By Hanlon, on August 30th, 2010 at 05:22 PM
 I think many of us internet denizens are unique in that we actually remember the formation of the modern Tea Party. You remember that? Back when it was Ron Paul and neo-libertarians who rejected both parties in favor of a bunch of policies that pissed off and enthralled the left and right in equal measure? Agree or not, at least they had a unified idea.
Cue 2010 and now the Tea Party is basically a more extreme conservative party, one who only nominally gives a damn about the Constitution. They all but formally kicked Paul out of the party some time ago, and now he’s got this to say:
“As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.”
These days, the Tea Party’s philosophy can best be summed up in three words: “we hate liberals”. Watch the speeches, read the signs, check out transcripts, whatever. All the Teabaggers give two shits about is opposing Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, I have a fact-finding mission: if anyone can show me a sign from the rally that attacks Bush/Cheney, that would really mean the world to me.
By Hanlon, on July 6th, 2010 at 09:10 PM
By Hanlon, on March 20th, 2010 at 06:05 PM
These are the maniacs the GOP wants to court.
A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-M.D.) had been spit on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-G.A.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a ‘ni–er.’ And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a “faggot,” as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president’s speech, shrugged off the incident.
But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.
“I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus,” [said Clyburn.]
This is more than just “a few idiots”. This is the core of the movement.
By Hanlon, on February 11th, 2010 at 06:52 PM
 Pumping up the “Tea Party” may have been the worst idea the Grand Ol’ Party ever had. Sure it may have been an astroturf organization from the get-go, but as we’ve seen, the people wrapped up in it certainly didn’t see it that way. If there’s one thing that’s a seriously stupid plan, it’s for the elites to rile up an anti-elites movement.
And so we see that a Democrat may get into office in Texas not because Texans are so down with the Bluebirds, but because the squabbling amongst the GOP candidates has gotten to hilarious levels. And TP candidate Debra Medina’s comments on 9/11 may cause some hair-pulling from the Tea Party acolytes. As she said on Glenn Beck’s program:
GLENN: Right. Here’s then let me be more frank and ask you the question: Do you believe the government was any way involved with the bringing down of the World Trade Centers on 9/11?
MEDINA: I don’t, I don’t have all of the evidence there, Glenn. So I don’t I’m not in a place, I have not been out publicly questioning that. I think some very good questions have been raised in that regard. There are some very good arguments, and I think the American people have not seen all of the evidence there. So I’ve not taken a position on that
Needless to say, the Republicans smell blood in the water. Incumbent governor Rick Perry and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison wasted no time:
“Today’s comments were an insult to the thousands of Americans who lost loved ones on Sept. 11 and the military men and women who are overseas protecting our country,” Perry said in a statement.
…
“To suggest otherwise is an affront to the men and women who are sacrificing their lives to root out the terrorists in Afghanistan and around the globe,” the [Hutchison] added. “Ever since that tragic day, I have fought tirelessly to ensure that we hunted down the Islamic extremists who target our nation. No one stood closer to President Bush and Vice President Cheney in their efforts to defeat the terrorist threat to our freedom.”
Now here’s where things become interesting. In all fairness, Medina answered honestly. She didn’t say that the government was involved, just that the 9/11 Truth Movement raised some good questions. However, Teabaggers are, unsurprisingly, not big on such things (to wit: they’re trying to ouster Ron Paul for not supporting the “war on terror”). But are we expecting the Teabaggers to embrace Perry or Hutchison? The Tea Party’s base largely believes the GOP proper is weak and ineffective, will they turn their backs on their candidate because of that?
Keep an eye on Texas. Things are getting fun.
By Hanlon, on February 9th, 2010 at 01:48 PM
 I’ve written time and time again on polls, when they matter and when they don’t, and I think one of the most useless kind of polls is popularity polls. When it’s a discussion of the popularity of political figures, specifically when the people polled are able to vote for said figures, then sure, it matters. Presidential approval ratings, local polls about Congressmen, polls about people who are considering a run, whatever.
What’s pretty dumb, though, is just asking people what they think of “democrats”, of “capitalism” or things like that, and as Matt Yglesias points out, an Iowan result on the popularity of the Tea Party is similarly flawed.
Des Moines register reports: “A third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the ‘tea party’ movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government, according to The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll.” But how loud a chorus is this, really? 55 percent of Americans say they’repersonally protected by a guardian angel. 38 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, but I don’t see anyone writing newspaper articles about how a populist wave of socialism is sweeping the country. The number of Iowans who like the tea party movement is smaller than the number of Americans who want marijuana legalized or the number of Americans who believe the government has had secret contact with extra-terrestrials.
Statistically, this means that the Tea Party is less popular than Cuba and socialism, which is serious food for thought.
What’s even more significant, and speaks even more about the numbers, is that the Tea Party really doesn’t have an identity of its own. It’s not really about fiscal responsibility, since they didn’t seem to have a problem with Bush’s insane “cut taxes and spend anyway” policy. It’s not really about keeping the American government from being imperialistic, since most of them support the War on Terror and secret tribunals. It’s not about taxes, since most of the people in the movement will be getting tax cuts next year.
The Tea Party’s a lot like an abstract painting: it is what the viewer wants it to be. So for anyone pissed off at the Obama administration, the Tea Party is kind of a catch-all. If you think he’s an immigrant, a pansy, a socialist, whatever. Anti-Obama “Get a brain, morans” types can just affix whatever they want to the movement. There’s a libertarian bend, sure, but for the most part it’s a conservative pseudo-populist construct.
If everyone who was polled was also asked what the ethos of the Tea Party was, chances are there’d be a myriad of responses, which just gets to the core of the issue. The “movement” would be a hell of a lot less popular if the people who claim to support it really had a clue what they were supporting: a GOP-promotedexploitation of various small sects of pissed-off right-wingers.
But like Matt says, don’t hold your breath for the media to point out how popular socialism is in the polls. I don’t support “socialism” as a whole doctrine. A few socialist policies, sure, but then so do most people.
By Hanlon, on February 8th, 2010 at 04:49 PM
Well, it was always an astroturf GOP stunt, but at least the people who bought into it are starting to wake up to the fact.
The libertarian movement is nothing new. The Teabaggers, however, are a joke.
By Hanlon, on February 5th, 2010 at 12:25 PM
Boy, what an amazing grassroots movement.
To quote Will, “I think I had more people than that at my bar mitzvah.”
By Hanlon, on November 16th, 2009 at 01:34 PM
 I think, on some level, we all have a similar presumption about the current wave of right-wing protesters. We see them as hypocrites, either willful or not. We see them as people who sat through eight years of Bush terrorizing, economic obliteration, and war crimes and now that a Democrat is in office suddenly they give a shit about things like executive overreach and fiscal responsibility.
Brad Friedman over at the Guardian has another perspective. It’s not that they saw and ignored Bush’s transgressions, they just didn’t know about them.
By contrast, Fox presents an alternative reality where Republican hypocrisy, scandals and abuses of power are either spun into something they are not or, more frequently, simply not mentioned at all. As such, the depths of the historically unprecedented failure that was George Bush’s presidency remain virtually unknown to Fox viewers. In the bargain, as the young Obama administration moves forward, attempting to deal with countless disasters they’ve inherited, issue after issue now comes as a complete surprise to the majority of Fox’s audience.
…
The list goes on and on, but the frothing teabaggers protest as if the last eight years never happened. Rather, these poor saps were presented with a phony version of reality produced with Hollywood-style special effects and distractions (missing blonds, steroids in baseball, terrorists around every corner, non-existent voter fraud). Now these confused souls roam the streets, town halls and email lists as clueless zombies, unaware of who and what they are fighting for (government-supported corporatocracy) or against (their own self-interest).
We’ve all been hit with a moment where, after combing through more ideologically tilted news outlets, we’re caught in the headlights by a pretty dang important story that didn’t get mentioned anywhere you were looking. Now, most of us have some diversity in where we get the news, and so such stories are cases of “falling through the cracks” that don’t happen all that often.
Imagine, though, living as someone who gets all of their news from FOX and right-wing talk radio. Literally, all of it. The way you’ve heard, Bush was a steadfast and courageous man of God whose presidency was plagued with evil liberals attempting to destroy his good works. The war was always justified, and always successful, thanks to the brave Republicans fighting off Democrats who tried to ruin it. The economy was doing great under Bush until the Democrats started screwing it up, and the bailouts and such were all Obama’s ideas.
This is why these people are willing to follow Glenn Beck unquestioningly, despite his tenure on CNN as a republican cheerleader who wholly endorsed just about everything he’s now calling a threat to the United States’ soul: they never watched him on CNN. Having never branched beyond the FOX/Limbaugh sphere, they’re unaware of anything that may have happened out there, be it news items or massive cognitive dissonance in their heroes.
Consider the O’Reilly strategy of dealing with criticism: cite nothing and attack viciously. This gives the appearance of covering “the other side” without ever making his poor, fragile viewers actually have to see it. So sure, Factor viewers are aware OF some sort of row between himself and Olbermann over something, but not having seen any of it, they’re left taking Bill-O’s word that the spat was because O’Reilly said something Keith didn’t like and so KO threw an ideology-based fit.
Welcome to the right-wing media mold. Spin everything, deflect criticism, ignore stories that muck with your narrative. Is it any wonder that people are up in arms?
By Hanlon, on November 9th, 2009 at 02:46 PM
As an equal opportunity armchair quarterback, I’m more than happy to explain why each party has a problem with its base. Lately, though, I dare say the Republican Party has a far, far more severe problem with its base than do the Democrats with theirs.
Most of you probably recall my October-fast, and so realize that it must be something pretty outrageous to have me turning my attention toward the rabid, frothing conservative Teabagger base. It is.
Elie Weisel is a Holocaust survivor turned Nobel laureate who committed the unpardonable sin of… criticizing the Teabaggers who held up a picture of the Holocaust in an attempt to exploit that pain and criticize Democrats’ health care plan. The response is downright horrifying. Head to the original Politico story for more comments.
Rothschilds nothing! Everyone knows that Obama is George Soros sock puppet. Wasn’t Soros Jewish once upon a time? May the Schwartz be with you.
The jews need to clam up and accept the fact that they are in a Chritian country.
This hollowcost thing is totally overblown by the jewish.
Elie Weisel is disgusting PR-seeking profiteering demagogue who has made a fortune off playing on the world’s guilt trips about the what happened to the Jews during WW2.
Weisel is getting too touchy in his old age. Too bad, I remember when he deserved respect, not pity.
This comment is pretty awesome.
Perhaps Weisel should take Obama’s advice. Lets wait for the facts. For all we know it was liberal democrat holding that sign.
I’d like to remind everyone that these people are defending the use of a picture of the stacked bodies at Dachau for a disagreement on health care reform, and turning their ire toward a man who was actually in a concentration camp. I’m almost expecting to see someone with a sign that says, “I’d rather die of cancer than live under socialism”, and after a man dying of cancer says that”s tasteless, the base tells him he should have his corpse buried in France. These are people who would correct Jesus Christ on what the Bible says.
These are your friends, GOP. Those are the Teabaggers, the “real Americans” who are supposedly giving voice to the “concerns” America has with liberal policies. We often talk about the spineless Democrats, but the Republicans have become far worse. While the Democrats are afraid to embrace the ideals of their base, the Republicans are downright terrified to rebuke theirs.
You’d think any decent human being would agree that using an actual photograph of corpses in the Holocaust would be beyond the pale, but the GOP is so scared of losing what little support they have that they won’t do it. Ironically, this is the very reason national support for the Republican party is collapsing. While the Democrats’ problem with their base is related to their seeming abandonment of the base, the Republicans have the opposite problem.
Of course, this all adds up to a Washington that’s sitting far to the right of the people they’re supposedly representing, but that’s another rant for another time.
By Hanlon, on October 15th, 2009 at 11:24 AM
On one hand, we have pure unbridled rage from people protesting the notion of a minor tax bump at the highest levels in order to give health care to the poor. On the other, people who want to get married. Those protesting against helping the needy, and those who want equal rights.
For the record, this is not a breach of the Octoberfast. It’s a serious look at how different the two biggest protests of the year were in tone and character. This isn’t “gotcha” blogging or hunting for stupid stuff some pundit or politician said.
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