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News & ArtsTuesday, September 28, 2010
Politics / ??!! / Money Required Reading: Taibbi on the Tea Party
Posted by Jonathan Golob on Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 4:46 PM
Matt Taibbi on the Teaparty movement:
"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. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
The whole piece deserves a read.
4
My brother in law is a Tea Party supporter, listens/watches/reads Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, etc.
For the past 2-3 years, he has been on unemployment, collecting checks. Got married, spent a full year playing video games and nothing more. Got his wife pregnant and is currently a stay at home dad. Plans on home schooling his offspring, out of fear from what he claims is "The indoctrination of our children". Although I suspect home schooling is a means to avoid having to go back to work, even though he has a doctorate in psychology.
Has handicap plates and card, but I've never seen his face wince in pain. He shows no limp in his walk and does not take any pain killers. Alternatively, I suffer from on going sciatica and my dad has similar vertebrae problems, both are painfully obviously when witness us walking.
He drinks only liquor, does not smoke weed and often talks about suing people if they dont have extra handicap parking stalls. He honestly thinks accessibility laws for blind or deaf are a waste of the Americans with Disabilities act.
I know that you need to submit resume applications twice a week in order to accept unemployment checks. I suspect that if he fully exhausts his benefits, they'll call him in for an audit. If he owes, that should crank his level of hatred for the government up a few notches.
For the past 2-3 years, he has been on unemployment, collecting checks. Got married, spent a full year playing video games and nothing more. Got his wife pregnant and is currently a stay at home dad. Plans on home schooling his offspring, out of fear from what he claims is "The indoctrination of our children". Although I suspect home schooling is a means to avoid having to go back to work, even though he has a doctorate in psychology.
Has handicap plates and card, but I've never seen his face wince in pain. He shows no limp in his walk and does not take any pain killers. Alternatively, I suffer from on going sciatica and my dad has similar vertebrae problems, both are painfully obviously when witness us walking.
He drinks only liquor, does not smoke weed and often talks about suing people if they dont have extra handicap parking stalls. He honestly thinks accessibility laws for blind or deaf are a waste of the Americans with Disabilities act.
I know that you need to submit resume applications twice a week in order to accept unemployment checks. I suspect that if he fully exhausts his benefits, they'll call him in for an audit. If he owes, that should crank his level of hatred for the government up a few notches.
6
@5 is correct about the Teabaggers, and we need to stop dancing around it. The rage of most of them, at its core, is about their inability to accept seeing a black guy in charge. That's supposed to be only for someone like _them_!
8
5 & 6: You honestly think they'd be less pissed off and incoherent if Hillary Clinton was running things? It would be the Fosterites rather than the Birthers...
9
@4 is also correct. The Teabaggers are a white's only club of ignorant douchebags who are terrified, passive aggressive cowards. They had NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with the 8 years of spending under Cheney Corp. and now that (here's where @5 comes in) a half black man is running the show, they're all a bunch of screaming, scared infants.
10
Really, the teabaggers are just people who will never vote for a democrat, no matter what. Even if the non-democrat candidate was a goat, they'd vote for the goat over the dem.
Even though I disagree with their politics, I have to admit that I'm a person who would likely never vote for a republican, no matter what, no matter who the dems put up, I'd vote for the dem.
Why? Because I know the general dem priniciples and repub principles and I simply agree with the principles over any particular democrat. A republican candidate would have to stray pretty fucking far from their party's mission for me to consider them... and of course, that would most likely mean their party wouldn't be supporting them anyway.
So all the people who are amazed that the teabaggers are such blind followers should at least recognize that they might not really like their candidates so much, or even know what their candidates are talking about, but they absolutely disagree with the other side too much to care.
Not that that's an excuse... just sayin is all...
Even though I disagree with their politics, I have to admit that I'm a person who would likely never vote for a republican, no matter what, no matter who the dems put up, I'd vote for the dem.
Why? Because I know the general dem priniciples and repub principles and I simply agree with the principles over any particular democrat. A republican candidate would have to stray pretty fucking far from their party's mission for me to consider them... and of course, that would most likely mean their party wouldn't be supporting them anyway.
So all the people who are amazed that the teabaggers are such blind followers should at least recognize that they might not really like their candidates so much, or even know what their candidates are talking about, but they absolutely disagree with the other side too much to care.
Not that that's an excuse... just sayin is all...
11
My fellow sloggers: please read the Rolling Stone interview with Obama. Yes, you'll be pissed that he's chiding you for not being grateful for his presidency. But you all should be grateful that we have such an intelligent, progressive leader. Shame on my fellow lefties who are never, never satisfied!
12
@4,
I know a guy like that too. A mormon, currently in grad school, married with 3 kids and another on the way. His wife doesn't work, since she's got a full time job dealing with 2 toddlers and an infant. Grad school students make shit for income. His family receives state aid, food stamps, medicare, the works. Even though his family is basically in abject poverty and he's getting taxpayer funded state benefits, he still tithes 10% of his income to the mormon church
He votes republican 100%. He volunteers as much as possible for republican campaigns, distributing leaflets and such. When he's not doing that, he volunteers at his church, helping give baptisms to non-muslim dead people (yes, he really does that). He told me he usually spends 8+ hours a day doing that every Saturday and Sunday.
He's completely anti-universal health care. He's anti-welfare. He's in favor of tax cuts for the rich ("because they're the ones who create the jobs!"). He's anti-gay marriage equality. His reason for that is that his church tells him not to support it, so he doesn't. Whenever I ask him if he feels the church is making a mistake on anything, he says he doesn't think so, but if he felt bad about it, he'd just pray more.
He's completely brainwashed. It's sort of sad, because just from knowing him a little, I can tell he's not a bad guy. He's just misled and obedient.
I know a guy like that too. A mormon, currently in grad school, married with 3 kids and another on the way. His wife doesn't work, since she's got a full time job dealing with 2 toddlers and an infant. Grad school students make shit for income. His family receives state aid, food stamps, medicare, the works. Even though his family is basically in abject poverty and he's getting taxpayer funded state benefits, he still tithes 10% of his income to the mormon church
He votes republican 100%. He volunteers as much as possible for republican campaigns, distributing leaflets and such. When he's not doing that, he volunteers at his church, helping give baptisms to non-muslim dead people (yes, he really does that). He told me he usually spends 8+ hours a day doing that every Saturday and Sunday.
He's completely anti-universal health care. He's anti-welfare. He's in favor of tax cuts for the rich ("because they're the ones who create the jobs!"). He's anti-gay marriage equality. His reason for that is that his church tells him not to support it, so he doesn't. Whenever I ask him if he feels the church is making a mistake on anything, he says he doesn't think so, but if he felt bad about it, he'd just pray more.
He's completely brainwashed. It's sort of sad, because just from knowing him a little, I can tell he's not a bad guy. He's just misled and obedient.
13
There was a similar article recently about Pro-Life women who have abortions, and how they are able to justify their own but everyone else is wrong for having them. Some of them even request to wait in a different room, away from the other immoral girls there to murder babies. Interesting to watch it play out, in a really depressing kind of way.
14
Just read the entire article. it's awesome. Taibbi sums up the Tea Party Movement perfectly - an extension of the GOP that is pulling the wool over the eyes of the ignorant. It's amazing how they get people to vote against their own interests...simply amazing.
15
Anyone who's had to fight for school district funding in much of this nation has had a foretaste of this.
Always older, Caucasian folks that don't want us to "waste" our community's money on the generation coming in that happens to be darker, more "uppity" (including more assertive females), more not like them, as they perceive it.
Such thinking especially galls me in this state, when I've seen how much parents volunteer of themselves, often those who don't have much else to give but their time, for the sake of their kids' schools.
And the bottom line, almost always, is race. Somehow having a darker hue on the whole means our nation's children are less deserving.
Obama's inauguration just took such an attitude national, is all. Add money, media and stir, stir, stir.....
Always older, Caucasian folks that don't want us to "waste" our community's money on the generation coming in that happens to be darker, more "uppity" (including more assertive females), more not like them, as they perceive it.
Such thinking especially galls me in this state, when I've seen how much parents volunteer of themselves, often those who don't have much else to give but their time, for the sake of their kids' schools.
And the bottom line, almost always, is race. Somehow having a darker hue on the whole means our nation's children are less deserving.
Obama's inauguration just took such an attitude national, is all. Add money, media and stir, stir, stir.....
16
Taibbi makes me wish I had a sex drive. Actually, I would even pass on the sex if only I had him around to talk with.
17
Tea Party: Prototype for Emergent Web Organizations
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.…
The Tea Party, unlike state initiative movements, is truly an emergent phenomenon. Its evolution will create an apt test of network governance models. If, as the Tea Party is attempting to do, it removes incumbents from both parties in the November 2010 election, the Tea Party will then need to define a purpose grander than its current ambitions, one that can continue to galvanize its disparate members when there is no election looming on its horizon.
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.…
18
@17: These are the people who are too disorganized to even set up any sort of major convention. Get off of my interwebs, Bailo.
20
#18
Your definition of a political party in 2010 is having a "convention". The Tea Party has a convention all day long in the same way modern workers don't have "meetings" any more as they continually discuss, plan, build together.
I guess you define a "computer" as a great big thing with vacuum tubes in it.
Get off your "interwebs"? Sure...because it's probably just an operator at a switchboard....a Democrat operator.
21
20 - Please share with us your hero's story of how the government and 'Democrats' have kicked you around enough to troll everyday on slog with meaningless tripe. I'm listening.
22
The majority of teabaggers are gullible, easily manipulated, racist, poorly educated, set in their ways and given to conspiracy theories. In a nutshell: the Tea Party is is an umbrella organziation for crackpots who have been waiting for someone to recognize their potential as political cannon-fodder.
23
God, I love Taibbi's sardonic, wickedly sharp writing style. I've been waiting for him to direct one of his scathing pieces at the Tea Party and he doesn't disappoint here.
25
@13 - I personally know two women who have had one or more abortions and feel that it should be outlawed...
My head spins.
My head spins.
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