Archive for the ‘teabaggers’ tag
Surprise! Some of these teabaggers may have a case of the racism
Anyone who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention knows there are more than a few crazy racist people within the Tea Party movement. However, it appears as though the mainstream media is finally awakening to this reality (via)
In several instances, tea party members with racist backgrounds such as Roper have played a role in party events. At the same time, The Kansas City Star has found, white nationalist groups are encouraging members to attend tea parties. One organization based in St. Louis is sponsoring tea parties of its own.
Yes, it’s true. The Tea Party has a bad case of the racism. For example, SPLC recently profiled former Olympic athlete Bob Richards, who has minutely strayed from his career in pole vaulting in order to become a full-time bigot. Richards has taken up with a white supremacist group called the American Third Position (A3P).
That A3P’s cause is to “represent the political interests of White Americans,” according to its mission statement. The California-based organization hopes to unite disaffected racists and field candidates for political offices across the United States.
And A3P has apparently found some kindred spirits within the Tea Party movement.
Right Network: 'Pro-America, Pro-Business, Pro-Military sensibilities'
Actor and right-wing news guru, Kelsey Grammer. Image by Getty Images via Daylife
(Updated)
Comcast has joined forces with the Tea Party movement to form by airing “Right Network,” a television/web/phone venture that hopes to “entertain, engage, and enlighten Americans who are looking for content that reflects and reinforces their perspective and worldview.” (emphasis mine)
It’s all very exciting. Kelsey Grammer is a partner in the venture! Remember Frasier, you guys?
The operative word here is “reinforces.” Right Network is media built specifically for teabaggers. It exists not to inform, or encourage critical thinking, but to reassure far-right, fringe ideologies. Quite simply: it’s propaganda — and that fact is plainly stated in RN’s own preview document. (h/t Shoq)
On television, through partners including Comcast, RIGHTNETWORK delivers programming on demand that enables our audience to watch what they want, when they want. Everything Right, at the click of a remote. The lineup focuses on entertainment with Pro-America, Pro-Business, Pro-Military sensibilities — compelling content that inspires action, invites a response, and influence the national conversation.
As opposed to what? The mainstream media is already pro-America, pro-business, and pro-military, unless I’m missing a Burn The Flag, Marine-Shooting Cooperative network hidden between MSNBC and Comedy Central.
The perfect marriage: Lou Dobbs to headline 'Tax Day Tea Party'
Image by Joe in DC via Flickr
This afternoon, I received a breathless update from one of the several Tea Party mailing lists to which I subscribe.
TeaParty365 announced today that the nation’s leading business commentator Lou Dobbs (www.loudobbs.com) will headline its Tax Day Tea Party Rally to be held on April 15th from 7:00pm-9:00pm at the James A. Farley Post Office across from Penn Station in mid-town Manhattan.
It makes perfect sense. Dobbs made a living railing against Mexicans, and claiming dangerous others are changing America. A recent CBS/NYT poll confirms that 82 percent of teabaggers see illegal immigration as a “serious problem”. And just 24 percent say they get Tea Party information from the internet, while 47 percent get their information from television.
Things that will end badly: State-approved militias
Image via Wikipedia
(Updated)
Frustrated by recent political setbacks, tea party leaders and some conservative members of the Oklahoma Legislature say they would like to create a new volunteer militia to help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.
Tea party movement leaders say they’ve discussed the idea with several supportive lawmakers and hope to get legislation next year to recognize a new volunteer force. They say the unit would not resemble militia groups that have been raided for allegedly plotting attacks on law enforcement officers.
“Is it scary? It sure is,” said tea party leader Al Gerhart of Oklahoma City, who heads an umbrella group of tea party factions called the Oklahoma Constitutional Alliance. “But when do the states stop rolling over for the federal government?”
Great idea, team! I really hope they follow Digby’s advice and call this one McVeigh’s Law.
I would have loved to see Conservative’s response if the left pulled this shit during Bush’s reign. “No, no. Nothing weird is going on here. We’re just forming state militias designed to actively undermine a government we refuse to recognize as legitimate. Carry on.”
I’m guessing it would have taken lawmakers around 30 seconds to declare martial law and roll the tanks down Main Street.
Tea Party harbors a dwindling, confused demographic
Image by cometstarmoon via Flickr
Charles Blow points out the obvious. The Tea Party is home to a dwindling demographic: the white, Evangelical Christian, who is “less educated … than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack” according to a Quinnipiac University poll released this week.
As Blow points out, these voters are anachronistic to the country’s demographics.
the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
So whenever a teabagger screeches that they want “their country back,” what they mean to say is they want the country to be an Aryan nation.
The violence and lies post-reform medley
Image by AFP via Daylife
The most frequent dissent I received in response to my post about Tea Party bigotry is that racist teabaggers are a small part of the Republican Party, and they do not represent the party at large.
But there has been a shocking lack of condemnation on the part of Republican leadership in the wake of these vicious and bigoted attacks on Democratic lawmakers. Not only has there been a lack of castigation, but in some cases, Republican leadership have encouraged this emotive climate.
Color of Change called upon Republican leadership to stop inciting and supporting hate, citing that the RNC endorsed the rallies in which teabaggers carried signs that announced “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery,” “The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s Oven,” and “Guns Tomorrow.”
When reports of the signs surfaced, Michael Steele did nothing to distance his party from the fear-mongering. In fact, he embraced the radicals by saying he’d be “out there with the tea partiers” if — ya’ know — he wasn’t already chairman of the RNC.
Color of Change adds that Republican governors — far from denouncing their radical fringe — wanted to instead plan a “Tea Party 2.0.”
This behavior escalated over the summer.
Tea Party's bigotry is a birthmark, not a tattoo
Image by bsryan via Flickr
The very public implosion of the Republican base into a tribe of frothing-at-the-mouth racist, homophobic militants has been so extensively documented that it has inspired former Conservative bloggers like John Cole and Andrew Sullivan to renounce and/or heavily modify their political ideologies.
Through it all, the claim from party leadership and beltway insiders has been that the Republican Party has newly fractured into two extremist sects: the Neo-Conservatives, hellbent on world domination, and the Tea Party militants, who refuse to recognize a Democratic and/or black president, and who truly believe feminists, blacks, gays, Hispanics, the poor, and the unions (the dangerous — yet strangely amorphous — “Them” Glenn Beck always whips out when a specific enemy isn’t readily available) are encircling the suburbs.
The Tea Party base has been described as a new phenomenon — a surprising turn of events that no one could have ever, ever predicted. Most recently, a spokesman for Astroturf Inc. FreedomWorks, quoted his boss, Dick Armey:
Shorter David Brooks: 'You're all paranoid idiots'
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In this thrilling issue of the NYT, David Brooks explains how teabaggers are like the New Left because they distrust authority figures and protest in the streets. Of course, this is all very silly and zealous, Bobo explains. But just in case anyone dares accuse him of portraying protesters as cartoonishly simplified lemmings, he clarifies:
There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers. One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other is motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Wal-Mart.
And there you have it. You’re either stoned out of your gourd — probably naked and covered in mud — in some Hudson Valley field, or you’re a poor redneck who has to buy tube socks in bulk at Wal-Mart. (I smell a sitcom!)
Either way, if you’re protesting, you’re a fucking lunatic.
Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence. Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” is how Rousseau put it.
Iowa Tea Party movement less popular than pot, aliens, and Socialism
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Unsurprisingly, the media covered Sarah Palin’s address at the Tea Party convention in Nashville with unprecedented levels of enthusiasm for a fringe political movement. To be sure, if hundreds of radical leftists gathered for a meet n’ greet, CNN would not show up to document the event.
Yet, there were the mainstream media’s cameras to capture every crazy second of Palin sharing the same stage with Joseph Farah, a man who promotes the birth certificate conspiracy theory and hates gay people, except the cameras seemed to miss Farah’s fruitcake moment in the spotlight, and instead focused almost exclusively on Palin’s cheat notes.
Eric Boehlert offers a hypothetical to illustrate the media’s unique relationship with the right:
Republicans rethink Mad Max future
Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr
Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) hates Big Gubment. He hates it so much that he once rejected $700 million of stimulus funds, saying, “We simply cannot afford to base 10 percent of our state budget on money that will disappear in two years’ time.”
Translation: Thanks, but we’d rather just have a budget hole. The feds always rush in here, spendin’ cash like they’ve got the Argentine Elopin’ Fever. No, siree. Things are fine the way they are!
It takes a brave man to reject federal stimulus money, especially when one considers South Carolina has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the country (No. 1 in the south). Side-note: according to the Children’s Defense Fund, those poor residents include 190,000 children (h/t BC), or as anti-gubment Conservatives call children, “Those Who Have Not Gotten A Job And Remain Leaches On The State.”
The extremist teabaggers, who are now the majority of the Republican Party, have a very specific attitude about poor people that can best be described as: “fuck ‘em.” They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. See: SC Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, the man running for the Republican nomination for governor, who recently compared public assistance to feeding stray animals.
