The first-ever National Tea Party Convention began today, and you can watch the frightening proceedings online on CSPAN.com. It’s actually re-airing on television right now. Now, I’ve been part of a nascent political movement. I’ve been to conferences just like this one where like-minded people came together to get organized in an effort to win back Congress and to take back the White House. And I’ve seen that movement be part of the successful achievement of those goals. So, I don’t dismiss these people. I don’t dismiss them, but I will tell you two things. If they’re successful, they’re likely to be far more disappointed than progressives are with our victory. But if they aren’t disappointed, we’re going to lose our democracy.
Why do I say that? Well, on the first score, they’re likely to learn just how hard it is to really change Washington. If you think it’s hard to trim the defense budget and get the permanent establishment to reevaluate our forward-leaning foreign basing strategy…if you think it is hard to pass health care…just try to change entitlements or the tax structure. These tea-baggers won’t find a lot of friends in the White House or Congress when they get to Capitol Hill. It’s no different for true progressives. But, if they did actually succeed in getting their policies enacted, we’d be living under an authoritarian, Christianist, nativist, eschatological thumb. The debate over torture would be decided once and for all, in favor of torture. Any semblance of the rule of law would be lost forever.
But maybe you should watch the proceedings. At the moment Joseph Farah, the founder of WorldNetDaily, is going on at length about how the rule of law is being violated because Obama wasn’t born in the United States. He also appears to be somewhat drunk.
I really have no frame of reference for these people. I don’t know anyone who believes what they believe. I don’t even know how I’d get drunk enough to behave that way on CSPAN.
Maybe I should go to the next Netroots Nation and drop acid for the first time. That might come close.
Sir, how dare you speak such slander of the esteemed molecule! From the tiny bit I saw of the proceedings, meth would be the camouflage of choice.
Once again, Booman…mock these people at your own risk.
There is no IQ test for voting.
Albert Einstein or Joseph Farah…same vote.
There are a lot of them, and they are madder than hell.
Not only that, but…unlike the middle class, oh so politely repressed left…they are being quite direct about it.
Publicly direct.
Like cornered animals, these last remnants of stupid, racist America understand that their reptilian backs are to the tarpit, and they are going to make a fight of it. They are going to fight to their last drop of blood.
It’s going to be nasty.
But it’s not going to be funny.
I wonder how many representatives of XE and Halliburton and even the CIA are there, fanning the flames.
It will be a test of passion.
In a comment here recently about what I would like to hear from Obama’s State of the Union speech, I included a YouTube clip of the “Madder than hell” monologue from the 1970s film “Network” and said
And so far…they’re winning the passion game.
Big time.
They are madder than hell. Being backed up against the tides of evolution’ll do that to ya.
Watch.
I have said here many times that the first pol to stand up…left, right or center…and really lay down an emotional, directly spoken attack barrage will win in a landslide. And I stand by that idea today.
So far…it’s the right that threatens to do this while the left and center hide behind trite code words and phrases.
You write:
I assume that you are talking about things like those effete cocktail parties held in Las Vegas or wherever by dKos & Co.
Brother…this is not “just like” those things.
This one has some teeth in it.
It is red in tooth and claw
And it’s comin’ t’GETCHOO!!!.
That’s what the good Germans said.
And then…it did.
Sarcasm has no effect on these people.
They’re too dumb to even understand it. Too mad also.
It’s a rapidly building wave.
How to oppose it?
I dunno.
Let us pray that it burns itself out.
Let us hoipe that it so threatens the PermaGov that it is bought out or otherwise disarmed.
And let us fervently pray that it wakes up the stolid leftiness clones and other middle classers before it’s too late. Black people and others of color know these folks. It’s white people who don’t instinctively and immediately recognize their act.
Not yet they don’t.
Riiiiiight…
WTFU.
Oppose them with action.
Words ain’t gonna do shit.
Not with these folks.
Bet on it.
AG
Yep, I’m armed and ready for them to bring the funk if they wants to get funked up…
they are going to get some really crazy people elected. This year. I take them very seriously. I know exactly who they are. You might remember that I called out this bullshit when it was Clinton trying to tap it, and when Palin did tap it.
from where?
I know you do, Booman. My broadside was aimed at other craft.
AG
AG
Or to cut to the chase: the teabaggers are stockpiling power and influence for one reason — they are putting the fear into Republican officesitters. They are making them do it. They have shown that they are willing to
Somebody name me just one “lefty” or lefty organization that is putting the fear into any Dem pol. Dems/liberals have one built-in advantage over the teabagger cult, in that they actually have ideas for making things better, for addressing the anger in a real way. That tool is as functional as an antique scythe blade hanging over a suburban fireplace. I rant about this regularly over at Kos these days. There is not the slightest interest.
It may be that the trajectory taken when nations fall is unalterable. It’s hard to rally the folks around the hope of a somewhat easier dissolution.
No doubt.
No doubt at all.
AG
There aren’t enough of them. We just went through crazy and people aren’t down that road again.
It’s not a movement that’s going to catch fire. The birchers wanted to be in power and they aren’t.
We have always had these types of groups. I can’t get upset over this.
It has already caught fire, utried.
The only question that remains is…how big is the fire going to become?
You say “The birchers wanted to be in power and they aren’t.”
First of all…”the Birchers” were in power here throughout the Reagan years and both Bush administrations. They just changed their name. And their game as well.
Secondly…When the John Birch Society was an active force in the country, the U.S. was in a seemingly invulnerable position. Everybody was working…everybody white, that is…them culled folks was pretty much in their place and all was right with the world.
Yes, we have “always had these types of groups.”
A “group of this type” tried to recruit General Smedley Butler to run a coup d’état on FDR.
A “group of this type” ran the McCarthy witchunts and exerted huge political and culltural power in this country.
And a “group of this type” hounded Bill Clinton out of power and stole two elections here only a short decade ago.
Just for starters.
How quickly we forget, us leftiness folk. “We’ve won!!!” we shout. And then promptly go right back to sleep again.
ZZZZZZzzzzzz….
Hillary Clinton spoke of a “vast right wing conspiracy”.
Her mama didn’t raise no fools.
But judging from the smug complacency of many leftiness shmoon, a lot of mamas did raise some fools.
Lots of ’em.
Check it out.
So here we are, one year from a fairly narrow win over possibly the most incompetent presidential administration in the history of the United States, and right in front of our eyes a new political party is taking shape that will make the Ratpublican Party look like a Sunday School brunch outing. Taking shape during a time when the country’s economic and international position is the weakest that it has been since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
And you pooh pooh the danger.
Nice, utried.
Very nice.
Change your handle.
U aren’t trying.
Not really.
Except…eyes wide closed…you are apparently trying not to see what is really happening here.
You write:
Above, keirdubois writes:
You are both living in some kind of leftiness fantasy land.
” ‘We’ just went through crazy and ‘people’ aren’t down that road again!!!???”
Who “we?”
What “people?”
Oh.
“I really have no frame of reference for these people. I don’t know anyone who believes what they believe.”
I guess they don’t really exist if we don’t know any of them.
Phew!!!
I feel better already.
Not.
You want to see some of them in action??
OK, bubbas and sistren.
Here they are.
Just in case y’all have somehow missed ’em.
UH oh!!!
Yeats pinned it 90 years ago.
90 years ago.
When the first wave of this shit was just beginning to form around a little Austrian corporal from the defeated German Army.
You see those fools in the Palin/Third Wave vid?
Passionate like a motherfucker. That’s all they have is “passion”. Powerful negative emotions powerfully and freely unleashed.
Now check yourselves out.
Weak.
Flaccid, even.
Spoken like true bourgeois.
Now re-read some of the Yeats.
Hmmmmm…
Wake the fuck up.
The beast lives in Bethlehem.
Bethlehem, PA, among many other places in America.
Bethleehem, PA.
Where they took a steel mill that was abandoned by the corporate right wing’s lust for quick, easy profits and innate laziness, a steel mill that supported thousands and thousands of hard-working unionist immigrants for nearly 100 years:
And transformed it in to a casino that is dedicated to stealing from the descendants of the same kinds of people, now hypno-mediaed into a lockstep semi-middle class lifestyle with nowhere to run when the banks’ greed sucks them nearly dry except to the slot machines, crap tables and lotteries of forlorn hope.
Nice.
Wake the fuck up.
The National Tea Party Convention.
Being held in the cultural heart of the white right wing.
Nashville, Tennnessee.
Yee HAH!!!
Wake the fuck up!!!
AG
Thanks, AG. I had no idea I was living in some coddled Shangri-La until you pointed it out. Then the scales just fell from my eyes.
I grew up in South Orange County surrounded by these freaks. Excuse me if I wanted to get away from them and get them the fuck out of my life.
Come on, AG. Just because you’re a figurative thinker doesn’t mean you’re the only one. Don’t beat the help. We’re smarter than you think.
And then you wrote:
Sorry.
Does not compute.
I can only take you at your word.
Your first word was: “I have no frame of reference for these people.”
I thought that maybe you might need one.
A “frame of reference.”
So I gave you one.
Several, really.
Now you say that you do know them; you just don’t like them.
Oh.
Are you familiar with he term “Eyes wide shut?”
In combat situations…and that is what this is, karmic, societal combat at the very least…the “eyes wide shut” approach does not work very well.
Bet on it.
AG
Yes, you can only take me at my word. I apologize for being contradictory. I frequently forget that I will be judged constantly on whatever piece of vomit happens to trickle out of my spoiled little mouth.
And yes, I’ve tried eyes wide shut and have paid for it on what I can only assume to be a relatively (and thankfully) meaningless scale. I am not wired for combat and have no interest in doing so. There are things worth dying for, but nothing’s worth killing for.
If that makes me a Good German, well, then at least you won’t have me to kick around after the apocalypse.
Not by a long shot.
AG
I have this vision of many police officers…white police officers…and (white) soldiers all over this country sitting in front of the TV in their living room with a beer in their hands and their guns hanging on a hat stand behind them, yelling “HOT damn!!! That’s what I’m talkin’ about!!!”
Not all of them…just about 30% or 40%.
More than enough as far as I am concerned.
More than enough.
More than enough for what?
You have to ask?
Please.
AG
Watching The Tea Party Convention
C-Span has been running the videos from the Tea Party Convention in Nashville all night, and I started watching when I got up in the morning… and, believe me, this is scary stuff. I especially was taken by one Joseph Farah, who is the Founder, CEO and Editor In Chief of WorldNetDaily.
This is scathing stuff about the country’s move to Socialism over 90 or so years, the Marxist description of President Obama, and the focus on changing our underlying culture with its non-political organizations away from the socialist-leaning entities that, he says, they have become.
It is particularly frightening to me because Theatre is one of the areas (Entertainment Industry) that Farah fingers and encourages his followers to overcome.
He ties everything together with ACORN (which he seems to think is an openly Obama-operated organization) and uses that connection to attack the poor, the immigrant population, etc., with the notion of “turning make believe crises into real crises… and why?… to take away our freedom and the American Way of life.
Is it dangerous to have this stuff up on TV… even at 6 in the morning? You bet it is. But, if like me, you believe in free speech, which I don’t think Farah does, you have to let this crap go on. If you want to accept his notion that Obama is using Government to replace God for Americans (and here I will go beyond my own non-religion base), then you will see that he is calling for an Above The Government control of the population.
If you see, as he does, that our elected leaders are a judgment on us and that we have to find tea-party-related leaders to elect, then you are already removed from freedom.
Time to actively work against these monsters.
Under The LobsterScope
I was watching some of that last night (I fell asleep), and it was creepy. I love how they say Obama’s policies will bankrupt the country – Uh, Bush already did that in his 8 years!
And then they were interviewing some of the attendees who were so weird it made me laugh a little…but of course, I laughed at the idea that anyone would vote for W in 2000: he was a ne’er do well with nothing but a rich daddy and a string of failed businesses to his credit.
They shouldn’t be underestimated, especially in an economic situation where people are looking for someone to blame for their pain.
Dangerous as hell they are.
Bet on it.
AG
We gonna need Hillary Clinton…or some other potential hell raiser and infighter…before this is over.
Bet on that as well.
We gonna need us some claws!!!
Watch.
AG
Y’know…if there was a leftiness Tea Bag equivalent, I’d be there in a NY minute.
Yup.
Only there isn’t.
These Tea Bag folks…I can identify with them. They’re alla my less intelligent cousins. I know them. Real well. And I sympathize with their concerns. I really do. Most of them have worked hard for 20, 30, 40 years, and what have they got? They ain’t got shit, that’s what. Only thing is…tthey are not smart enough to figuure out the real reasons why.
Read Joe Bageant, folks.
He knows these people, too.
Come to think of it,, maybe that’s why he’s moved to Mexico and points south.
Hmmmmmmmm…
AG
at this convention is about 600 and I can’t find anything as to whether this is in line with the expectations of the organizers. It seems kinda small to me.
A view from across the Atlantic:
Prejudice and principle brew at tea party meet
These people remind me quite a lot of this group from our not-so-dim past (at least from a historical perspective).
And I believe Arthur is correct in that they have the potential to be dangerous. There are more than a few of them around here in the bible belt states. I keep my ears open to all kinds of whisperings on the street.
Hell, there’s more than a few of them in and around Seattle, one of the bluest areas in the nation. And while it might make some of y’all feel better to keep repeating how stupid they are (just as the left sneered at Bush, and now Palin), more than a few of them aren’t. In fact, that smug superiority not only makes the left far too complacent, it’s part of what pisses the TP’ers off.
And there’s plenty of corporate money quietly supporting their infrastructure-building, in a way the grass roots left never enjoys.
I think AG is absolutely correct.
Stupid they may be, but, as you say, there are leaders who are not so. Stupid also = easily led sometimes.
One of our precinct committeemen resigned at the last central committee meeting, saying he didn’t fit in with the party anymore. I was able to trace his defection back to the fundamentalist church he attends where his son preaches. Apparently there’s a lot of anti-Obama birther crap being spewed there.
It’s the difference between the KKK and the CCC…
Yep, and the thought’s the same, no matter the outer dressing.
There are times I am glad I cannot afford cable and today is one. I could not watch these crack pots.
hey they’re on the ‘tubes (can’t afford cable either)
Taking them seriously- the absence of fact-based oratory is overwhelming, – but I must say Farah’s graffiti mustache matches the eagle on the podium.
“At the moment Joseph Farah, the founder of WorldNetDaily, is going on at length about how the rule of law is being violated because Obama wasn’t born in the United States.”
yes, but will he declare how angry he is over the dailykos poll that shows a majority of republoicans believe “Obama wasn’t born in the United States”?
that, to me, is very funny.