Life in These Untied States
So, to sum up:
1. People who make far less than 250K per year, whose tax rates will be cut, spent Wednesday out in public demanding that Obama stop increasing their taxes. They proudly marched and defiantly yelled and etc., etc., insisting with waved signs and shaken fists on their opposition to something that is not the case. They have made it their business to prevent something from happening that was never going to happen in the first place--and they mean it!
2. These same people, whose economic and physical well-being are a matter of supreme indifference to the richest families in America, have been persuaded to insist on policies that will only benefit the richest families in America. There is a term for these people, and it isn't "right-wing" or "conservative" or "patriotic" or even "Republicans." The term is "sucker." These people are suckers. They have been tricked and manipulated into working against their own interests and for the interests of people who could literally not care less about them. Their patron saint isn't Barry Goldwater or Thomas Paine or Ronald Reagan or Jesus H. Christ. It's P.T. Barnum.
3. People who would be forced into bankruptcy by an attack of appendicitis, who have no idea what "socialism" is or how it differs from "communism" or "fascism," were to be seen Wednesday out in force, self-righteously pissed off and calling Obama a socialist, a communist, and a fascist, often interchangeably. And what are their ideas about how to deal with the worst economic crisis in eighty years? "Let them go bankrupt!" Ignorance and indignation: it doesn't get any more American than that. Each of them--proud, free, unafraid to speak stupidity to power--is like a homeowner whose house is on fire and yet who refuses to let the fire fighters turn a hose on the flames because "it'll get my stuff all wet." And when the fire chief ventures the suggestion that the fire is a) going to destroy their stuff anyway, and then b) spread to other homes, he gets shut down with such wised-up, common-man arguments as, "I pay your salary!"
4. Glenn Beck--a prancing, sobbing, gibbering buffoon who will say literally anything to keep his audience's attention--has become the new spokesperson for the right. Yes, just when you thought Sean Hannity was, not only as bad as it got, but as bad as it could get, here comes the next level in televised right-wing demagoguery. Glenn Beck--whom Dickens himself would delete from a novel as being "too obvious"--is a star. As a consequence of this...
5. Rush Limbaugh has become the "de facto leader" of the right. Think about it--if you dare! Glenn Beck has accomplished the impossible. This is science fact, not science fiction: He's somehow managed to make the country's most famous sex-tourist drug-addict saloon-loudmouth hate-mongering hypocrite seem dignified and thoughtful. Glenn Beck has succeeded in bestowing gravitas on Rush Limbaugh. Still, maybe we shouldn't be surprised. When the spotlight is grabbed by the dancing monkey, the rhinoceros in the background starts to look downright serious and thoughtful.
6. Fox News, a factory of propaganda and lies on the best of days, has decided "the hell with it" and become an outright partisan fomenter of "revolution." While formerly (as a study showed during the Bush years), watching Fox News actually made one stupider, now watching it (as a follow-up will surely prove) makes one insane. During Bush, Fox News merely promulgated falsehoods. Now, during Obama, its function is to corrode its viewers' very understanding of reality itself. But what else can it do, since...
7. The devolution of the Republican Party (for which Fox News serves as Pravda) proceeds apace. The GOP, fifty years ago the Cotillion Party, is now the Toga Party Party. Newt Gingrich--hippie-dippy marital history, ethics charges and all--is newly converted to Catholicism and plotting his return. (Who said there are no third--or is it fourth?--acts in American lives?) The governor of Texas threatens to secede. (Memo to Gov. Perry: Here's your Stetson; what's your hurry? Just leave us Austin as your going-away present to us.) A senator openly talks about advising his wife to hurry down to the ATM and withdraw all their money, suggesting what in the good old days we used to call "a run on the bank." Libertarians (which is a fancy poli-sci term for "adolescents with firm political opinions about an imaginary society") threaten to "go Galt" but then somehow can't follow through. Whither the courage of the Randroids? And no one in the party of Wm. F. Buckley and Norman Podhoretz seems to know that the term "tea-bag" refers to dangling a man's genitals into someone's mouth.
This is not "the loyal opposition." This is Animal House. Every week brings a new hit single from the demonstrably unhinged Michelle Bachmann. And talk about legislation--what do these frat rats do? They release--get this--a budget with no numbers. What a goof!
8. The right-wing blogs, from the most crayon-on-paper-bags illiterate to the airy summit of the National Review, from obscure typists like Pastor Grant Swank (Google it; you'll be amazed) to the preening elite like Jonah Goldberg and Michele Malkin, have heard that funky jungle beat and formed a great writhing conga line of lunacy: having turned their brains inside-out defending the indefensible Bush (never mind Cheney) for eight years, now they say anything that comes to their fevered minds just to keep the gig and not actually have to work for a living. "Where is Obama's birth certificate?" "The Navy shot those pirates but Obama had nothing to do with it." "This tea-bag revolution--" (well-documented as having been conceived, directed, funded, and scripted by right-wing foundations)--is a marvel of spontaneous grass-roots populist grass-rootsy spontaneity!"
What does it all mean? I'm asking, reader. Is this widespread madness fun? Is it business and politics as usual? Should we derive from it nothing more than good old fashioned schadenfreude, and just pass the popcorn while watching the people who created and supported the catastrophes of the past eight years as they now wallow in their impotence and irrelevance?
Or is all this manipulated, phony "grass-roots" outrage fated to lead to some serious danger to innocent people? For every thousand citizens who gather in public to scream idiotic slogans and proudly flaunt their ignorance, how many more are laboring away in basements and garages, building bombs or assembling arsenals? How many does it take to lead to disaster?
The anger and fear of these people are real and, probably in most cases, justified, however much they misidentify their causes. That's what the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Becks depend on exploiting in order to make themselves rich and famous. But this entire cycle (rage; exploitation; more rage) seems to me worse than usual, as does its manipulation by the wealthy and their servants.
Is it? Or is all this just more publicized than it used to be? Doesn't publicizing it make it grow, and therefore make it worse? Or is it a relatively minor, if lurid, sideshow?
Should I be worried, indifferent, or vastly amused? What does it all mean?
Cross-posted on What HE Said
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The largest "Tea Bagging" party was reported to have 7500 people in attendance
Great piece as for the answer to your questions I'm at a loss. Hopefully it will lead to the continued purging of independent and suburban support for the GOP as the reasonable and the centrists flee. Maybe even the dissolution of the Grand Old Party and the emergence of a new modern party arguing thoughtfully for conservative ideas that drops most of the social issues.
At any rate, where ever the Republican Party ends up, we are in the beginning of new political era that is operating on a different set of assumptions. The era that could be characterized as an era of Conservative Backlash starting in 1968 has finally ended....
What these nutcases intend to achieve, is to make the country ungovernable. They know they will likely not regain power with their dwindling base of lunatics. So the only alternative for them is to sow as much discord as possible with their loud corporate megaphones across the board. The fact that we are here spending time pondering THEIR actions rather than discussing our OWN agendas proactively es exactly the point of thier disease. They live for chaos, anxiety, doubt and creating as much din in the public square as possible to drwon out everybody and everything else. The next time they will get a slightly bigger audience and so on, until they achieve their aim of stymying any governance whatsoever.
I too am scratching my head about the dissonance between the tax cuts these tea-baggers are getting and the drivel they were spouting on Wednesday. Certified lunacy, it is.
IT can be hard but even for a realist the glass is half full. The gas tank is half full. While still locking all my doors and windows and proclaiming that it is going to be a beautiful day.
Corporate America rules above everything else.
After you understand that, you understand the America we live in today.
Yeah, but that doesn't make it right... Congratulations on a GREAT article, Ellis Weiner.
What the people of this country need to realize is that America hasn't abandoned capitalism, capitalism has abandoned America..!
See what I mean..?
No.
I understand completely.
If I hear one more idiot pundit say I love this country, even start crying like Glen Beck, I'm gonna hurl. The only thing these people love is their face in a little square box and God some of those faces. Who picks these guys and gals. Maron! Aye caramba!
I agree completely. I am pure Main Street America...
That said.... I am surrounded by Middle America Republican
That's what this is all about.... the wealthy elite are manipulating racist, homophobic, Middle America...
not unlike how Israeli First American Jews manipulate the Christian Right to hate Muslims... [leaving no Jewish fingerprints of course]
The GOP is lost, broken, and struggling for support...
Wall Street is manipulating Main Street... telling them their interests are aligned... when they most certainly are not.
I think the multinational corporate model is EVIL by definition.
I hate Wall Street....
But they have the Hannity, Limbaugh rural whites doing their bidding...
I'm fairly confident they're a small minority in the US (thank God). The only reason they have any relevence at all is because FOX news covers their insane acts.
The independents see through their game as demonstrated in the last election.
Fear not, the country's getting more and more diverse and the old white, racist GOP'ers are quickly dying off. The newer, more racially diverse generations don't have a thing in common with the Republican party, and the GOP doesn't even care to include them. So let the GOP have their fun......t
Great post.
If we could get an assault rifle ban passed; we could get this party started.
How do you think the Rwandan Genocide came about? Constant radio bombardment, calling for hatred and then action. Very scary.
I think people should be worried. These things sound ridiculous, but they've worked before.
I will say one thing...I was really pissed about Obama keeping Bush's wiretaps and listening in on people's phonecalls and emails. But after reading how crazy it has all gotten, I think it's a good thing to keep these wiretaps and turn it on these right-wingers. It might be the thing that keeps Obama alive, because like it or not, we were all thinking it. We fear for his life. And I'm worried about this invasion of privacy, but the way Fox news and all these Republican senators and congressman are talking about fascism and armed revolution, and just bringing out all the nutcases..
And angry as I am about domestic surveillance, I am savoring the delicious irony of having these warrantless wiretaps being turned on the biggest cheerleaders of the Bush administration and their illegal power grabs. I don't like domestic surveillance, I think it's dangerous.
You make a lot of sense. I thought the same thing about the wiretaps..
As for this article. IMO, exceptional. I, for one, am worried.
True...Bus
It took one crony appointment after another to get him into the Presidency.
Vidal on Bill Maher made a stunning statement last week: His ATHEIST uncle was a senator for decades in OKLAHOMA for decades in the early part of the 20th century.
Things AREN'T getting better it seems, quite often.
Yes...we decry how people lack reading skills - but the real illiteracy is understanding what is read and critical thinking about what is read.
There was a coup in this country Nov. 22, 1963.
Eisenhower (General Eisenhower, mind you) said on his way out of the Presidency: "Beware the military industrial complex."
Kennedy said to aides after the Bay of Pigs: "The military are mad."
That Gore Vidal interview on Bill Maher was SPECTACULA
HuffPost, you should put a clip of the interview on your site, it's really GREAT!
I was just thinking this morning of all the pestilences we've been seeing of late:
1. Children being kidnapped, murdered and thrown in suitcases
2. What ever happened with those enlisted women that were being murdered?
3. Then today we have the Craigslist Killer.
4. Planes keep dropping out of the air onto people's homes and I live by an airport.
5. Mass shootings
6. Murder/suicides
7. Obama ignoring the torture issue
8. The havok the Bush administration wreaked for the past eight years that we are wallowing in
9. Pirates
10. Korea with Nukes looking for attention
11. Pakistan with nukes and the Taliban, who is really a front for Al Queda, moving in
12. And all we need is the right wing fringe racists giving tea parties a bad name, all we need!
I am convinced that this is all really escalated over the past few years. See what you did Bush?
I don't know the answer to the author's question, but I'm pretty sure we are seeing a catharctic exposure of all of our ugliness for us all to see and think about. Our actions determine whether we have a good outcome or bad outcome.
Thanks for contributing to the cause with your well-written and well-thought out words.
250,000 people in total, for every single "tea party", out of a population of
300 , 000,000 !
Why that's a whopping..
That's hardly a "national movement"! What a joke!
Sweeping the nation....
That was the most enjoyable article of the day. Thank you. Just the right amount of spice.
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