How it is that the Teabagger Movement is bogus

The sorrow and the pity is that a lot of these folks are genuinely scared. They’ve been lied to, manipulated, shoved into these roles, but they are, indeed, scared. They are old enough to want Sinatra back, Doris Day, abundance in goods and services, to have a personal doc who comes to the house, and a world of people just like them, working hard, living decently, retiring with loving family. Yes – they want the fiction that often enough was fact of the 1950s when the US reigned supreme and all was therefore right with the world.

Having the second Great Depression (in many states it is) coupled with terror from forces they don’t understand, and a Black president to whom they cannot possibly relate all compounds the loss of jobs, the insecurity of their economic lives, the apparent abandonment of them to Wall Street.

A century ago they would have been the founders of the Grange movement, the anti-railroad forces, maybe even union organizers – but we’ve destroyed the heavy industries, the farms, the very roots of what once made us prosperous and relatively self-sufficient. What ELSE can they rail against since they haven’t a clue who runs the behemoth multinational that took their land, tore down their mill, threw out their jobs. There is no figure like J.P. Morgan anymore – there are only faceless, nameless hedge fund and derivative sellers.

If we want to stop this racialist, anti-government hype from them, this Congress and Administration needs to understand they are NOT just crazy. They’re terrified. We must make investments in secure pensions and health care for our retirees and bring back manufacturing types of jobs for the working people. Does anyone remember the LIFE magazine cover with the four blast furnaces being blown down in Youngstown OH? What you did not see – cropped out of the photo – were the TEN THOUSAND men, women and children standing at the chain link fence watching their lives go to hell.

Only today have we destroyed productive industries and the jobs that go with them. People claim it was always true – the buggy whip makers died when the car came in. Yeah – but the buggy whip was replaced with the gear shift. Never before in human history have we destroyed entire industries – because it paid more money (government payouts) than staying in business. But what we also threw away were these people and their families.

So, detest them as I do (I’ve been in their midst at rallies) for their ignorance and massive gullibility, I also pity them – I know their ilk nationwide. Good people distorted and warped by a society and economy that has no use for them.

We have to regain America for everyone, even – or even especially – for them. They once were the salt of the earth, but now they are nothing but pawns of anger and hate. It’s up to us to give them hope and bring them back some measure of security. We have to remember them in our plans and goals for change. We need a new kind of civil rights movement today – civil rights and economic rights for the ordinary working citizen, regardless of race or ethnicity. If we can show them the commonality so many people have, across color and ethnic lines, because of giant corporate pillaging of our nation, maybe we can begin to rebuild a nation for all of us. We have to try.

Kevin, you have to remember that Teabaggers get their talking points from industry tools who read and twist the meaning of the Health Care Reform bills but actually do build on stuff that is there.

For instance the Death Panels thing is built from both the provision to pay for end of life counseling with your doctor and the government establishing a panel to analyze best practices and promote them. So the twisters read this and decide that the government is creating a panel to tell you how you must die. When you confront the tea baggers with the accurate information about one part they start to argue the other part.

Or for another instance even though the House bill clearly states that illegal immigrants won’t be getting subsidies for buying health insurance the republican’ts complained (Joe “You Lie” Wilson et al) that because there weren’t stringent checks (tigher then the checks to buy a handgun for God’s sake) to make sure those weren’t illegal aliens that we were just letting them in. And even now that we have strigent checks in the bill preventing subsidies going to illegal aliens the fact that illegal aliens would be able to buy health insurance (as opposed to running around this country without any) through the exchange is to the republican’ts tantimont to subsidizing them because taxpayer money is used to run the exchange.

You have to have a lot of patience and knowledge to defeat that kind of crap.

And if you are going to spend time complaining about Huffington rather than Red State or Druge you might as well just set up a circular firing squad.

I think KevenSeven makes a valid point about the teabaggers marching to get “their” country back. There is a lot of fear of the different in their platform. They feel the white majority rule slipping away after they have so carefully segregated themselves into white flight areas.
They don’t understand much about this country’s history except that the wealthy and powerful always looked like them. The others (people with non-European heritage) needed to be segregated to the fringe of government and society. This somehow made them more secure. Fear of loosing this social order is at the root of this “movement” and their anxiety. I believe them when they profess that racism is not what the movement is about because they have nothing against the non-white as long as they aren’t in charge of anything. Black people are just fine in the abstract, but having a black President, or employer or bank CEO is another. Privileges slipping away has them fearful.

Best.post.ever.kevenseven.

And the most true and telling line resides in your last paragraph: ” They mean that America should not have a N****R as president.”

I too hold them in utter contempt.

Americans for Prosperity and Dickhead Armey should be ashamed of their completely transparent machinations of people who have absolutely no real understanding of the issues, and persistently fight against what is in own their best interest. Indeed, the buses carrying these shills to the site of their faux populist gatherings could be likened to coffins.

Teabaggers will be pitied, reviled, and laughed at for the remainder of this country’s history.

The “Tea Party” movement is a great example of the right wing robbing the language and our history of their meanings — like they always do. They know that marginally educated people don’t really know why all that tea was thrown overboard, so they distort the history to mean something else entirely. They know that people are all too ready to be jingoistic, so they throw in a few historic slogans — that people don’t really understand either — get everyone all riled up, and send them off to Washington.

Then they conflate what is supposed to be a “limited government” movement with racist posters, offensive and inappropriate parallels to the Holocaust, bad spelling and pictures of our president doctored up as insults that have no relationship to anything about his presidency.

It’s ridiculous political theater. And the country is having none of it.

I would rather be a Teabagger than a Teabagee…and it’s not just a gay thing…btw.

So much for taking the insults out so real debate can happen.

Enjoy rolling around in the mud with the rest of the pigs.

Thanks Kevin,
I will never look at Tang- the same.
I wonder…..
Can’t that tea baggie {{energy}} be harnessed to fight the wall street banker monarchy?
Isn’t that their REAL enemy?

If they are this gullible to follow Dick Army as tea baggers.
I think they could be lead into going away with the circus and performing with monkeys.