By Mike Appleton (Guest Blogger)
In 1773 the British East India Company was broke. In an effort to prevent bankruptcy, and the resulting loss of the crown’s investment, the British government eliminated all taxes on domestic tea sales and granted the company a monopoly on tea shipments to the American colonies. In December of that year radicals boarded ships in Boston harbor and threw $75,000.00 worth of tea overboard. The first Tea Party was a violent reaction to monopolistic economic power protected by government.
The modern Tea Party doesn’t understand history, so it can’t be expected to appreciate irony. It is a mongrel movement, its leaders self-proclaimed, its agenda by turns unfathomable and incoherent, its philosophy grounded in vehemence. So how can it possibly be dangerous? Here, in no particular order, are my four Rs of the Tea Party.
1. It is racist. I know. I just played the race card. But the best way to stop someone from playing the race card is to quit dealing it. Public expressions of bigotry began as soon as Barack Obama was nominated at the Democratic convention, and continued throughout the campaign, during which prominent Republicans referred to him as “boy,” “uppity” and other vulgarities. In short order he became a socialist and a Marxist and was then transformed into an extremist Arab Muslim. Sarah Palin eventually settled on the euphemistic “let’s take our country back,” but we all knew what she meant. The Tea Party began forming before the inauguration and was printing “Don’t Tread on Me” posters while the Obama family was still unpacking in the White House. On April 15, 2009, the Tea Party was protesting a tax burden that was, and is, the lowest in 60 years.
The Tea Party has promoted ugly forms of nativism, including punitive immigration laws, English only legislation and bans on the teaching of ethnic studies. It is the 1840s once again, but the targets are Muslims and Hispanics rather than Germans and Irish.
2. It is a religionist movement. I don’t know if religionism is a word, but I use it to describe a phenomenon distinct from traditional religion: religion as political philosophy. It is the view that the Constitution was divinely inspired, that America is God’s gift to mankind, that capitalism is mandated by Holy Scripture and that the notion of “social justice” is the work of the Antichrist. It is a culmination of the fundamentalist reaction in the early 1900s to Darwin and the progressive movement. It has spawned a form of Christian imperialism that justifies the “crusades” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supports Israel uncritically and sends American politicians to Africa to lobby for the death penalty for homosexuals.
3. It is repressive. The Tea Party is committed to authoritarianism. Lawmakers in Congress and throughout the country, particularly in states with heavily Republican legislatures, have been imposing humiliating burdens on women’s constitutional rights at breakneck speed. They are simultaneously reducing taxes on business and cutting funding for education and health care. The regulation of entire industries is being eliminated in certain states. The integrity of public employees has been impugned and their rights to organize curtailed. Laws banning the phony threat of sharia are pending in a dozen states. The independence of the judiciary has been threatened by proposals to reduce courts’ rule-making authority and politicize the judicial selection process.
4. It is revisionist. The Christian right and its supporters in legislatures and on school boards have demanded that high school history texts be rewritten to eliminate references to the deism endorsed by many of the Founders in favor of promoting the false notion of America as an exclusively Christian nation. The history of slavery and the Civil War is being falsified to satisfy the desires of apologists for the Confederacy and southern “values.” Science cannot be re-written, but it can be denied. The sciences of climate change and evolutionary processes have become the subjects of unnecessary controversy.
Robert La Follette, a founder of the progressive movement, became governor of Wisconsin in 1900 and immediately took on the railroads, forcing them to pay higher taxes on their assets. When the new governor of Wisconsin took office this year, he immediately took on labor in an effort to destroy public employee unions and cover the cost of new tax reductions for business. But like I said earlier. People who don’t understand history can’t appreciate irony.
raff, do you know how that is accomplished? Embalming!
OS,
I love pizza too, but when I said survival food, I am talking about food that will keep fresh for weeks!
little debbie swiss rolls
the worlds most perfect food
Otteray,
I’m with you. I vote for pizza–especially my husband’s homemade pizza. Food doesn’t get much better than that!
raff, I thought that was pizza. I would not have survived grad school had it not been for pizza and potato soup.
Elaine,
Thanks for the correction!
OS,
Don’t knock Twinkies now! Twinkles are the original survival food!
rafflaw,
Did you mean Fox Gnus?
🙂
Holy crap! Mr union suck,
You may want to look at your numbers. Facts are a funny thing. Social Security is solvent for another 30years and has absolutely no impact on the national debt. You need to stop watching Fox News.
Buddha,
Dark chocolate is a much better mistress.
😉
101st keyboard commandos
HELL ON CAPSLOCK
Sugar is a harsh mistress.
BIL, he may be in Twinkie withdrawal. When you live in Mommies basement, you cannot let yourself run out of Twinkies. Needs to tell Mommy to go get some more.
Is the drool from your slack jaw shorting out your keyboard, bad ass?
By the way, you lost any credibility when you entered this place with a threat of violence, you dumb redneck.
You acted like a rude violent child, so I’ll just continue to treat you like one: with ridicule.
I don’t owe you an explanation for your stupidity.
Ask your parents.
So explain to me sir, do you have the $245,000 you owe to this government to support it’s unlawful entirement programs? Do you have the $245,000 per child in your household? what is YOUR plan to pay back your portion of this debt? What makes you think you have a right to demand that I or my children pay for your? I look forward to each of your well thought out answers to these questions. The problem is, you will have an answer to none of them, yet you continue to believe that you should make no sacrifice. Your line of thinking never has answers, you just want more and more. Did you live in your parents house until you were 34 demanding they take care of you. YOU are not MY problem.
The Truth About the Tea Party: Matt Taibbi takes down the far-right monster and the corporate insiders who created it
By MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone
SEPTEMBER 28, 2010
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-on-the-tea-party-20100928
Excerpt:
It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.
“I’m anti-spending and anti-government,” crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. “The welfare state is out of control.”
“OK,” I say. “And what do you do for a living?”
“Me?” he says proudly. “Oh, I’m a property appraiser. Have been my whole life.”
I frown. “Are either of you on Medicare?”
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
“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.
Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine.” But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself — half of his patients are on Medicare — he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. “Physicians,” he said, “should be allowed to make a comfortable living.”
Your threats could be your last demand . . . at least not ones made to your guards. Threats made against another’s life made via the Internet are a felony.
Not to mention your ridiculous assumptions that you’re all that, redneck.
Which are as funny as you are stupid.