Requiem for the Teabaggers
Remember the tea party?
Remember when they were the force that was going to change the country, the people who were going to send the Socialist Communist Muslim back to Kenya and run the country the way the founding fathers wanted it run, with no black people in charge, and with businessmen entitled to do anything they damned felt like, where everyone could carry an automatic weapon anywhere, and where government kept its hands off of Medicare, and all of the other good things that government created?
Where did they go?
Green Eagle was all over the teabaggers, right from the beginning. He even went to numerous tea party events, and followed many more closely. So, who could be better than Green Eagle to explain what happened? Here's my take:
The tea party people, as distinguished from ordinary Republican drones, never existed. At the end of the Bush Administration, Republican leaders had to face a dreadful prospect: They had just cheered wildly while their own government destroyed the economy, involved us in a shameful military aggression which was not only a monumental war crime, but seemed to have been run by bunch of schoolyard bullies. And they couldn't even claim with straight faces that Bush and Cheney were anything but party-line conservatives, running the whole operation just the way that Conservatives always dreamed of running things. As credible leaders, the Repubican party was dead, even for most of its mentally deficient followers.
Luckily, there was something that Republican leaders knew they could count on- their miserable "base" was made up of people with no long term memory, and a longing to be lied to again, and told that they are the only good people on earth- that it is evil to care about others, to help the poor, to object to being robbed blind by the rich and powerful, and above all to do anything good for non-white people. So they knew all they had to do was to wait things out.
Thus, the tea party. As I documented in literally dozens of posts, most teabag demonstrations were synthetic dumb shows, attracting minuscule crowds, after being heavily financed by the Koch brothers and other neo-Krupp moguls, just itching to be the economic powers behind a newly reborn fascism. The Republicans counted (quite properly) on the mainstream press to never dig under the surface, and report this phenomenon as some sort of real popular uprising.
This whole thing was created to give the dregs of our society, the White racist takers, the gun wavers, the tax haters, somewhere to take shelter until they forgot the damage that Republicans had done to them and their families, and were ready to rejoin the fold. So, after a couple of years, when a new Presidential election was upon us, the rich moguls pulled their money out of the tea party and put it into electing one of their own President. (Note: in case you didn't notice,it didn't work. I guess even Republican tools don't forget having their lived destroyed all that fast. Oh well, there's always 2016 to try the same thing all over again.) Without this massive backing, the tea party groups disappeared like a palmed card. And no one feels the least bit sorry. Sane people are happy to see the last of them, and their one-time followers have moved on to a more open and unapologetic form of race hatred, mixed with contempt for their duty as citizens to help the government function. Sarah Palin, McCain, Dick Armey and the rest of the tea party enablers have been pushed off the stage, replaced with Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and a whole new breed of phony technocrats, selling a new, revised version of the same old thing. The teabaggers are happy to come home to mama, as long as they get to hate the same old people, and thus, the fiction that was the tea party can be allowed to dissipate like the ghost of Saruman vanishing in the wind above Hobbiton. And there's always a new leader to take the place of the old leaders.
Remember when they were the force that was going to change the country, the people who were going to send the Socialist Communist Muslim back to Kenya and run the country the way the founding fathers wanted it run, with no black people in charge, and with businessmen entitled to do anything they damned felt like, where everyone could carry an automatic weapon anywhere, and where government kept its hands off of Medicare, and all of the other good things that government created?
Where did they go?
Green Eagle was all over the teabaggers, right from the beginning. He even went to numerous tea party events, and followed many more closely. So, who could be better than Green Eagle to explain what happened? Here's my take:
The tea party people, as distinguished from ordinary Republican drones, never existed. At the end of the Bush Administration, Republican leaders had to face a dreadful prospect: They had just cheered wildly while their own government destroyed the economy, involved us in a shameful military aggression which was not only a monumental war crime, but seemed to have been run by bunch of schoolyard bullies. And they couldn't even claim with straight faces that Bush and Cheney were anything but party-line conservatives, running the whole operation just the way that Conservatives always dreamed of running things. As credible leaders, the Repubican party was dead, even for most of its mentally deficient followers.
Luckily, there was something that Republican leaders knew they could count on- their miserable "base" was made up of people with no long term memory, and a longing to be lied to again, and told that they are the only good people on earth- that it is evil to care about others, to help the poor, to object to being robbed blind by the rich and powerful, and above all to do anything good for non-white people. So they knew all they had to do was to wait things out.
Thus, the tea party. As I documented in literally dozens of posts, most teabag demonstrations were synthetic dumb shows, attracting minuscule crowds, after being heavily financed by the Koch brothers and other neo-Krupp moguls, just itching to be the economic powers behind a newly reborn fascism. The Republicans counted (quite properly) on the mainstream press to never dig under the surface, and report this phenomenon as some sort of real popular uprising.
This whole thing was created to give the dregs of our society, the White racist takers, the gun wavers, the tax haters, somewhere to take shelter until they forgot the damage that Republicans had done to them and their families, and were ready to rejoin the fold. So, after a couple of years, when a new Presidential election was upon us, the rich moguls pulled their money out of the tea party and put it into electing one of their own President. (Note: in case you didn't notice,it didn't work. I guess even Republican tools don't forget having their lived destroyed all that fast. Oh well, there's always 2016 to try the same thing all over again.) Without this massive backing, the tea party groups disappeared like a palmed card. And no one feels the least bit sorry. Sane people are happy to see the last of them, and their one-time followers have moved on to a more open and unapologetic form of race hatred, mixed with contempt for their duty as citizens to help the government function. Sarah Palin, McCain, Dick Armey and the rest of the tea party enablers have been pushed off the stage, replaced with Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and a whole new breed of phony technocrats, selling a new, revised version of the same old thing. The teabaggers are happy to come home to mama, as long as they get to hate the same old people, and thus, the fiction that was the tea party can be allowed to dissipate like the ghost of Saruman vanishing in the wind above Hobbiton. And there's always a new leader to take the place of the old leaders.
Comments
Maybe there's a lesson in that.