The Only Victims You Can Listen To: The Tea Party Bangers

They rock.
They roll.
They scream bloody murders like 3 years old.
They cry on demand and pout.
They threaten the nation of  armed revolt and secession.

They are insanely misinformed.
They seem grassroots enough to look genuine but the bermuda clad old white xenophobic guard
- who claim to have direct access to the Founding Fathers' brains, hearts and every other vital organs -
have this air of deja vu, of old news and fake concerns and cringe-inducing ideological contradictions.

In other words: where have we all seen this before?

Bla, bla, bla - small government - with huge WAR  facilitating created deficit and corporation subsidizing.
Bla, bla, bla - bootstraps for everyone: if you can't have kids, stay with your alcoholic husband and get to church for moral support like everybody else just die already. Where does it say anything about helping anyone in the Constitution?
Bla, bla, bla - Nafta, Free Trade, The Share Holders Pleasure Principles - no need for manufacturing jobs here, they're for losers and Unionists. If the corporation gets richer then the whole country gets richer! Don't you get it? Your share of GDP just gets bigger! Don't you feel the love?
Bla, bla, bla - no taxes but more services! (This one makes my brain explodes. I just can't deal...)
Bla, bla, bla - no immigration reform or else we will have to pay them a decent wage and then where will we be?
Bla, bla, bla - no bank bailout (well, duh! Say thanks to Dubya and Paulson for that one) but no government regulations, meddling or, gasp!, takeover!
Bla, bla, bla - No! To everything! Because I say so!
Bla, bla, bla - no liberal media - but WE own them wouah! ha ha ha!  Own the idiot box, you own the idiots! Viva la vida Fox!
Bla, bla, bla - no activist judge - except our own!
Bla, bla, bla - no unemployment benefit - the more desperate you are, the less you cost. And there's always WalMart.
Bla, bla, bla - no government schools - the slaves didn't know how to read and they made a decent livin'! Stop bitchin' all the time and get to work!
Bla, bla, bla - confederacy - And you thought we'd lost?! Suckers!
Bla, bla, bla - God is on our side. Sucker!
Bla, bla, bla - no national heathcare BUT DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH MY MEDICARE ! (Screeching pitch)

Well, you get the gist of it.
Where, O, where have we seen all of this before??
Wait, it's in the tip of my tongue, white, rotund, male, newt worthy, gone in vacation all the time, war, deficit, lame jokes, no accountability....
Darn! I almost had it....
Where have we seen this before?
And why can't we make them eat those words once and for all?

From the Nation

Tea Party Hypocrisy

Editorial

This article appeared in the March 1, 2010 edition of The Nation.

February 11, 2010

"Energy. Budget Tax cuts. Lift American spirits." This was the infamous list of talking points scrawled on Sarah Palin's palm when she stood to address the first-ever Tea Party Convention in Nashville. It's fitting, given that the agenda of Palin and the movement for which she has become a tribune is short on details about how to govern the country. "Lift American spirits" is about as substantive a description of their agenda as you're likely to hear.

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Such vagueness has served the movement well, allowing it to claim to be many things it is not. There has arisen in some quarters a quaint and dangerous notion that the tea party movement is an entirely new phenomenon--a bipartisan, organic channeling of broad (and rational) distrust of and disgust with America's main institutions, particularly Wall Street and Washington, which seem to have formed a perfectly closed loop of rent-seeking and self-dealing. According to Tea Party Patriots national board member Mark Meckler, "Although we are conservative in political philosophy, we are nonpartisan in approach. Both parties need to re-dedicate themselves to the principles of our founding fathers and remember that this should be the government of 'We the People' and not of special interest groups or pork-laden politics." While the energy and outrage may be genuine and organic, we should not fool ourselves into seeing this as anything but a right-wing reactionary movement, one whose themes (jingoism, militarism and a cult of victimhood at the hands of sundry nefarious betrayers) are as old as the John Birch Society. And yet, because the details of the tea party's worldview remain obscure, it's startlingly popular with the broader public. Forty-one percent of respondents in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll have a positive opinion of the tea party movement. According to the same poll, the Democratic Party was viewed favorably by only 35 percent. The Republican Party fared even worse with 28 percent.

Why Can't we be Friends?: The Lack of an Unifying Voice on the Left

Bob Herbert did it again. This time, his poise and precisely pitched outrage is all but palpable in his op-ed piece about the lack of an unified voice from the Left that could counter the screeching, perverse, unhealthy liebox of the right-wing media.

Why the thousands of little affiliations and bloggers and .org can not seem, finally, to get organize, not around a 'personality', but around the need to react to those dangerous forces at work right now within the inflammatory Republican pundits machine advocating violence, 'revolution', excessive demagoguery and right down sedition, is beyond me.

But it is also the most tender Achille's heel of the Left and leaves it vulnerable to the most poisonous impact of the hate speech of the right snake oil vendors. We are the new Silent Majority. And we can't seem to find representatives that know what to do with us since we're not the big corporate donors that they seek.

All of this could even spell, democratically, the undoing of a country who once knew how to do the right thing instead of just the Right's hysterical new memo point of the day.


A Voice Of Reason

By BOB HERBERT

Published: April 9, 2010

The Republican Party is not simply the “just-say-no” party. It’s also a shameless advocate of the free lunch. Ronald Reagan famously told us he could jack up defense spending, cut taxes and balance the federal budget all at the same time.

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Bob Herbert

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George W. Bush put two big wars on a credit card. And now we have the perennially clownish Newt Gingrich, in an embarrassing rant against President Obama, assuring the deluded G.O.P. faithful that, yes, the party can indeed bring down the federal deficit while cutting taxes.

The Great Recession and the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been savage enough to reintroduce the G.O.P. to reality.

One of the reasons so many conservative Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people — people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that “government is the problem,” the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so.

The result, in addition to the terrible consequences of Iraq and Afghanistan and the damage to America’s standing in the world, was the tremendous (and tremendously debilitating) transfer of wealth from working people in the U.S. to the folks already in the upper echelons of wealth and income. The elite made out like bandits — often literally.