Posts Tagged ‘Tea Parties’

Why is it that whenever I see a picture of Michele Bachmann somewhere I feel compelled to offer the rest of the country my most sincere apologies? We have three Republicans in the House but I merely disagree with the other two. Maybe it’s because neither of them has ever been caught hiding in the bushes spying on a pro-gay rights rally. It could be that she called on the media to investigate perceived anti-American sentiment amongst her Democratic colleagues in congress. Or perhaps it’s statements that are so painfully stupid and nakedly partisan that one has to wonder if she even cares that they’re bald-faced lies: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” (The last swine flu outbreak was during the Ford Administration…and this one started under Bush. Not that I believe viruses have a voice in our political process.)

Today this danger to herself and everyone she comes into contact with will be hosting a Tea Party event on Capital Hill. The main point of this is to march very loud, very angry people into the offices of members of congress so they can express their displeasure that the government would want them to have affordable, competitive healthcare. Of course it’s phrased a bit more batshit-crazy-like so as to whip them into a frenzy, but you get the general point. As so as to prime those Harley-Davidson-like engines of fury, Bachmann even appeared on Fox News last night where she was told by the “fair and balanced” host that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was gearing up Capital Hill security to clamp down on the event. Bachmann took connected with that softball talking about how that would be a “big mistake” for Pelosi to dare try to stop this event.

On a side note, I find it somewhat interesting that this plot starts in the basement of the Capitol. November 5th has a rather sordid history of such things.

Fox News promoted the living shit out of it. Not surprisingly, they then backtracked from their full endorsement of it in a failed attempt at reporting it objectively. The mainstream media picked up on it. It’s officially news.

Now I could be speaking about any of the objectives of the Bush Administration’s platform, but I happen to be referring to the tea parties that were organized yesterday to coincide with Tax Day. And for all the attention Fox didn’t pay to hundreds of thousands of protesters of the Iraq War, they were all over these things yesterday like flies on shit.

Example A: Bush-league Fox News on-scene reporter referring to Democrats as fascists.

You get the feeling during that frothing display of partisanship that he was about to freak out and start killing folks at random.

But what is most enjoyable is watching what happens when you toss around words like socialism and fascism without also granting folks the ability to know what the terms actually mean. Bless CNN’s Susan Roesgen for trying to maintain a professional demeanor in what is obviously a hostile environment to any reporter who isn’t sporting the Fox News logo on their microphone. Also bonus points for calling out a social retard for tossing out the word fascist while obviously not having the slightest clue what it meant. I mean, aside from ascribing it to an image of Obama’s head on the body of a Nazi.

Wow. I want to buy her a cup of coffee. Remind me if I ever meet her.

Here’s the long and the short of it, folks, and take it with whatever grain of salt you wish:

Obama is cutting most of these people’s taxes. Anyone making less than $250K a year will get a tax cut. This is a fact. He ran on it and, long stretch here, was elected by a clear majority of the American people for it. The sad fact is that the only way out of this fiscal nightmare is to pay off the agencies holding the country for ransom — the ones referred to often as “too big to fail”. Then you regulate the living shit out them. You enact laws like the ones that were in place before Phil Gramm’s bill destroyed them that allowed these institutions to get so fucking big and you move on.

This is going to be comfortable for no one. That is something you’re just going to have to accept. Collectively the American people are that person you know with the huge gambling habit. They’ve run up their debts to the point where the loan sharks need to collect or lose their own shirts. So they’ve come to collect and we can either let us all fail or pay the motherfuckers and go to Gambling Anonymous and get it over with.

To assign blame on this crisis to any one person is ludicrous. And if you did your homework about this nightmare you’d know that already and you would’ve flipped off Limbaugh and Hannity a very long time ago for suggesting anything differently. It’s also not the fault of any one political party folks. Gramm’s bill passed 90-8. Had more folks listened to Sen. Dorgan or Sen. Wellstone back in 1999 there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be in this mess.

As for the tea parties themselves, there’s an awful lot of noise coming from the left that these events were the creation of the right-wing. True or not, the anger and frustration expressed by those who attended, tragically uninformed as they often seem to be, are very real. There’s a lot of pissed of people out there. Sadly, righties, I don’t think there are as many as Fox would like us to believe. Most polling suggests that Obama still has the clear majority of support from the American people. But in order for him to be affective in his goals, folks have to take a deep breath and let him try to do his job.