Cole is partially right.

Teabaggers are confused by the complexity of the modern world and angry that it's not conforming to their simplistic beliefs of how things should be. Too stupid to realize that their simplistic beliefs are the reason they're afraid of the modern world, they need someone to blame.

Who better than "the Democrat (and a black "Muslim," to boot)" in the White House.

Friedman also doesn't realize how ridiculous he himself is. He reminds me of John McCain, in fact, confusing a posture of seriousness with actual seriousness, and believing his off-the-cuff blathering will be perceived as innovative thinking.

"Friedmanism" is a LOT more dangerous than you're giving it credit for being!

This is part of the media narrative that says that whatever moves the extreme right is evidence of "what the American people want" regardless of the fact that it's 13% of the people and regardless of the fact that it's wildly irrational and happily so.

Tea-baggers HATE facts and they get angry when you try to reason with them.

I should know. My own father is a Tea-bagger and started screaming at me because I dared to contradict his Fox News narrative that "the vast majority of the national debt has been added by Obama in 1 only year."

I went to the U.S. treasury web-site and quoted the actual budget statistics that proved that the vast majority of the debt was created by Bush & the Republicans. All he could do was shout "That's not true."

"I'm looking right now at the official U.S. Dept. of the Treasury web-site."

"That's just not true."

When I told him exactly what the official numbers show he just got angry and hung up the phone.

That's the tea-bagger response in a nut-shell. You can't argue or reason with them and facts are irrelevant. They have their OWN facts which cannot be contradicted.

The media narrative gives these people power. Friedman and others like him will keep seeking for reason in their wild ranting, and argue that the rest of the country has to move more towards the tea-bag view of the world as part of our duty to be "bi-partisan."

It's a tilted scale that always says we have to move endlessly to placate the right-wing no matter how determined they are never to be satisfied. Because they must be angry about SOMETHING, so it's our duty to find out what it is and move to satisfy them.

Why? Because they're "the American people". Apparently black and brown people are not "real Americans" and Democrats cannot legitimately run things because they depend on the votes of "non-real Americans."

It's easier for Palin to see Russia from her house than for Friedman to see the U.S. from his wife's vast holdings. McCain has a similar problem. Perhaps we should call it Gigolo's Myopia.

Ever take public transit?

The entire teabagging party seems to be that crowd of riders at the bus stop that wasn't paying much attention when it should have, and now is just realizing it's been waiting at the stop while the bus has already departed, years ago!

The anger we've witnesses over the past year is the kind that foments when a person realizes he's been ripped off, but can't quite figure out who's the one who ripped him off.

Well, we are graciously blessed with the teabagging party simply because their fearful bus drivers, Bush and Cheney, have left them stranded in the dust, and now they think the new muslim kid is going to steal their fares money! -Kevo

The tea party types are the middle class private sector employeed whites who never paid much attention to government or policy but now realize that there is no place in politics for themsleves or even for their demographic group. The Republican Party became the big government, cheap labor, Neo-con wet dream party while the Democratic Party is the massive entitlement, non-white pandering party.

What most people should have realized by now is that there is no place for middle class whites in the future of the U.S. because the elites of the U.S. want to replace them with immigrants and there is nothing that the tea party types can do about it.

This movement is not unlike another such "movement," in that when you're finished with it, you (1) wipe, and (2) flush. Just because someone dresses up Mister Hankey to look like a Benedict Arnold wannabe, it is still a walking, talking, beer-belching pile of extremely nasty stuff.

I believe the next six months are crucial vis a vis the tea partiers.

They're not unhinged, they're stupid assholes, stupid assholes who just like hearing themselves talk tuff.

Unhinged will be the people inspired by their bad example lugging guns around in public.

Also they're aggressively, self-righteously banal. Barack Obama is not banal so they're completely offended.

The biggest threat of the Tea Party movement from the very start is that its protests, being hyped by conservative media and given far too much play by the MSM, would be seen as the authentic expression of majority public opinion instead of the "real majority" that expressed itself quite clearly the past two elections.

Notice how its the Republicans who hold no branch of government who think they are still in a position to tell us what "real Americans" believe. Chances are that, given the way today's media is organized, progressives would get HALF the coverage when staging rallies TWICE as large, so it is important to keep the Tea Party in perspective and object when the media give them more credibility and legitimacy than their real numbers warrant.

They are not a grassroots movement, but the right wing of the GOP that does not want to be associated with a defeated party whose name brand is in the crapper, and is once again protesting a political process that refuses to give it real power.

I'll take it a step further, and submit there's not a lick of real difference between Tea Baggers and congressional republicans.

I stopped reading when I got to this: "Become the Green Tea Party."

Did I miss anything?

Moveon.org ought to start organizing Green Tea Party rallies, just to see how long it takes Fawkes News to call them terrorists.

...this crowd not only applauded when Republicans added $5 trillion to the debt and decided to stop trying to pay for their own initiatives...

Don't rewrite history too much. Part of the reason Dubya's popularity sank so low was that he lost the support of Republicans who complained that he wasn't cutting the budget enough.

Cugel: "That's the tea-bagger response in a nut-shell. You can't argue or reason with them and facts are irrelevant. They have their OWN facts which cannot be contradicted."

superdestroyer: "The tea party types...have realized...that there is no place for middle class whites in the future of the U.S. because the elites of the U.S. want to replace them with immigrants and there is nothing that the tea party types can do about it."

I continue to wonder why the tea-party types hold so stubbornly to facts which can be so easily contradicted. Obviously, their attitudes are not about being accurate. superdestroyer's comment suggests that the motivation is group identity; that is, tea-partiers, middle-class whites, believe the government does not work in their interest. Their ignorance is profound.

If I felt there were no place for middle-class whites in the future of the USA, I'd be pretty upset, too, but, personally, I am more worried about the future for middle-class people of any color. From my POV the national problem is that incomes have been stagnate or slipping over the past 40 years. The poor in the US have become poorer and the rich have become way richer.

In other words, Americans, tea-partiers among them, are scrapping over a shrinking pool of resources, and they are feeling the pinch. In their ignorance and resentment, they are sure that non-whites are doing better at the expense of whites (with the help of government), but the truth is that everyone is doing worse. The challenge is to convince them that the conservative ideology to which they cling in their ignorance, is the cause of their economic malaise.

Actually, it will only take a Friedman Unit to get them to see the error of their ways.

Anyway, that's what a cab driver in Mumbai told me.

The biggest threat of the Tea Party movement from the very start is that its protests, being hyped by conservative media and given far too much play by the MSM, would be seen as the authentic expression of majority public opinion instead of the "real majority" that expressed itself quite clearly the past two elections.

Thus the big teabagger lie is being foisted by the MSM corporate media to create a narrative that the Rethugs are on the ascendence, and to make it a self-fulfilling prophesy. The big lie repeated often enough becomes reality, if not the truth. Goebbles was right eighty years ago.

Fawkes News

Spewed my coffee. Too funny!

"Expecting far-right activists to move to the left on energy policy, just because it's wise and in their interests, is regrettably a fool's errand."

and, as a fool himself, mustache tom is just the guy for it.

PTate is right on.

From what I see, the Tea Party is not so much Republicans vs Dems. The driving force is race. Not so much anger at a black president (though Obama provides a convenient focus that helps concentrate their rage), but at the TP'ers belief that liberal/Democratic policies tend to redistribute towards people of color.

A great indicator of the fundamental racism of the Tea Partiers is their frequent complaint (echoed in the RememberNovember video, and elsewhere) that Obama and the Dems "ignore the will of the people." They can count votes, they know they lost the election - what they're really saying is that all those non-white people who voted for Obama and the Dems shouldn't really count.

well to be fair, tom hasn't been bashful about pursuing fool's errands before. This might be a tragic flaw.

Yes, it's almost certainly only about race, and the residual resentment most of these people were made to feel by Reagan/Lee Atwater Republicans that blacks were taking away what was rightfully theirs through the mechanism of federal taxation. (Remember Atwater: we can't say that we just don't want money going to black people, so we will instead say "No new taxes" as code for that sentiment.)

It's an old story with them, and evidently they have bred a few young people to cling to this "injury."

That's why they will marshall any issue, anything at all, to claim it's unfairly redistributing their income to 'inferior' people. They are the spawn of Reagan/Atwater and of Nixon's Southern Strategy to which Michael Steele recently admitted.

And that's why they are so profoundly 'confused'.

Also, try this Bill Maher deduction...gets right to the center of their 'movement' and puts it on the spot.

http://videos.mediaite.com/decor/live/transparent.gif

PTate

Middle class whites have very little chacne of getting into the tier I universities that are about the only course left for whites to succeed in the U.S. Since they have little chance of that happening, the middle class whites are left to compete with immigrants for jobs in health care, with blacks for government jobs, and with Hispanics for construction jobs.

Since whites have smaller families and a different culture that Asian, the middle east, southern Asia, or South American immigratns, whites cannot depend on tribal, clannish, or ethnic based groups to help to support them. Look at how few whites of any class major in engineering or the science, look at how middle class whites are leaving California because there is no future for them there.

Calfirnoa is about a half a generation ahead of the rest of the U.S. as far as whites are concerned the future does not look good.

Now they call themselves the "Tea Party".

They used to call themselves "Ditto-Heads".

What they are, by whatever moniker, is weak-minded, ignorant, mean-spirited, gullible dupes of pseudo-ideological corporate propaganda.

They believe, say and do whatever the corporations pay the corporate stooges of the phony "conservative" media to tell them to believe, say and do.

Dupes led by stooges.

It's really that simple.

Since whites have smaller families [...] -- superdestroyer, @15:51

BS. The underbaked cracker who comes to my Free Clinic for charity healthcare (but sports Cucinnelli sticker on his car) has a FULL DOZEN blessed spawn. That's a whole damned soccer team plus a referee.

@ superdestroyer

As usual, your sweeping generalities (a) are wrong and (b) add nothing to the conversation.

I am a 65-year-old white middle-class male.
I haven't voted for a republican since 1972 (and then only at the state level).
I am a classical bleeding-heart democratic liberal.
I don't have medicare yet because I'm still working, but I'm goddamned sure its a government-administered, tax-supported program, as is the social security I expect to get in a few years.
I don't resent anyone getting anything from the government, except thieves (see: Boston firefighters, Blackwater/Xe, Goldman Sachs, folks who commit medicare fraud, any number of defense contractors, AIG). I resent the hell out of thievery, especially from my tax dollars, locally, state, and federally.
I hate hypocrisy, demagoguery and stupidity, which pretty much define the modern GOP and its acolyte crazies, the teabaggers.
While I believe that any government works better when it has a thoughtful and principled opposition, I'd really like the modern GOP to slide faster into oblivion. I don't know what will follow, but it can't be worse. And don't give me any crap about heading toward dictatorship: the natural thing to happen would be fro the dems to split into liberal and conservative parties.
The American polity is slow to act; it is like a supertanker: you have to think about turning miles before its time. But it eventually turned against Nixon, and Shrub, and the impeachers, and punished them at the polls. It will do the same to the modern GOP, deservedly so.

The classic MSM tactic is to report the most extreme behavior, or the most radical idiots as somehow characteristic of the mainstream. If tose distortions are all we see, hear, and read, 24/7 then a small minority of very confused, but opinionated people, loom larger in their importance than they really are, and the larger public begins to think they have either something to fear or to join.

The corporate sponsored propagandists have learned well how to manipulate the media and public perception. Having given the teabaggers an obscenely disproportionate share of exposure, when some unhinged lunatic(s) think they have permission to take matters into their own hands and perpetrate some woeful atrocity on their fellow citizens, we are bound to hear, "how could anyone have seen this coming?" and other bullshit rationalizations. It's just a matter of time.

exlibra,

I thought progressives were suppose to be the reality oriented, evidence-based community. If you look at http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/methodstatement.pdf you will see that the birthrate for Hispanics is 50% greater than for non-Hispanic, non-blacks. Couple birthrates with open borders and unlimited immigraiton and will become a minority inside the U. S. some time between 2040 and 2050. Of course, the quotas, set-aside, ethnic based affirmative action programs will still be in place.

Thus, whites had better get their children into a Tier 1 university for plan on their grandchildren to live in poverty with the immigrants, Hispanics, and blacks.

efgoldman ,

The Democratic Party will not split into two parties. Have the Democrats in Chicago, Mass., or Maryland split into two parties even though the Republican parties into those place is irrelevant? It is more likely that the current Republican voters just start voting in the Democratic primaties to try to influence policy and governance instead of trying in an irrelevant Republican Party.

Since politics in the future will be a fight over entitlements (who gets them and who pays), those fights will take place inside the Democratic Party and during the primary elections. There is no need for two political parties to exist if no disagreements are allowed to occur over major issues.

The real question is how will the U.S. generate the economic activity necessary to support the coming massive government spending on entitlements while the demographic changes turn the U.S. into a third world country. Most European countries have social-welfare states that are not sustainable in the long run. The U.S. is determine to match Europe is trying to maintain a massive social welfare state.

My guess is that future corruption and tax evasion will make supporting a massive welfare state impossible.

So tax evasion is a good thing, then?

cld,

It is not a quesiton of good or bad. However, if the tax rates go very high and the U.S. is a one party state that leaves the people who earn above average income, it is very predictable that people will begin to cheat more on their taxes. Diversity will also lead to more tax cheats (see current California for a good example).

I watched the video posted at Huffington Post where a videographer was interviewing a variety of tea party members (upset that he said nothing to dispel their completely misinformed opinions...but then he would have been thrown out or they would not have expressed their views) and it became apparent there is no talking to these misinformed angry people. It's like interviewing the patients at an insane asylum on how best to run the hospital..no joke. Their minds and ears are shut off completely from truth and reality to the point of senselessness.

I still firmly believe that the portion of Obama taking questions and rants from that republican gathering where they thought they would grill him and he made them all look like the ignorant fools they are with truth and logic should be played over and over again at all tea party events and the nightly news until these people get the point we finally have an intelligent, thinking caring president that most of the world recognizes as a blessing. The time for these tea partys was 8yrs ago. I have hope that most of America sees these goobers and rejects them the more they expose themselves. Republicans in this era ruin everything they touch and should be voted out at every opportunity. One would be hard pressed to find a single good thing republicans have done for the people over the past 30yrs spending all their time trying to undo everything dems have accomplished. Republicans are the party of hypocrisy...saying one thing while doing just the opposite like trippling the debt and the size of government while calling for a 'Mayberry' size government. Just look at Palin, Wasilla and Alaska for an example of hypocrisy.

They just can't get over a Black Democrat in the Whitehouse nor accept majority rule or tolerance...the principles of democracy.

superdestroyer,

Homogeneity leads to tax cheating and diversity leads to tax cheating.

My plan is working perfectly, bwahahaha!

But --"It is not a quesiton of good or bad."?

Cheating on your taxes is neither good or bad? That's just the kind of thing people do and good for them if they get away with it?

Superdestroyer

Everything you say is predicated on the idea that everything will continue on its present course and lead to your future speculation. Necessity will demand change to such an extent that a new scenario will emerge. Ever expanding growth and population must come to terms with finite resources until a balance is reached or self destruction ensues. Affirmative action programs will be based on economics only, once people realize there is only one race...the "human" race.

This IS the tipping point for population, economics, and all resources. What cannot be seen or predicted will enter the picture changing the entire situation...

Mr. Benen is correct since the Teabaggers only want budget cuts affecting everybody else BUT their own direct interest. You never hear any of them giving up their own SS and MC, but they want it abolished for everybody else. They complain about socialism yet also complain about the condition of the roads and subways. Hey, teabagging assholes! Do you see Microsuck or CocaCola building roads and subways? (They might put ads in/next to them, but not send out their own road crews)

They're just angry McPalin voters who can't stand a black guy with more brains, power, and insight than them.

Thus, whites had better get their children into a Tier 1 university for plan on their grandchildren to live in poverty with the immigrants, Hispanics, and blacks.
Posted by: superdestroyer on April 25, 2010 at 4:55 PM

In order to get into what you call "Tier 1" university, one has to have brains. My son went to one of those. There, even the kids on football scholarship were smarter than most in his high school. Which was local, public and full of the "salt of the earth", "real Americans" (white), who were better at hunting squirrel than at algebra. And most of them -- like you -- didn't know the difference between "supposed" and suppose (and when to use which), either. Quite a number of them "graduated" directly across the road -- to the county jail. Their chances of getting into *any* university, never mind "Tier 1", were nil.

I read Benen, Friedman, and the comments here and have to wonder if simplicity isn't a disease that affects the left as much as the right. The crazy tea baggers are not going to win or lose any election anywhere any time soon. They didn't elect Scott Brown. There just aren't enough of them. Something is out there fueling the current distrust of government that is rampant in the general population. For the longest time I thought it was skillful propaganda and a simple minded populace, but lately I have begun to wonder if we in the know types aren't just too smug and self important to realize that people are scared shitless right now. A lot of people aren't going back to work. Those who do are not going to do as well as their parents. It is a fact that people haven't saved for retirement. Many of those who did saw their 401Ks raped by Wall Street grifters. They look around for help and honestly conclude that the Government is bought and paid for by the theives who destroyed their retirement.

Barack Obama is not doing as well as one would think not because he is a black socialist/marxist/fascist. He is not doing well because he gives ever indication of not doing anything to help them if it is going to hurt the grifters and theives. Heads should have rolled at Goldman Sachs and Citibank. Instead they are back to business as usual. The government should have helped people stay in their homes. Instead the forclosures are at an all time high. The very fast talking companies who sold Americans crappy mortgages so they could spend beyond their means to finance the Bush administration excesses are now driving people from their homes at a record rate. What do we get. We get phony programs that don't work. Programs that were PR tested and approved by the very grifters and thieves who sould be in prison.

Into the void created by Democrats unwillingness to do anything loud to help the American people, and expecially anything that would upset the greed is good crowd, marched the Republicans and their ginned up tea party movement.

Democrats and Obama are not in trouble because they are socialists. They are in trouble because they aren't.

All the stories about fringe and stupid tea partiers and all the comments about racism paint over the fundamental failure of the Obama administration and Democrats in general to actually hold the Wall Street grifters accountable and to do things that actually help a very, and understandably frightened populace.

the columnist recommends that these activists start taking energy policy seriously and endorse "a $10 'Patriot Fee' on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt."

Anyone who talks about a special tax with "all proceeds going to pay down our national debt," has no clue how the federal budget works. Can we give Friedman a dictionary with the word "fungible" highlighted?

bjobotts

Affirmative action and minority set asides have been around for forty years and how no side of lessening or ending. As the U.S. become more diverse, the demand for racial set asides will increase and the right for the few tickets to the top will become more intense.

I find it odd that you mentioned that problem with open borders, unlimited immigration with environmental issues. The current leaders of the U.S. have refused to face the environmental problems caused by open borders, unlimited immigration, and high birth rates among the poorest Americans. How to Americans retrofit homes and purchase expensive, energy efficient cars when most of them are poor?

exlibra,

If you look at the number of whites in the public schools in places like Boston, NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, LA, it is obvious that the only way for whites to live in those cities is to be upper class and send their children to private schools.

One of the reason for the drop in birthrates among upper class whites is later marriage due to educational and career requirements and the massive costs of living in urban America.

Bill and Hillary Clinton could end up with no grandchildren because of the culture of the rich. Al Gore, Jr, will probably have more children than grand children because of the costs of living in deep blue American even though two of the Gore daughters are married to muilti-millionaires.

-the columnist recommends that these activists start taking energy policy seriously and endorse "a $10 'Patriot Fee' on every barrel of imported oil, with all proceeds going to pay down our national debt."-

America net imports about 4 billion barrels of oil a year. so that's 40 billion dollars on the debt. Hell that doesn't even pay the interest.

Green Tea Party? But it sounds so... foreign.

In answer to the Tea Baggers stubborn resistance to facts, one has to point a finger at Religion.

When you look at a Tea Bagger, see that it isn't just politics, or Fox, or a black president which garners this defense. It's their belief system that is the foundational cause of their resistance to facts. You see the same reaction when discussing evolution vs. creationism.

For the most part, Tea Baggers are aging people, and this fact-avoidance goes all the way to the Bible, death, and the promise of a beautiful afterlife. Christian beliefs have been ingrained for many people since childhood, and those beliefs comfort and spiritually house those within community groups based on religious affiliation. Against mounting evidence, Tea Baggers continue believing in a heaven for themselves and a hell for those who have hurt them, not giving in to science, to debate, often not even willing to discuss evidence or anything that endangers this widely held belief system that lets people cope with inevitable death.

Religion requires one to keep believing, regardless of counterpoint or debate, and if a person's ears are closed to maintain one's religious beliefs, how simple to apply the same closed ears to other areas? Perhaps rather too easy.

While belief can be taken as a light word, it has the heaviest of implications when you talk about a human trying to make sense of a world without answers.

bob somerby:

throats catch as we read Obama’s words about those coal miners, “this band of 29 roughneck angels.”

He notes that their labor gave us things we very much take for granted.

We’ll only suggest that you recall this: These are the same people we deride when we mock those stupid “tea-baggers.” We “liberals” love to have it both ways. When will our side grow up?

Bob Somerby might want to ask this guy when he'll grow up.

Ok so let's agree that the Tea-baggers are a bunch of ..(pick your moniker). But so are democrats and republicans and most people. Why don't we for a change start by making some reasonable arguments about their policies, pointing out the inconsistencies and errors in their facts and trying to honestly explain why our way (whatever that is) is the better one. Someone certainly convinced "them" to hold their current views, why don't we really try to convince them that our views are so much better instead of just insulting and denigrating them.

These (coal miners) are the same people we deride when we mock those stupid “tea-baggers.”

No they are not, these are the people most immediately victimized by Tea Baggers.

cld,
Are you from West Virginia? I didn't think so. Otherwise you'd know the answer was "Yes".

As far as being "victimized by Tea Baggers", I don't think anybody has been victimized by Tea Baggers. Tea Baggers don't have any power, how could they be victimizing anybody.

And enough with this "Black Muslim" stuff. Sure there are people that feel that way. However the majority of people are opposed to him because he is a Democrat. They are just as angry at Harry Reid, and he's not a black muslim (sic).

Now, when you accuse these people of being racist, how do you think they are going to react? Instead, we have to make them realize they are being manipulated into supporting ideas that don't make any sense and are counterproductive to American ideals.