The old Soviet Union had a term for western journalists who catapulted their propaganda. They called them Useful Idiots. Today there is a corollary in this country, and we call them teabaggers.
I can not, for the life of me, figure out what they are so outraged over, outside of the fact that they have become a marginalized, rump regional party, confined to the south and a handful of mountain states.
Do they even realize the incongruity of the “tea party” concept? The original Boston Tea Party was to protest taxation without representation. But the people who are protesting have been the recipients of the largest middle class tax cut in history and the results are already being reflected on their pay stubs. I can’t believe that the top marginal rate going up three percentage points, to 39.6%, (it was 50% under Reagan) inspires enough spontaneous rage to fill the Missouri River with Earl Grey.
And by the way – where were these morons when Bush was wiping out a budget surplus, lying us into a three trillion dollar war and blowing off another one that was actually justified, and spying on Americans? Oh – that’s right. They were telling me to get with the program, that “9/11 changed everything” and if I had nothing to hide, I had no reason to be concerned. I remember now. They were too busy questioning my patriotism to protest against the perfidy of the Bush regime.
Ahistoric morons and dupes, the lot of them.
don’t make much sense and the participants don’t seem to be aware of the contradictions inherent in their rhetoric is to miss the point; these people are angry, bitter and frightened; they’ve been that way for a long time. This is why they loved the pugnacious nationalism of Bush and Co. which they found reassuring, and why they are easy game for the interests who want to use them to oppose meaningful healthcare and financial regulatory reform.
What is frightening is that these are the people that often turn to fascist militancy during hard times; when you throw in the racial agenda (folks that just can’t abide a black man in the white house), you have the makings of a mob ripe for a new Father Coughlin, priming for a takeover.
They are the ones I don’t bother with, on either end of the spectrum. They are unreachable. I don’t question them or point out the errors of their ways for their benefit – I do it for the 44% in the middle who are not steeped in idiocy and ideology, but who instead engage the thought process and are educable and reachable.
and that is the media response. Apart from Fox which one would expect to be support the events, the rest of the mainstream media seems to be going all out to sell the Tea Party narrative just the way the organizers want it sold.
I wrote earlier about a local TV station (KMOV); today I see very uncritical and unquestioning reports from the AP, and on the CNN Website. On NPR’s Talk of the Nation the coverage was almost fawning, only rightwing supporters of the protest were allowed to comment and nowhere was there even a hint of any counter-narrative, any effort to bring up the loud accusations that the protests consisted of astro-turf, or to to critique the claims of the protesters — all of which are as worthy of coverage as the events themselves and the beliefs of the protesters which get lots of coverage.
This media complicity is disturbing because it suggests that those manufacturing these events may actually have the resources to achieve their goals — building a base from which to effectively oppose needed reforms.