My favorite comment on the Republican Pledge is this blog post by Ross Douthat.  But I'm not nearly as confident as he is that the Tea Party enthusiasm for fiscal retrenchment extends very far toward means-testing Social Security and cutting Medicare reimbursements.  That doesn't mean most tea partiers are against having means-testing phased in slowly or some kind of Medicare reform  that voucherizes the program as part of a larger health care reform (especially if the alternatives are  bankruptcy or a crushing tax burden), just that many tea partiers might not be seeing our budget problems the way Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan do.