If you’ve been reading this blog for some time then you know by now I really hate tea baggers. I think they are a scourge on this country. I think they are completely un-American and a threat to our society. If you don’t believe me or can’t understand why I would say that all you need to do is go read Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party. It’s choke full of tea baggers angry at Obama and “Big Government” all while enjoying their medicare subsidized rascal scooters and oxygen tanks. Their attitude is that some how they earned it but the rest of us can go to hell.
This is not an isolated incident. An anti-Government militia leader Mike Vanderboegh who advocates throwing bricks through the windows of Democrats is himself on Social Security Disability. It’s this cognitive dissidence which seems to be the hallmark of the Tea Bagger party that makes me loathe them.
But beyond the obvious hypocrisy and lack of compassion for fellow citizens (as evidenced by their reaction to The Cranicks’ house burning down) there’s also their political platform which is often packaged and presented in such a way to make it sound legitimate but is actually based on lies.
First and foremost is their attempt to tie the current $14 Trillion of National Debt to Obama. A typical tea bagger will conflate Obama with the $14 Trillion National Debt purposely for political gain. They prey upon the weak minded who don’t know the facts. This is their principle way of gaining converts – “did you know we’re $14 Trillion in debt? Yeah it’s all that Obama Big Government spending!”…”well sign me up for a Tea Bagger Rally then!” “We need to take our country back! (from the black guy)…”
What a Tea Bagger leader will fail to tell people is that when Bush and the Republicans came to power in 2001 the National Debt was at $5.5 Trillion. By the time they left office it was $12 Trillion. A crafty Tea Bagger might then say “well we’re against Republicans too!”. My ass. You’re just too embarrassed to call yourself a Republican. Although there’s been those idiotic billboards of Bush with the caption “Miss Me Yet?” popping up around the country. Bush doubled the National Debt and we’re supposed to miss him?
Next a Tea Bagger will talk about “record Obama decifict” which was actually inherited from Bush. Government spending they say is “out of control!”. “We need to take our country back!” What the Tea Bagger leader will fail to tell his or her minions is that we had record deficits under Bush and the Republicans. Except the Republicans used an accounting trick by funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq via Emergency Supplementals. This kept the war spending off book for years. This means that while the news would report a deficit under Bush Republicans as say $660 Billion, if you counted the war spending the deficit was well over $1 trillion. And this went on for years.
Oh yeah, that’s another Tea Bagger trick – to conflate debt and deficit. They are two different things but don’t even bother trying to explain that to a tea bagger.
Granted, Obama did add about $700 billion to the deficit for the stimulus program which a large portion of was tax cuts as insisted upon by Republicans. But regardless of what Tea Baggers and Fox News says the stimulus did save jobs and Republicans love posing with big stimulus checks in their districts. The stimulus was not nearly large enough and did not create enough jobs. That’s because Republicans would not allow it because in the long run Republicans do not want to create jobs or improve the economy because they like cheap labor and multinational corporations more than the American People.
A Tea Bagger will rail against TARP. Fair enough. It was unpopular across the board and we really won’t know until the history is written if it was necessary or if Bush and Paulson just robbed us blind. Either way, TARP has largely been paid back and was not Obama’s invention. “But he voted for it!” a Tea Bagger will scream. Ok, go put mud in your milk to make it chocolate milk you nitwit.
Tea Baggers love to rail against “Obamacare” but their criticisms are often based on lies such as “death panels” and “government run” healthcare. Now we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not healthcare should be a right or a privilege. We can debate whether health insurance companies should be regulated by the government or not. But to out and out lie about something for propaganda purposes is despicable.
Go ahead and repeal Obamacare tea baggers. We’ll see how much 25 year olds love losing their insurance and people with pre-existing conditions love losing their insurance. But who cares about them, right? They should pull themselves up by their boot straps!
Another Tea Bagger hot button is Obama’s bailout of GM or “Government Motors”. This was railed against with dire predictions of it being Obama’s door to communism. They said GM would soon be producing only one car which we would all be forced to drive! Again, pure propaganda bullshit. As it has turned out the bail out of GM has saved jobs and they are about to go public again. We could have a debate about whether government should step in to save an industry and millions of jobs in the process or let the whole thing fail. I would make the argument that it’s a National Security concern that we maintain some capacity to produce our own vehicles. A tea bagger would argue to let it all fail because “government can’t do anything right”.
Bottom line is the tea bagger platform has no basis in reality and is largely based on lies. I am not sure people fully grasp yet that the tea baggers want to get rid of Medicare, get rid of Social Security, get rid of Public Education, and deregulate as much as possible. This is of course is an impractical and sophomoric approach to government. But then again look at the top tier Tea Bager candidates – Joe Miller (who loves unemployment benefits for his wife but no one else), Sharron Angle (who loves her husband’s Government provided healthcare), and Witchy Woman Chrsitine O’Donnel. Ask any one of them what they think of food stamps, unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Medicare.
If the tea baggers do win in November, well we’ll all just have to learn the hard way by watching our houses burn down, our grandparents die in the streets for lack of healthcare, our parents having to move back in with us for lack of Social Security, our kids wandering the streets because they have no school to go to, and our infrastructure crumbling all around us because “we don’t want no government spending!”. Oh yeah, and going to the grocery store will likely be a game of Russian Roulette because there will be no FDA to make sure the food is safe. You’ll just have to ask around and see if any of your neighbors got sick after eating those eggs or consuming that hamburger.
But hey, taxes will be low. You might have to pay a lot of fees – but they’re not taxes! And you don’t have to pay the police fee or fire department fee if you don’t want to!
