Tea Partiers: Crazy Like a Fox

For the last couple of months I've been getting spammed by a publicist of the most bizarre right-wing clients you can imagine. It was kind of adorable for a while, but I was getting these emails at a pace that felt like three a day.
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We've all been spammed by people we didn't want emails from. We've all been added to those lists we just don't care about, and we all get those emails from that one conservative relative who always has the latest new birther conspiracy. As a member of the press, I get added to email lists by publicists all the time. Most of the time, it's okay. Publicists see what I do, either for Huffington Post, Big Shiny Robot!, or wherever else they've seen my writing and send me stuff that I'd probably write about. More often than not I write about geeky stuff, progressive politics, and the intersections between the two.

For the last couple of months I've been getting spammed by a publicist of the most bizarre right-wing clients you can imagine. I was offered an interview for guys who thought that putting more guns on the streets will reduce crime. Others wanted to talk to me about the budget with a right wing slant, or climate change, or whatever.

It was kind of adorable for a while, but I was getting these emails at a pace that felt like three a day.

Last night I received an email touting a client of this publicist who proclaims he's a leader of the "TEA Party" movement. He's penned columns that read like Michele Bachmann's talking points and I just decided I'd had enough of their spam. I replied and quite flippantly asked why I was getting these emails about country-damaging right-wing crazies. You know, like you do.

Well, I got a reply back.

They insisted that they would take my comments and use them to inspire throngs of tea partiers that will push the "TEA Party" to new heights come 2012 on their path of destruction to topple President Obama.

I was also told that I had no idea that TEA stood for "Taxed Enough Already." I'm not sure who's being taxed enough already, especially with reports that multi-billion dollar companies like GE and Exxon-Mobil haven't paid any taxes and actually received refunds. And it's easy to discover that when we were fighting The Great War, the highest rate of tax on the rich was 77% to pay for the cost of it. Who is it exactly that's taxed enough already? I don't get it.

If we were that aggressive about paying for our wars, we wouldn't even be discussing shattering the contracts of the Great Society Republicans are trying to dismantle to redistribute the wealth up to super-rich.

But if the "TEA Party" is going to use my sarcastic request for them to stop spamming me as some sort of rallying cry, I just wanted to get out in front of it, piece by piece, so they know I'm behind it.

First off, they shouldn't take offense to the term "country-damaging," because when you chip at bits of the government to make it weaker and smaller, you're doing damage to it. And as much as they try to paint themselves as bipartisan, I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination for people to confidently call the Tea Party the radical wing of the far right.

Maybe they can take offense to being called crazy, but I'm not sure I'm wrong about that, either. Maybe crazy like a fox, they'd say. Or like Fox news.

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