in Germany, Japan and the Korean Peninsula. "We need to have a 'no loitering' policy."

"As the Tea Party totters precariously between empire and republic, the fragile threads that are holding it together will fall apart on the rocky shoals of foreign shores," she concludes. "Maybe then, Libertarians and social progressives can make common cause against expansive--and expensive--empire."