"So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob..."
Matt Taibbi is back at it in another Rolling Stone article praising America's latest and greatest political movement in: Tea & Crackers.
Interesting stuff about his encounters with Tea Party zombies. As I read it I laughed, then the reality of the article seeped in - those folks really live and breath their propaganda. Scary shit. Sorta reminds me of the cult of personality shit City Councilors like Toomey, Haller, & Rushston are trying to propagate. With some success. Freaking scary thought.
Being a person who appreciates anything that challenges the status quo, whether it be Wusta politics, state (even got a place in my heart for Jill Stein) or national movements, I always believed things have gotta change or else - out with the old, in with the new - or the country turns into giant Wusta. Again a scary thought.
Here have some of my Kool Aid. Corporate influence over the lives of citizens is a serious issue for this country. Making it worse is the Supreme Court's recent decision on Corporate Free Speech. If you ask me, the beginning of the end - corporations will dominate American society. And again, a scary thought.
Lots goin on out there folks. So buckle in, its gonna be a heck of a ride.
Here meet your neighbors, the Tea Partiers. Article excerpts:
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.
“I’m anti-spending and anti-government,” crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. “The welfare state is out of control.”
"OK,” I say. “And what do you do for a living?”
“Me?” he says proudly. “Oh, I’m a property appraiser. Have been my whole life.”
I frown. “Are either of you on Medicare?”
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight,” I say to David. “You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?”
“Well,” he says, “there’s a lot of people on welfare who don’t deserve it. Too many people are living off the government.”
“But,” I protest, “you live off the government. And have been your whole life!”
“Yeah,” he says, “but I don’t make very much.” Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it’s going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit.
… This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they’ve mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn’t an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.
The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can’t; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet..
