Are a waste of time.
I would no more go to a tea party, than I would to an anti-war demonstration. I’ll fight stupidity through the ballot box, thank you very much.
The teabaggers are acting like they are some holy crusade, however they don’t really have a coherent message to put out. What is it they are protesting exactly?
Higher Taxes? There have not yet been any tax hikes. Yes, some are on the table, which encompass the moving of the top marginal bracket to previous levels. Further, I would wager that, that the vast majority of people protesting will get tax cuts if Obama’s plan passes Congress. If these people love tax cuts so much-they ought to be happy with this year’ s plan. Most folks making over 250 K don’t have time to carry signs anyway-they are out making money.
Government Spending? “It isn’t as if the spending just started–it has been going on for some time. Indeed, whether it is massive social expenditures (the Medicare prescription drug benefit) or bailouts (TARP, loans to Chrysler and GM, bailout money for AIG, etc.), not to mention war spending, it all started under the previous administration, and some of it has been going on for years. ” So while I understand at some point enough is enough, it is difficult for me to take seriously all of this outrage on this topic right now. Want to save some real money? get the hell out of Iraq-tomorrow.
But, if Sean Hannity and the rest of the slobbering horde is to be believed, Americans are more than willing to spend billions for worthless Arabs, but not one damn cent for real Americans. And evidently, they have no beef with starting a renewed war for the Somali coast without backing out of any of the the other four we are in.
However government spends too much.
As is noted here-all this tea baggery makes for an odd brew:
If nothing else, the conservative movement is an irony producing machine. Aided and abetted by their echo chamber at Fox News, on Tax Day next week members of the raging right will gather at so-called Tea Parties around the country. There, the protesters, at least 95% of whom received a tax cut courtesy of President Obama and Democrats in Congress, will in essence decry “no taxation with representation.” And if their misunderstanding of the Boston Tea Party wasn’t bad enough, their choice of tea bagging as metaphor is more unfortunate still.
To be sure, what theoretically began as a protest against profligate government has morphed into a Rorschach Test of right-wing political grievance. (For examples, see this video collection from Huffington Post.) Glenn Beck’s astro-turf acolytes decry saboteurs and “communists,” evolution and “brainwashing machines.” The tea baggers’ strange brew of Birthers and Birchers proclaim Barack Obama foreign-born while issuing calls to “burn the books.” In the end, the far-right foaming at the mouth (starting around the 1:58 mark above) was enough for the renegade conservative blog Little Green Footballs:
“This is some really deranged stuff, and the audience is eating it up.”
As Jon Stewart rightly pointed out to the beaten and battered, furious and frothing minions of the right, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” While President Obama has proposed returning the tax rate for the 2% of taxpayers earning over $250,000 to the Clinton-era levels of the booming 1990’s, the Tea Baggers apparently believe King George III is still oppressing his colonial subjects under the yoke of the Townshend and Tea Acts:
If you ask me the Tea Parties are a celebration of selfishness. Protesting a problem that does not really exist yet-and not offering a coherent solution for a non-existent problem. They can however-tell you who is to blame for it: Any one but them.
Because part of the tea party movement-which was not much of a movement at all-until Fox News, Freedom Works, and other patron saints of the conservative movement decided to up the ante and bankroll the movement. Enlisting the usual suspects of the right to help talk it up.
Which is what makes Republican politicians showing up to support them, as Paul Krugman asserts, more than a little unseemly:
Everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
What I find most disturbing about the tea parties is the attitude of those who praise them. If you argue that maybe, just maybe, the previous administration had something to do with increased government spending, you will be greeted with a rolling of the eyes and that quick eye glance around, ” Don’t you get it? It is all the fault of the One!” No thought of trying to work together to fix problems as a nation together-rather the same tired old logic of: ” We are better than them”. Them who? Someone who disagrees with you? To hell with the tea bags -make your case to the electorate.
Plus there is always the undercurrent of fear lurking just around the corner:
“Get ready for the anti-Tea Party sabotage and smear campaign”For the next 9 days, the left-wing blogosphere and left-wing clueless pundits will hammer away with their unreality-based Tea Party smears.
And on the ground, the tax-subsidized and Soros-subsidized troops are going to try and wreak havoc every way they can. Many readers and fellow bloggers have seen signs that ACORN may send in ringers and saboteurs to usurp the anti-tax, anti-reckless spending, anti-bailout message.
Always, of course, this message is delivered with a patented sneer-such as only the truly converted can deliver. They go home in the calm self assurance of knowing somehow that their protests are better than someone elses:
No stilt puppets, and precious few kettle drums, so far as I can tell. Everyone fully dressed. And lots of American flags. Most of which were flown right-side up, and all of which were untrampled upon and unburned.
Conclusions are left to the reader.
Which is the important part-the message doesn’t work without that self assurance. I mean God forbid they might just be barking up the wrong tree. Namely-that in the aggregate Americans are not the most heavily taxed society and Stalin is not lurking around the corner. The notion that Obama is “driving up the debt several times whatever Bush did” doesn’t make any sense.
Take the biggest tranch of the future debt – $32 trillion of a new Medicare drug entitlement – Obama gets blamed. Except for the fact that Obama inherited that commitment, with no provision for funding it, from the Republicans. To blame Obama for it is like blaming him for the future costs of the Iraq war. Yes, they will be incurred after Obama took office – but they decided long ago.
And for anyone who was actually paying attention, instead of being blinded by silliness-you knew that already.
Oh and in case you guys never heard-you might have picked a better name.
Have fun in the park today.