But .... but ... it's not about race!!

At least, so they keep saying.

And in the real world a Tea Party web site has this:

Patriot Freedom Alliance, a tea party group in Hutchinson, Kansas, made a statement on its website recently, depicting Obama as a skunk. “It is half black, half white, and almost everything it does, stinks,” the site reads, according to a screen grab posted by The Hutchinson News.

To the Patriot Freedom Alliance, this is simply political satire and no worse than what Palin was subjected to.

well, then that certainly makes it ok.

Tea Party Jobs Plan

Let there be none.

Proposed oath for small businesses from Tea Party Nation:

I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.

I hereby declare that my job creation potential is now ceased.

"I'm on strike!"

It's about nothing sane. And when you find a small business owner who intends not to hire to make a political statement, as opposed to making a living, please get in touch.

they've been drinking the John Galt tea nonsense again.

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Without comment

Tea Party

White, over 60, mostly southern and mostly Protestant. Put that way, I am one of them.

They want to run a country?

Tea Party types. They have a bit of an organizational problem with Palin and O'Donnell which seems to get crazier as the day wears on.

I never thought of the Republican Party as comic relief before.

as for running a country, I hear that is an opening in Libya, and perhaps Syria soon.

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Getting a little nervous are we?

It ought to be pretty simple to defeat Obama since the economy is going down the tubes again. But there seems to be some worry among the Right's stipendiary pundits:

Consternation on the right about the lack of a viable candidate next year is gaining traction. Jonah invokes the Buckley rule (one should support "the most rightward viable candidate") and warns the GOP to err on the side of electability:

There follows a quote from Jonah on Andrew Sullivan.

As Budweiser once told me about politics, "you can't beat something with nothing." So let's see what they have after the primaries. Remember last time?

By the way, Buckley is famous for driving the John Birch Society and others of the ilk out of the conservative movement. Basically, if I remember correctly, because he thought they were so crazy and repellent they would permanently damage the movement.

They're back.

A Tea Party example of fiscal responsibility

Sometimes the news is so droll I figure that Colbert and Stewart are stealing candy from babies. Here is a true story (the opposite of 'not intended as a true statement') from TPM:

Tea Party aligned Georgia Rep. Tom Graves (R), who castigates Washington for fiscal irresponsibility, reached an out of court settlement Wednesday after he was sued for defaulting on a $2.2 million loan -- which his attorney argued is the bank's fault for lending him the money in the first place.
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The bank, which has since failed and had its assets taken over, sued Graves and Rogers for defaulting. The two Republicans then countersued, "accusing [the bank] of improperly declaring the loan in default after reneging on a promise to refinance it at more favorable terms," according to Jeremy Redmon and Aaron Gould Sheinin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

Yep. It's about nothing real, nothing coherent, nothing honest.

Except maybe the anger.

Why it's about nothing

I know that there are a lot of reasons why people want to be known as Tea Partiers but I still believe that in reality it is about nothing. Their complaints did not exist, at least on media radar, until after Obama was elected. Their complaints and solutions now are either inconsistent or contradictory.

And once their candidates are in office, they wander off to do business with the rich folk just as they have always done like, say, Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia according to Dana Milbank:

In a broader sense, Scott’s bill gets at what has long troubled me about the Tea Party movement: It is fueled by populist anger, but it has been hijacked by plutocrats. Well-intentioned Tea Party foot soldiers demand that power be returned to the people, but then their clout is used to support tax cuts for millionaires. They rally for tougher immigration laws, but then their guy in Washington helps corporations to fire U.S. workers and hire foreign nationals.

The company he defends by wanting to abolish Legal Services is guilty of favoring immigrants over native born, the very nub of anti-immigration complaints.

I wonder if I should tell Budweiser about this? For a conservative he is a damn good Legal Services lawyer.

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Interesting Pie Chart

Love pie charts. Don't know what they really mean but they sure are pretty. Here's one. It's from a commenter over on Frum Forum. No source given, but it sure is pretty.

now if I could only understand what it means.

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One more conservative ...

... who has begun to notice that the old GOP of Reagan and the Bushes no longer exists.

Kathleen Parker.

She's finally figured out, like poor ol' David Brooks, that the kooks are in charge.

The tick-tock of the debt-ceiling debate is too long for this space, but the bottom line is that the Tea Party got too full of itself with help from certain characters whose names you’ll want to remember when things go south. They include, among others, media personalities who need no further recognition; a handful of media-created “leaders,” including Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips and Tea Party Patriots co-founders Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler (both Phillips and Martin declared bankruptcy, yet they’re advising Tea Party Republicans on debt?); a handful of outside groups that love to hurl ad hominems such as “elite” and “inside the Beltway” when talking about people like Boehner when they are, in fact, the elite (FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Prosperity); and elected leaders such as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, head of the Republican Study Committee, and South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who grandstand and make political assertions and promises that are sheer fantasy.

Od course, if you are of the Tea Party ilk, there is no need to take this seriously. Just jam your fingers in your ears and chant "Lame Stream Media!" "Elites!" "Elites!"

Now I must get back to work because my school administration has imbibed too much of the zeitgeist.

Oh - it was about being WEIRD

OK. I have said often enough that the Tea Party is about nothing, in the Latin sense of Nihil. But after reading this amusing little article in the Washington Post I now realize it was about something: the state of social disintegration on the planet Trzzlinioch in the Alpha Centauri sector.

Wesbury [a Tea Party 'leader'] suggested that Republicans should show some “adult kind of behavior.”

This was a curious request coming from a group that included two men wearing tricorn hats and colonial costumes. Temple had a feather in his hat, carried a 5-foot musket and, without explanation, switched to a Scottish accent during the news conference. Next to him was a man dressed up as George Washington who read a 215-year-old passage.

read the article - it shows that the entire Republican congressional leadership has stepped out of the pentagram.

What did the Tea Party really mean?

Nothing.

It was always about nothing. It was a phantom movement with incoherent goals and nebulous membership and leadership.

Now, the proof: no one in the new Congress, even those elected by the 'The Party' is paying much attention to them. Here's the opening line of Dana Milbank's assessment in today's Washington Post:

Dear Tea Party voter: You've been had.

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But stay tuned, the cable news and the MSM and the Blogs will be bringing back the specter of the dread Tea Party for years now.

ever hear of the Soccer Moms?
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Country to Emulate!

East Germany.

They know how to close their border. Here is Tea Party candidate Joe Miller on how to solve our immigration problem, based on his military time on the German border:

During that time, he said, "East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow" from one side of the border to the other. "Now, obviously, other things there were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, obviously to secure our border. If East Germany could, we could."

And, indeed, we could. If we want to be like East Germany.

the picture is an example of how the East Germans closed the border with the Berlin Wall (and shooting anyone who got near it).

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A quote from a Tea Partier

Here it is:

“Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too,” - Kelly Khuri, founder, Clark County Tea Party Patriots.

Yep. No more extreme than the Birchers. I suppose you have to be as old as I am to remember a time when the John Birch Society was virtually the definition of "extreme" in America and Bill Buckley, founder of National Review among other accomplishments, drove them out of the conservative Republican ranks.

Elites

A funny thing happened on the way to the Tea Party.

Read Dana Milbank on the plutocratic co-option of the Tea Party.

Assuming there ever was a Tea Party.

Tea Bags: History as remembered

Jack was commenting on the origin of using the term "tea baggers" or "tea bagging" in reference to the various protests that coalesced under the name "Tea Party."

This is the way I remember it, so this must be the truth (for purposes of this blog anyway):

When groups began referring to themselves as the Tea Party, they also started using the tea bag as their symbol and referring to some of their activities as to 'tea bag' something or someone, as seen here in an early protest in Feb of 2009. I distinctly remember at least a few protesters referring to themselves as tea baggers who were going to tea bag the tax and spend budget buster. I knew this from articles I read on TPM at the time, before either Josh Marshall, or poor naive Clemens learned what the term REALLY means in our modern culture.

Once we were all educated to the use of the term for a sexual practice (Josh even had a clip from "Sex and the City" where the girls discuss doing this) that the liberal media hit upon it as a snide way to put down the movement.

So neither the movement nor the liberal media invented the term's sexual connotation. That apparently was already part of a part of our culture.

Since I would never want to impart a snide flavor to Sententiae I hereby declare a moratorium on the term .... at least until the next time I need to use it.

UPDATE: Just discovered this little article from NRO by Jay Nordlinger giving a brief history of the term. I love new terms.

Tea Party Philosophy

There has always appeared something a bit unhinged about the Tea Baggers (as they first wanted to be called). Too much anger, too much hate. Two emotions I don't deal with either internally or externally very well. There is a lot of racism involved, though that supplies only part of the electric force running through the synapses to motivate the limbs of the creature. To some extent they are channeling age old populist anger at the elites. Now that is something I have more sympathy with, but it is exceeding dangerous for the Repubs, and not much better for the Demos. It is a force that is destructive to the political process itself because the process is seen as in the hands of elites that are inimical almost by definition to popular forces.

Is the movement coherent, does it have a sane agenda past the inane slogans and cheers? I doubt but we will see. In the meantime, J M Bernstein, a professor of philosophy, has a smart take on the deep motivating forces behind the movement in a little essay in today's NY Times. You should read it all, but here is some of it:

The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief. More than their political ideas, it is the anger of Tea Party members that is already reshaping our political landscape. ..

... In a bracing and astringent essay in The New York Review of Books, pointedly titled “The Tea Party Jacobins,” Mark Lilla argued that the hodge-podge list of animosities Tea party supporters mention fail to cohere into a body of political grievances in the conventional sense: they lack the connecting thread of achieving political power. It is not for the sake of acquiring political power that Tea Party activists demonstrate, rally and organize; rather, Lilla argues, the appeal is to “individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power.” He calls Tea Party activists a “libertarian mob” since they proclaim the belief “that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone.”

... Where do such anger and such passionate attachment to wildly fantastic beliefs come from?

His conclusion seems to fit the odd contradictions seen in most comments from Tea Baggers:

My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.

Well, as Chou-en-Lai once said, too soon to tell. But I think there is something to Bernstein's analysis, though it seems incomplete. As of yet the movement has not budged out of its low numbers and has not demonstrated any electorial clout beyond primaries which can be swung by the oddest little things (Alvin Greene!)

The Sheep fight back!

Seems like some TPers are happy with neither Palin nor the Repubs. Something about "Demon Sheep". I don't know. The likes and dislikes of the TPers are hard to keep straight. But it is encouraging that some seem to hate the Repubs just as much as the Demos. As prominent TPer Dale Robertson says of Palin:

She represents a growing insider's attack to the heart of the Tea Party. Very much like a wolf in sheep's clothing entering in at the gate as an ally, but for all intents and purposes there to seize and capture, not only one or two stray sheep, but the whole flock!

What is it with this need to characterize conservatives as sheep? (see previous posts re sheep)

if everyone thinks this way I'd be a fool to think otherwise, as Yossarian once said.

Tea Party time

Good times indeed. As reported by the Frum Forum, Tom Tancredo led off by lamenting the lack of a literacy test for voters. Tancredo, like your faithful correspondent, is old enough to remember when most southern states had just such tests. They were designed to stop blacks from voting. I am not sure, but I think that may be what he had in mind. And then there was this guy, Joseph Farah, chief of World Net Daily:

Farah started fine — heaping praise on the constitution, and urging America’s leaders to be faithful to it. He ended well, too, with a stirring exhortation to “take the offense in this struggle.”

But these flourishes were merely the bread in a lunacy sandwich — the filling of which were 10 solid minutes implicitly questioning whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. In 2012, he declared, every single election lawn sign should say: Show me the birth certificate.

It’s a silly line of attack against Obama — one that’s become the stuff of parody on late night cable shows. Even Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck have turned their back on the Birthers. Yet Farah’s cheap shots on this subject got big ovations. Message for the cameras: This is a room full of conspiracy theorists.

And this:

What’s worse, Farah wrapped up his Birther nonsense in Jesus’ garb, going on in semi-satiric detail about how the Bible documents Jesus’ lineage in a way that Obama cannot.

I believe Jesus is descended from some guy named Jesse.

personally, I'd check our DNA.

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