A recent survey showed that only 5% of the Tea Party signs were racist, or called the President a Muslim or said that he was not born in America and therefore had not been eligible to be President. And who did the survey? The very impartial person who did this was a Cato Institute intern. That is like saying that a Nazi Youth Movement member did a survey and found that Goebbels’ speeches were not anti-Semitic.
A columnist in the New York Times who is himself a Neocon, was delighted to report, therefore, that only 13 signs were on race, that is, were racist, that 13 were on the false premise that the President is a Muslim and that a mere 3 said that he was not an American. So the question becomes, not whether Tea Baggers were lying but the degree and the vehemence with which they lie. We apparently simply accept lies these days as standard for Republicans.
The Tea Baggers are the people supporting other fruitcakes like Ken Buck, Sharron Angle Christine O’Donnell and Michelle Bachmann. Not that any of these are suspect. For example, should we think that Angle is less than truthful about being against government programs just because live on government programs?
Should we believe that Christine O’Donnell is not a liar, even though she repeatedly said, on many official documents that she was a graduate of two universities from which she had not graduated. Does Michelle Bachmann really feel that the stimulus is a bad idea even though she asked the Department of Transportation for $300 million and said that it would create 3,000 jobs? Are they liars and hypocrites? You decide.
The Cato Institute, who sponsored the survey done by the intern who said that the Tea Party people were not racists and were generally not the desultory characters they seem to be has little to do with the principles of the Roman statesman and orator, Cato. It has more to do with the arrogance and greed of its founders, the Koch Family. The Kochs, everyone knows by now, are the owners of the largest private oil company in the United States, which they inherited from their father, who himself was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, the ultra-Right Wing organization.
No, the Cato Institute does not share the beliefs of the ancient Roman, Cato. Cato (the Younger) was all about the preservation of the Republic. The Koch family is totally committed to the destruction of our Republic.
What about accusations of racism? Are the Tea Party members racists?? According to all observers and reporters for the news media, they are now welcoming White supremacists into the Tea Party meetings. Glenn Beck, anticipating many Tea Party members at his little rally in Washington, cautioned them several times not to bring offensive signs. Apparently not all obeyed because there were, even admitted by the Cato intern, at least a dozen or more racist signs.
Are the Tea Party candidates viable, or even if viable in some strange districts, are they good for government…forgetting whatever political party they might support?
Sharron Angle wants to do away with the Education and Energy Departments. Rich Iott, of Ohio, who takes part in military reenactments…as a Nazi, believes in all the Tea Party nonsense. Christine O’Donnell wants repeal the Roe V. Wade decision. Joe Miller wants to do away with the minimum wage. And Ken Buck wants to reinstate the Bush tax cuts, costing the government another $4 trillion.
They all seem to want to do away with Social Security, Medicare, the Health Care and Wall Street reforms and go back to Bush deficit-spending, creating more debt. But the whole idea of the Tea Party in the beginning was that health care reform was a government takeover and would create even more government, leading to bigger deficits. So they don’t want to really cut government. They simply want to cut taxes, like Reagan and all following Republicans, creating massive debt.
One aspect of the supposedly fiscally conscious and integrity obsessed Tea Party program that belies its sincerity is its popular leader…Sarah Palin. Palin the Ignorant is the ringleader of the Tea Party assemblies. She is now a constant entertainer on the Tea Party circuit. But Sarah Palin is no altruist.
Palin is quite clearly a stooge for the Murdoch Fox News Channel and the FreedomWorks billionaires. Palin’s sex appeal and her folksy way with the hicks has earned her over $15 million in less than two years. She is all about the money. Having clearly hardly ever read a book, she not only wrote a book after leaving here four-year term as Governor of Alaska after only 2 years, but the Republican Party bought huge numbers of copies to make it a best seller.
The Republicans have jumped on the Tea Party Express with both feet. They see that with several hundred million in campaign commercials, some really loony people on the far Right they can come close to winning the Mid-term elections because of Democratic voter apathy and Independent disillusion with the President’s inability to create jobs.
Everyone knows that the two principal strands of the Tea Party movement were created by FreedomWorks, a Koch family funded enterprise and by Americans for Prosperity, another Koch family enterprise. Both have been supported by their pal, Rupert Murdoch and his stooges, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and by Rush Limbaugh, spawn of the Clear Channel Texas oil and media people.
These “Astroturf” rallies were people rallied and bussed in by the paid staffs of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. The Fox News Channel, and the Internet and radio affiliates keep up a steady drumbeat of lies about everything from “government takeover of health care” (paid for by the health insurance agencies) to the idea of the newest version of “the greatest tax increase in American history” this time being the Bush tax cuts for the rich…the retirement of which would particularly gall the Koch family.
The Republicans always trot out the name of George Soros, the billionaire who helped fund an alternative to the hundreds of millions spent by corporations, oil companies, health insurance corporations and Right Wing billionaire oilmen who were trying to take over the country. It hardly takes a genius to see that someone paying to burn down your house is not the same as someone paying someone else to at least keep the blaze from spreading and burning down the entire neighborhood. Soros prevented a handful of evil billionaires from totally buying up the elections to take over the country…hardly an act for which he should be vilified.
People like to say that the Tea Party ideas are totally nuts but they themselves are not…? (However you can work out that logic.) But commentators, political scientists and historians have all agreed that these people are the latest iteration of the John Birch Society cretins, the McCarthy era legislators looking for a “great enemy” like the Communists (in fact we see signs idiotically talking about Marxism by these largely grade-school-educated marchers,) or the ever-present fear of the dark-skinned Muslim. The Glenn Beck camp-followers thrive on his mystical paranoia…no enemy in sight but one supposedly somewhere over that next hill.
The idea that these Tea Party people have a real message is like saying that a carnival barker offers real philosophical truth. No one actually believes that people who want to turn back the clock on gay issues and on civil rights and on universal health care and on Social Security and on Veterans…has any thing at all to say about fiscal responsibility, for example. Especially when they want to immediately add $2 trillion or more to the deficit!
When you ask people nearing or over 65 about Social Security and Medicare, the answer is pretty clear. Overwhelmingly they say leave it alone! Don’t touch it. When the same people get into a Tea Party lineup, they act differently…until you tell them that if they win, they lose. Then they start to think things over and begin to equivocate within seconds.
The idea, of course, that we should touch Social Security, except perhaps to strengthen it for future generations, is ridiculous. The President inadvertently gave the Republicans a podium for their views, which are not shared by most Americans, when he set up the commission on the national debt.
The Republicans are paid by lobbyists and by some billionaires to do two things. The first is to keep income taxes on rich individuals and corporations as low as possible or non existent. The second is to end all regulations on industry or government interference with corporations, including financial corporations.
The Tea Party, as were the two wars, sadly, is merely a distraction from the effort of the Republican Party to continue to march toward their objective…making the United States a Latin American country, with a large, very wealthy segment who run the country, and another very large segment who are at the mercy of corporations, the ruling class who run government, and eventually, when things get really bad…the military.
The Tea Baggers may feel that they, too, will end up on the winning side, as part of the Neocon ruling group, much as the old Fascist party members were given positions in the governments of Germany and Italy and Spain in the 1930s. But they won’t. There will be less government. This is about rich people keeping more of what they earn. Hawks, as someone once said, do not share.
The battle is clear. Several thousand very rich families and their surrogates are in a fight to cut taxes and reduce services for the other 99% of Americans. One example would be the more than 100 people in a major health insurance company who each make over $1,000,000 per year, to insure that the CEO makes his $25,000.000 or $50,000,000—every year.
They think they will always be there. And they will, as long as they don’t care about their family members and neighbors who will pay increasingly more for health insurance and get increasingly less each year…if they are not dropped when they become ill.
Oh yes, there will be the privileged few. But not always the same privileged few. Only those who toe the mark for the Party. Those who shake off their consciences about the greater and greater numbers of unemployed and the greater and greater power of giant corporations over their lives.
Powerless over utility rates, over phone charges over bank charges, over food quality, over auto dealer actions, over investment firm and insurance failures and over crime. How long before it will be necessary to find a place to live, as we see all over Latin America and in the current nightmare of Mexico, with strong gates and high iron fences?
This is what the Tea Party will bring you. Not whacko legislators, but billionaires with private security forces…already here, in this country, active and already dangerous. The Tea Party is a distraction that replaces Iraq and Afghanistan, now that the rich can no longer participate in the spoils. Now the terrorist will be brought home. The many without a job and without unemployment or health care. He will become the terrorist and government will become the authority to keep him in line.
The Tea Party candidates are all working for the very, very rich and the largest corporations in the world. You had a chance to stop them. But you became too entranced by the bright lights. It is not too drastic to say that this could be the end of participatory Democracy in this country as we have known it. Remember the old story about the frog in the pot. They don’t dump it in boiling water. They merely make the water hotter and hotter until it’s cooked.
