Mad Hatters at the Tea Party

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. `I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she could.

`At any rate I'll never go there again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. `It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!'

"Tea Parties" were held yesterday across the nation and Pittsburgh was no exception (despite the fact that there already was a Tea Party here just last Saturday). The Other Political Junkie has posted on this phenomenon but I thought now was a good time for a review.

The Message

Ostensibly these Tea Parties are protests against taxation and big government spending. Their basis is the Boston Tea Party of 1773 which was of course a protest against taxation without representation. The participants in these Tea Parties are protesting taxation with representation. It's just the wrong representation I guess as there were no nationwide Tea Parties while Bush squandered Clinton's $236 billion surplus in his first year in office and then managed to leave a $482 billion deficit in his wake and a broken economy.

Then there's the irony of people protesting taxes who just got a tax cut -- how many of these folks do you really think make $250,000+ a year? And, how angry do they get when faced with reality?

The Tea Parties are also being presented as bipartisan events ("was neutral in any perceived attack on a particular party or politician"). Perhaps that's why Robert Baehr (Founder/Coordinator of PennsylvaniaTeaParty.com ) felt it necessary to recently take down the Obama morphing into The Terminator graphic (complete with terminator theme music) from his web site. Fortunately, I captured a screen shot of it only two days ago:


Bipartisan, my ass!

The Players

While I'm sure there were many genuine grassroots-type anti-tax activists in attendance, there is no doubt that "the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests."

On top of that, you have FOX News which both heavily promoted the events and participated in them:





The Subtext

So no one really likes to pay taxes and most folks dislike "big" government and have some reservation about the bailouts (though the Left would define "big" with such actions as, say, spying on the citizenry and denying women autonomy over their own bodies and the Right with things like taxation and gun control) so what's the problem?

As Atrios put it today:

All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.

I have to say that I agree with him on the Obama Derangement Syndrome part. Here are some signs from yesterday's protests:


Here's a video of delusional wingnuts from a Cleveland Tea Party a couple of months ago:



And, then there's this bit from the Saturday Pittsburgh Tea Party where Alan Keyes compared the Obama team to Al-Qaeda:

We have had foreign enemies who have sought to terrorize us with attacks, and we have domestic enemies who seek to terrorize us with economic collapse.

And works its way to a vision in which we are being led

happily into the slaughter pens where we shall go from being proud citiziens of the United States, fearing no one but our God, to being the subjects of a government where we must fear its every shadow.

But maybe Philly being far from Pittsburgh, Atrios is too far from seeing the broader picture: the Tea Parties aren't just about hatred and fear of Obama, they are about that deep, dark, ugly strain of America who hates government itself, fears anyone who is not like them, find conspiracies around every corner and see themselves as victims (but who only play at being martyers with their little tea bags vs. colonists who actually put their lives and liberty on the line).

As Chris Potter put it at his Slag Heap blog:

Let's recall that one week to the day before Keyes gave his little pep-talk, three Pittsburgh police officers were gunned down -- apparently by a guy who thought the government was going to take away his guns. It is in this context, in this city, that Keyes chose to praise his audience as a group in which "every individual is an army empowered by their faith in God."

I'm willing to bet that's how many lone gunmen see themselves. Especially the ones who would admire this line from Keyes' speech:

[N]ever as long as we have breath [will we] surrender the instruments with which we can defend [our] liberty against the depradations of a government no longer committed to it.

Make no mistake: I'm not suggesting that Keyes is encouraging people to go shoot cops. (His political program, such as it is, seems to involve "throwing the bums out" -- voting against every incumbent in 2010.) Nor would he be responsible if one of his audience later goes out and does just that. But Keyes talked quite a bit about how "liberty" wasn't all about doing whatever you wanted -- at least not when it applied to things like gay marriage. Maybe a word about the moral obligations of gun ownership would have been in order?

If you're in a city still grieving from a terrible shooting, you might want to think the se things through. If only to show you actually give a damn about the city you happened to parachute into that morning with your rantings. This is almost like Charlton Heston showing up in Littleton, Colorado to do the NRA "not from my cold, dead hands" shtick after the Columbine shootings.

What does it say when you don't have to go to skinhead web sites to hear these rants, when you can hear them at rallies across the country or pimped on FOX News or just listen to the batshit crazy rants of an elected official like Rep. Michele Bachmann who wants people to be "armed and dangerous," who rants about Obama's reducation camps for kids, calls for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America" and feels like she's a "foreign correspondent on enemy lines" when in the nation's Capitol or Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, told a Birmingham paper that there were 17 socialists in Congress?

Undoubtedly, someone can easily Google up a picture of Bush portrayed as Hitler from some Left rally, but there is a difference between the Left and the Right. For one, when the Left claimed that Bush cherry-picked intelligence or spied on citizens or tortured prisoners, they were proven right. More importantly, when they asked for redress, they called for impeachment or war crime trials -- legal remedies. The right is throwing red meat with talk of revolution and some coming storm and the need to keep their AK's.

If there's any doubt just how far they've gone, one only needs to see their mouthpieces willingly self-identify with extremists and terrorists all the way down to local radio personality Fred Honsberger who according to his Facebook message claims that our government thinks that you might be a home grown terrorist if: "you're a returning war vet, you ascribe to "radical" Christian views, you're against abortion, you have a Ron Paul bumper sticker on your car."

The Joke

But before we settle into a deep depression over the ugliness and lies of the Tea Parties, let's remember that wingnuts seem to have never heard of teh google and did not know that teabagging refers to a specific sexual act. So when you see things like this:






Remember that it means this:


And, laugh your ass off at them (but remember to breath through your nose):


.