Matt Taibbi's Oct. Rolling Stone article on the Tea Party "Tea & Crackers" is another Taibbi classic
 

"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."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

is it an important article? no not really, it says things we all already know, that what the tea party is doing does not make sense on the face of it, that the tea hypocrisy is just a cover for a lower brain rage at loss of promised boomer priviledge, and barely concealed bigotry at all the mud people, and an oddly unstateable hatred of the educated elites that serve the corporations as wage-slave trustys - unstateable, because it goes against their stated belief that the rich are inherently good, and that only the rich, with their jobs (which for some reason they never actually provide), can save us from evils of socialism like medicare and social security.

you cannot understand politics without understanding the brain and how the lower part of the brain controls tribe identity in the herd.

the corporate masters understand that lower brain process very well, and are using it, thru the media that they own, to control people and secretly seize power. The corporations have become a type of parasite that has infected the host body of this country and paralyzed it's brain - leaving us to be slowly digested alive.

here's more from the article - the usual suspects from the usual tribes will read it and enjoy it, while the other usual suspects from the other tribes will of course not even look - for to do so would defy their masters will.

""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."

More from the article, to make it easier to get the gist of Taibbi's argument:

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."

Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. Ha, ha, you thought we actually gave a shit about spending, joke's on you. That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues — it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake.

so that's Taibbi's prediction - the tea party is a fake, managed by the oligarchy, that will never actually really do any of the things it claims it's all about, because it's real purpose is to use lower-class boomer rage to make the rich richer and strip america of it's real wealth.

that's pretty much my prediction too.

the only querstion is, can we use the fakery of the tea party to our advantage somehow? can we use it, for instance, to force election reform, pure public financing of elections, and the outlawing of corporate priviledges down the federal governments throat?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...0fa_fact_mayer

Great read on how the Koch brothers (two of the richest men in the world) are closely aligned with -- many would argue responsible for -- the Tea Party.

Hopefully, they will continue to divide and conquer the establishment republican party. Tear it down more and more (as only the crazies can pass their tests) until it's nothing but a withered husk of what it should, and used to be. At that time, and probably only at that time, can sanit be restored to the republican party. Maybe then, people like <inseart board nut's name here> will stop being too ashamed to call themselves a republican and things will finally begin to imrpove.

Right now, the Republicans are only hurting themselves as the extreme nut jobs they are getting into and through the primaries have little chance of actually being elected. They will hopefully continue to cannibalize themselves until they make themselves totally unelectable. It will hurt, it will not be easy, but maybe then the Republican's can earn back some respect like a phoenix from the ashes of their destroyed party.

And on the opposite side we have George Soros.

at three billionaires to one you sure got my tribe beat.

altho it might be interesting to analyze the rightwing evidence on soros. I confess I have not given a shit about soros in the past, regarding him as just another one of the masters, albeit, like buffet and gates, not one of the most determined to enslave the rest of humanity.

how would we go about doing a comparison of soros to the kochs and murdoch? anybody know of an authoritative source that has checked the facts on these billionaires?

since the right always brings up soros, and always fails to mention the spectre of their big sponsor murdoch, it behooves us to take a look at billionaire blaming as a rhetorical device.

a quick search fails to turn up authoritative numbers, its all commentary. how would we research. who's richer, murdoch or soros?

the republican elite are taking a gamble - they don't believe they can be elected as the party of the wealthy, probably correctly, and they don't have any other source of political energy to tap than the anti-obamaism of the teaparty.

it remains to be seen wether the gamble will pay off.

however, you have to keep in mind that as our economy, which hasn't been fixed of it's fundamental flaws, continues to degrade, anger WILL bring the right wing back to power. in hard times people always vote for whoever uses fear the best, and you have to admit the right has fear locked down.

so we have to plan for a rightwing rise as the economy continues to be sucked dry of real wealth by the multinationals.

the real question is, what can we do to make our tribes politicians more afraid of us than they are of the multinationals?