Of course - this is Dick Armey's army.

Many of these activists are able to hold jobs and function well in everyday life. How are they able to do that? I guess they don't look at their own tax returns.

I believe the operative statement included the words "Rush" and "Beck"

As we all know studies have shown that Fox viewers know significantly less about the facts than any other news consumers. These Tea Party people are being fed false information in the form of "opinions" and they are unable to tell the difference.

As we also are aware Fox management considers itself an extension of the Republican party. Big suprise that their viewers are uninformed. and by uninformed I generally mean "too dumb to pount sand"

...The bottom line seem inescapable: Tea Party activists have no idea what they're talking about. Their sincerity notwithstanding, this is a confused group of misled people.

who already have true believers in Congress (Michelle Bachman) and will be running for office in the very next election.

Their understanding or lack thereof makes no difference to them. These are largely people who are angry at life and one reason is as good as another for sounding off. It is no accident that many of them are retirees. The feelings of being bypassed, being no longer relevant undoubtedly find some relief in these outbursts. No doubt it also alleviates boredom.

For a real insight into the folks at FOX please take a moment and check out the web site of Debbie Schlussel - some news on Sean Hannity that everyone needs to read, wish they would put him in jail.

...there are still some who believe the political mainstream should do more to listen to the Tea Party crowd and take its hysterical cries seriously.

To put it bluntly---and in a language that these "teabaggers" can understand---I will pay attention to your inept, shallow, clearly-ridiculous stupidities when you pry that attention from my cold, dead hand---because I do not suffer cognitive/intellectual terrorism kindly.

Though we should have nothing to fear but fear itself, an ignorant, angry mob can also be a very frightening thing! Shame and pox upon any political agent who would feed such a threat! -Kevo

How can you expect these people to know any better? The best reporting of what is really going on is on comedy shows. The so called News agencies lie by omission and ask irrelevant questions ad nauseam, and will not approach questions that might lead back to their sponsors being portrayed in a bad or questionable light.

A good chunk of these clowns are simply freaked out that an uppity neegrow is in THEIR White House. Period.

Have you all noticed that the tea party crowds seem to be getting smaller with each passing event. The other day they were down to a few hundred.

They are all worked up over obscure house and senate rules. Wow, the power of paid media.

There is a viral world of outrageously false emails that circle the planet in a vast tide. Tea Baggers read them, believe them, and pass them on in a 21st Century version of the Telephone Game.

It helps to be retired, have a modest fixed income, and way too much free time. . .

I think gelfling's got it. I'd just add that these people aren't just bored; they're the kind of people who thrive on conflict and fighting the "enemy" and have to have a big dose of that every day. It's a vicious cycle of Beck, Limbaugh, Fox, etc. feeding the addiction, which only grows when you feed it.

Teabaggers are also impotently enraged at the social, cultural and demographic shifts in the country as personified by the current president, and they're acting out on that. There is a large, large serving of old-fashioned racism in this -- especially revealing is the "I want my country back!" line.

shortstop

I don't think many of the tea party types consciously think of themselves as racists. Just the opposite. At some level they might be racists, but that isn't how they view themselves. For them life hasn't turned out the way it was promised. Their fixed incomes are fixed. Their expenses aren't. Their retirement plans proved to be a bust. Their kids aren't doing as well as they did so they can't help. The American dream turned out to be a nightmare. They want to blame somebody so they blame the "others." That the others are victims themselves doesn't mean anything, they are an easy target because they are unknown.

These people also believe:

a] The Rapture will occur in their lifetime

b] They stand a good chance of becoming rich in the next ten years

c] All unemployed people simply refuse to work

d] All non-white people want everything for free

e] There must be some legitimate reason why that black guy isn't legally our president

In short, these people are genetically engineered to take up the causes of super-rich corporatists. They are perfect, no-questions-asked foot soldiers willing to fight and die for an agenda that is utterly against their best interests.

My prediction: We may be seeing the Tea Party wane, but this particular willfully ignorant sector has now been identified. Thanks to the Tea Bagger convention in Nashville, the richer ones have been rounded up, given a T-shirt and the Mark of the Beast that means they'll be hit up for mega-donations from now until "The Rapture." The Tea Partiers will morph into a Conservative Fundamentalist Movement that will be throwing a lie-based monkey wrench into everything progressives hope to accomplish now and in the future.

It's all pretty funny, but I'm curious as to whether the general population would do any better on these questions than the tea-partiers.

I doubt their sincerity (not all, but most). It is ego, greed, and self-interest that drives these clowns. Most will ignore the truth to make sure their self-interests are fulfilled and their egos are satisfied. They have no problem taking advantage of others to get ahead, and have no problem not playing fair or not paying their fair share for something they want.

WAR IS PEACE
SLAVERY IS FREEDOM
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

“The trouble with most folks ain't so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain't so.” -Josh Billings

Behold the new secular religion.

chrenson,

I'd be a little careful about saying that. Although there is considerable overlap between Tea Partiers and the religious right, the Tea Parties have attracted a significant number of non-religious anti-tax people, as well. Remember, Ayn Rand was a staunch atheist, and I think a good number of her followers are, as well (although they probably don't trumpet their atheism too loudly at conservative get-togethers).

ShortStop and Ron,

I agree that these people don't perceive themselves as racist. They'll deny being racist bitterly simply because they don't talk the way their fathers talked about black people. But the reality is that racist talk has only become more nuanced.

The best way to tell if a person is racist these days is if they start a sentence with, "Now, I'm not a racist, but I saw these two black guys the other day and they were..." Another way to spot them is if they occasionally tell "uplifting" stories about this "nice black guy" they know.

Daryl,

Valid point. I guess what I'm saying is that the ignorant anti-tax people are the new religious right. An easily manipulated swath of mankind for corporatists to use as voterbots.

it's a bad idea for so many participants to operate on the basis of false notions.

Unless of course, you're the Republican Christian Propaganda Network, aka Fox. In that case, false notions put the Party in Tea Party. The truth - that your ideas almost destroyed the country - is too depressing.

Hope, the ethos of the Obama Campaign, they feel, was a false notion. Yet, they've concluded, Obama was able to mobilize his movement with it and win. This whole Tea Party movement in my estimation is an attempt to imitate Obama's campaign with right wing ideas. Deep down they envy him for running a successful largely grassroots campaign. This is their chance to try to emulate it. Unfortunately for them Obama's Campaign does not work without taking a hard look at the reality. For many of the Tea Partiers, they are much better off under Obama than they will ever be under a Republican. At some point, it will be too difficult for them to deny it.

chrenson, not only do they not perceive themselves as racist, they get quite hysterical at the mild suggestion (mine aren't mild, but many folks possess much better diplomacy skills than I have) that they might be unconsciously experiencing some discomfort with the changing demographics of our nation and its political power players.

In fact, they view us as the racists simply for mentioning race, because they're genuinely unable to comprehend that there are qualitative differences in discussions of this topic. Which brings us back to...their compelling need to be angry and victimized. Man. Wouldn't it be healthier to be addicted (and in denial about it) to refined sugar or basketball or shoe shopping...or heroin?

"WAR IS PEACE
SLAVERY IS FREEDOM
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

That would be a great slogan for the TeaBaggers!

IF their income increased by $5000 this year, and their tax burden went up $1000, then taxes have gone up.

Pretty simple math if you ask me :)

This argument fails, because the evidence supporting it is so flimsy. Frum didn't conduct a survey of tea partiers nationwide; rather, his interns just interviewed 57 out of 500 or so people present at one protest event. Bartlett's entire conclusion, therefore, is based on anecdotal evidence. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people (maybe millions) nationwide, who are affiliated with the Tea Party, these conclusions are meaningless.

It's pretty easy to attend a protest of any kind and find truly ignorant people. In college, I wrote an article for my college newspaper about the IMF/World Bank protests in DC in 2000, and of the people I talked to (about 30), none seemed to have any idea what either the World Bank or IMF was. Most of them just complained about coporations. I suspect that sort of ignorance is common at any sort of protest event, be it left or right.

So, the conclusion (that Tea Partiers don't know anything about taxes) could well be correct, but you need actual evidence.

The problem for them naturally is that they would quickly explode into a state of extreme chaos and civil war (amongst themselves as well as against others) if they ever gained any actual political power.

Fascism begins not with the dictator mounting the podium before an adoring audience of true believers in the destruction of democracy and its enemies, but with the free citizen, in the street, whose mind has been poisoned by the first blush of tyrannical ideas and the glorification of violence in all its forms, who demands that his fellow man has no right to dissent against the government which is bent on fascism.

The bottom line seem inescapable: Tea Party activists have no idea what they're talking about. Their sincerity notwithstanding, this is a confused group of misled people.

As Slacktivist likes to say, they're playing Family Feud where only peoples' opinions matter while we're playing Jeopardy, where facts matter. And yeah, it's the same as with Health Care. The "The American People Don't Like This Bill" and "The HCR Bill is Expensive" crap rules the day. Facts don't matter. Chris Matthews et al sure don't seem to give a shit finding out the answers (or if we're actually playing Jeopardy, the questions). Until that happens, we're fucked. And Orwell, like Barnum, was a piker, grossly underestimating the power of the easily misguided.

Bruce [Bartlett] added that "it's a bad idea for so many participants to operate on the basis of false notions."

Unless, that is, the participants belong to a Republican administration. Then it's just dandy while it lasts.

I live in a very small rural town; many older folks, lots of ranchers, people all know/are related to each other. The majority have no problem letting everyone know of their disdain for our current president and many locals are sympathetic to the tea party movement.

I've noticed that not only do they harbor a lot of resentment about taxes, "welfare queens" and impending American Socialism, but a lot of them also snort at any new technology they don't understand. The world is very young to them; those "punk" 23 year olds they sneer at are now bank managers and are selling them farm insurance. They hate cellphones and dvd players, hate going from analog to digital, hate new cars, yadda yadda.

They feel that they, the (ahem) "greatest generation" have little to offer now. So they judge whatever they don't control.

The world is moving on without them at the helm, and they just hate it.

Well, with a group whose motto is ""Keep your government hands off my Medicare", what would you expect?

Imagine my surprise that there were TEA PARTIERS found to not know much about what they doth protest! GEEZ, who saw that one coming?

Deb, so true! I can't help thinking that if we just devoted one basic cable channel to playing "The Andy Griffith Show" 24 hours a day, the Tea Baggers would all go away.

I'm not dissing "Andy." Just saying that that's the "America" they all want "back."

Many of these activists are able to hold jobs and function well in everyday life.

I've seen a lot of video of these protests, and I have to question your assumption. I see a lot of fat old white people who are probably already on SS and Medicare.

As for possible racism, I have to agree that it's definitely motivating them, because we didn't have these concerns about deficit spending under Bush, and he was doing it with all his major initiatives--the trillion dollar + war in Iraq, Medicare Part D, his tax cuts, none of them offset by other spending cuts or taxes, all added to the deficit.
So why are these tools complaining now? What changed? Well, now the president is a black Democrat, that's the only variable I'm seeing here.

Indeed, it appears much of the Tea Party crowd is simply clueless about the issues they claim to care the most about, wildly exaggerating federal tax rates, how much a median family pays in taxes, and what's changed since President Obama took office.

What has changed since Obama took office is that Obama took office. That last bit invokes an arcane tea party process, the Self-Executing Lunacy.

Or it could be they're adding up federal taxes on top of state taxes on top of ever-rising local property taxes too, and those fall hardest on the middle class.

Maybe they don't like the idea being out of work and having to pay for cadillac benefit plans of the public sector.

chrenson@10:22: Deb, so true! I can't help thinking that if we just devoted one basic cable channel to playing "The Andy Griffith Show" 24 hours a day, the Tea Baggers would all go away.

I'm not dissing "Andy." Just saying that that's the "America" they all want "back."

Nothing to diss there. Andy Griffith, who hails from about hour's drive from where I grew up (rural NC) is a well known liberal, as is little Opie (Ron Howard). Funny how much of their worldview was manufactured in Hollywood (cowboys, Reagan, Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, 24, Rambo, Dirty Harry, and on and on).

What would these people look like if it weren't for that little district in California that they despise so much?

i suspect that most americans [myself included] couldn't nail those policy answers either. the issue isn't ignorance, it's anger. the anger is, in my opinion, driven by the fact that the candidates these folks voted for lost.

Allan

While many of the tea partiers are seniors living on social security who are the receipients of socialized medicine (Medicare) many are slightly younger but graying boomers. They still have jobs, but jobs that are diminishing. Many have black co-workers and friends. They brissle at the notion that they are overt racists. I don't doubt that there is a racial element in their protests, but more to the point is some real classism and a need to blame people they don't encounter on a daily basis for their failures. Your comparison to Bush isn't really germain. The real question is how would these pathetic souls be acting if the President was Hillary Clinton. My guess is they would be acting in about the same way for about the same reasons.

They have slowly come to realize that for them the American dream has turned into an American nightmare. They have bought into the notion that life is a zero sum game and they are on the wrong side of the equation. They haven't figured out that the very people they are supporting are the folks who have profited by their loss. Given that they don't even understand basic taxation, or anything beyond what Fox News tells them, they probably never will. They have to blame somebody so they blame poor blacks, hispanics, illegal and legal immigrants and anybody else they can think of. They just don't blame Republicans.

This just confirms what I've known about Teabaggers from the get-go. They're just angry, and not much else. The problem is, the stuff they say makes them so mad -- high taxes, government oppression, socialism -- doesn't exist. So something else must be pissing them off when they look at Barack Obama. Hmmm. I wonder what that one thing might be...

I put it to you, that at least SOME of the teabaggers know the truth, but answer polls in the way that they think will help conservatism.

Not all 28% of the people who supported Bush actually did. Some said they did so his numbers wouldn't sink below those of Nixon. (or Truman who, oddly, had worse numbers than tricky Dick.)

People don't always tell pollsters their true feelings. To claim they do is ignorance of reality, too.

dj spellchecka@10:56: i suspect that most americans [myself included] couldn't nail those policy answers either. the issue isn't ignorance, it's anger. the anger is, in my opinion, driven by the fact that the candidates these folks voted for lost.

It isn't as though their candidates haven't lost before. There's something else motivating these people. Having grown up in a tiny rural town in the South, I can tell you exactly what that "something" is.

Moreover, 'whether one's taxes went up or down' is not a matter of "policy". True, most probably don't know what 'GDP' stands for, let alone what percentage is made up by taxes. But, I don't think the policy questions really matter here. They had a chance to correctly answer something that is made obvious to them every week or two. They failed miserably. Or maybe their alternate reality is just so comforting to them that they really, really don't care.

Your comparison to Bush isn't really germain. The real question is how would these pathetic souls be acting if the President was Hillary Clinton. My guess is they would be acting in about the same way for about the same reasons.

It's totally germain, because it proves that their supposed opposition isn't actually based on a concern about deficit spending. And I said that the two variables are that Obama is both black and a Democrat. Of course they would be screaming about "Hitlery" if she were president, but the fact that Obama is also black makes him even more of an "other" in their minds, not legitimate, not one of them, easier to oppose.

Bottom line, it's okay with them if you're a Republican, but not okay if you're a Democrat, and really not okay if you're a black Democrat.

I don't know if it's exhaustion or coming to my senses, but I'm getting close to my limit of engaging these people, directly or indirectly. Even mocking them isn't fun any more; they're like spoiled children that have to be weaned off screaming for Mommy's attention.

So after this weekend's vote, or after checking out Stewart, Colbert and the blogs on Monday, I'm taking a long break, and I'll be drawing a blank if I'm asked about the latest outrage from the Fox pack, Sarah P or the Cheneys. Maybe it's time for all of the sane people to just shut them down. Change the channel. Drop the subscriptions. Lose their bookmarks. Don't bother trolling and don't feed their trolls. It's spring; you only get so many.

The Tea Partiers are the new Grover Norquests with a twist. They see only what they want. They would ideally like to shrink government to nothing and then drown it in the bath as in their eyes their own government is evil and the problem. The twist is that the Republicans do everything they can to whip up this sentiment so as to use the energy as a mechanism to get themselves elected. This can't be overstated enough. Compare if you will, when Republicans are in power and tripling the National Debt, you hear nary a peep from the Tea Partiers, the Militia or Patriot movements because the right isn't funding and propogating them then. But elect a Democratic President or Majority and boom, the money flows to these very same 'grassroots' movements.

These would be considered astroturf organizations except that in this case the very people doing the astroturfing don't realize they are being taken as cannon fodder and chumps by their benefactors. Not much different than the RNC document which showed that Republicans think their donars are dolts.

Or it could be they're adding up federal taxes on top of state taxes on top of ever-rising local property taxes too, and those fall hardest on the middle class.

And why are those taxes on the middle class becoming more burdensome? It's because the Republicans who are sponsoring and exploiting the teabaggers are always shifting more of the burden from the top 1% to the middle class and the poor. That's what Republican Christie is doing in NJ, and what Repub Paul Ryan wants to do to the entire country. Bush already did it to a large extent.
Hate progressives? Wait til you get a load of the completely regressive system the Repubs have in store for you.

Maybe they don't like the idea being out of work and having to pay for cadillac benefit plans of the public sector.

You mean out of work and receiving socialistic unemployment compensation? Will they be returning the UC extension benefits that were just passed?
Oh, and I wouldn't call most public sector plans "cadillac", and if you're unemployed then you're not paying for them much in the way of taxes anyhow.
Many of the cadillac plans are in the private sector, and the result of giving up better pay. Maybe if you want better benefits you should organize with your co-workers and get them, as opposed to just taking whatever pittance they give you, and allowing yourselves to be treated like indentured servants. OTOH, if you vote against your interests, you deserve what you get.

While I agree that one could find ignorance on certain issues no matter which group of folks you polled, these Tea Party clowns have made complaining about taxes one of their central issues (if a group of mostly unorganized nutcases can actually have "issues" ... other than mental ones).

Their willful ignorance on the issue shows, however, that their complaints about taxes (or deficits, or health care, or whatever) are just a ruse.

It's about that Permanent Republican Majority that's collapsed all around them.

It's about a majority of American people rejecting their worldview.

And it's all about someone Not Like Them being in the White House.

Sure, they'd have blasted Hillary and done all they could to ruin her agenda as well.

But there is something much deeper going on with most of these people. They are NOT sincere. They are NOT honest. And they do NOT give a shit about our nation.

They care only about themselves, and those Just Like Them.

Period.

Many of these activists are able to hold jobs and function well in everyday life. How are they able to do that? - Ron Byers

Jonathan Raban had an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books about the recent Tea Party Convention in Nashville. The relevant sentence about the age profile of the participants said:

"We belonged to a similar demographic: most—though by no means all—of us had qualified for membership of AARP a good while ago; ..."

There's some more interesting information about Tea Partiers, at least the somewhat better off set among them that can afford shelling out $500 to hear their new hero Sarah P live.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23723

David Frum is a Canadian, I'm deeply ashamed to say. Feel free to tell him to stop messing in American politics any time.

"Or it could be they're adding up federal taxes on top of state taxes on top of ever-rising local property taxes too, and those fall hardest on the middle class."

For the umpteenth time - state income taxes are deductible from federal income taxes. One cancels out the other.

And, geez, do you think that the fact that federal taxes keep going down has anything to do with state and local (property/sales) taxes going up ? Nah, that's just silly.

Anybody that complains about the taxes in this country is a moron, period. We are at a point where we virtually don't have any income taxes at all. It's like complaining about the commission when you end up selling your house for thousands less than you wanted. The problem is wage income, but these idiots don't want to talk about that because their corporate masters don't want them to talk about it. They're puppets, useful idiots.

people who seem to have no idea what they're talking about, revel in their own ignorance, and nevertheless seek an active role in the process

In other words, John McCain and Sarah Palin.

When you're mad as Hell, why do you have to know any facts? You just have to know you're mad as Hell. And against whom. The reasons don't matter.

Property taxes going up? Huh? Property taxes are based on assessed values, which, of course, have been plummeting everywhere.

Anxiety is a unifying factor in what drives Tea Party types. Most people get more anxious as they age and with the world class fearmongering by the Republicans and their media allies, it is no wonder that the anxiety elevates to anger. These are emotional considerations, which of course, don't need factual or intellectual support. Essentially, Fox/Beck are preying on elderly people's emotions for financial gain and the Republican party is exploiting people's emotions for political gain. Pretty repugnant.

I LOVED this comment...just sums it all up so well that I think I will borrow from chrenson and re-post. Thanks!

These people also believe:

a] The Rapture will occur in their lifetime

b] They stand a good chance of becoming rich in the next ten years

c] All unemployed people simply refuse to work

d] All non-white people want everything for free

e] There must be some legitimate reason why that black guy isn't legally our president

In short, these people are genetically engineered to take up the causes of super-rich corporatists. They are perfect, no-questions-asked foot soldiers willing to fight and die for an agenda that is utterly against their best interests.

My prediction: We may be seeing the Tea Party wane, but this particular willfully ignorant sector has now been identified. Thanks to the Tea Bagger convention in Nashville, the richer ones have been rounded up, given a T-shirt and the Mark of the Beast that means they'll be hit up for mega-donations from now until "The Rapture." The Tea Partiers will morph into a Conservative Fundamentalist Movement that will be throwing a lie-based monkey wrench into everything progressives hope to accomplish now and in the future.

Posted by: chrenson on March 19, 2010 at 9:20 AM | PERMALINK

My prediction: We may be seeing the Tea Party wane, but this particular willfully ignorant sector has now been identified.The Tea Partiers will morph into a Conservative Fundamentalist Movement that will be throwing a lie-based monkey wrench into everything progressives hope to accomplish now and in the future. Blue Girl had a really good post on the same Forbes article this morning that draws some very stark parallels with the "Know Nothings" of the mid 1800s. They were duped by agenda pushers, too.

I think the phrase "deference junkies" just about covers it. They are the 20 - 25 percent of any large sample that are deathly afraid their peers have stopped listening to them.

When you think about it, that really is something to be afraid of.

Tea Party Nation is a movement propelled by hate.

It might be the hate that is motivated by rank bigotries, which is why we see white supremacists or crude nativists like Tom Tancredo hanging around the movement's fringes. Or, it might be the hate that is is an expression of fear -- fear of losing a job, fear of national bankruptcy, or more likely the fear you find so often in small towns where people are afraid of change and uncertainty, and whose fear is so easily converted into usable hate by demagogues like Sarah Palin who see political profit in it, or by financial oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch who know that using a media empire to promote the hate that fractures a community is the surest way to protect his billions from the sort of taxation for progressive causes that would surely arise if there was a greater sense of unity, community and common destiny within the nation at large.

It's no secret why Tea Party Nation is as irrational and emotional as it is. It doesn't know much about actual taxation because it was never really cared from the start.

Just as abortion has always been a proxy issue that provides wonderful legitimating cover for authoritarian males like Bart ("I never call nuns when I am writing pro-life legislation") Stupak and certain members of the Catholic and Christian Fundamentalist hierarchy who need to flex their muscles by subordinating women, the taxation issues provides socially-acceptable cover for the underlying expression of genuine hate at these Tea Party rallies -- some of which is motivated by fear and a lot of it by sheer bigotry.

But since taxation as such is merely a proxy for all of the other unacknowledged reasons people put on silly hats, paint their faces or drive hundreds of miles to denounce our socialist, foreign born president, we shouldn't be too surprised when they haven't a clue -- or even care -- about the signiture issue that purportedly brought them all together in the first place.

Well put, Joan. If I may paraphrase, this is the Dick Army we're talking about.