To me, the whole Tea Party phenomenon looks like a gigantic therapy session for Right-wingers who can’t accept the sad truth that Republicans are in fact in favor of the entire bank bailout situation and so are doing their best to convince themselves and everyone else that it’s all part of a secret Socialist plot to take over everything.
Here’s how I measure the bank bailout in regards to the political spectrum:
Economic policy on the Left is usually dominated by Keynesian economics. In comparison the economics of today to the past, Nixon, who claimed to not be a fan of big government himself repeated the well-known phrase, “We are all Keynesians now.” Milton Friedman, while saying that “we now are all Kenysians and none of us are Keynesians” took some of the same ideas and went more to the right with them. Bernanke has cited Milton Friedman in his decision to lower interest rates to zero. Bernanke has been identified by the Wall Street Journal and a close colleague as a “libertarian-Republican” in the mold of Alan Greenspan. Henry Paulson is also a Republican. Timothy Geithner was formerly a Republican who worked for Kissinger Associates (as in Henry Kissinger) and is now an Independent. Greenspan said we should nationalize the banks, a move shared by the far Left, but not the Right and not Obama. The only candidates against the TARP were Dennis Kucinich, the only Democrat who wanted to impeach Cheney (making him highly unpopular among Democrats), and Ron Paul, who did comparatively horrible in the presidential campaign despite being extremely popular working a grassroots very campaign similar to Obama’s. Traditionally, it’s the Left that say the rich should be taxed and the money given to the poor while it’s the Right that say taxes need to be flatter and the minimum wage lower so that the rich will have more money to hire the poor. The bailout is essentially taking money from the poor and lending it to the rich. So in what way is Obama being a Leftist/Socialist by going along with a bunch of libertarian/Republicans in bailing out the rich?
http://www.businessinsider.com/greenspan-2009-2
“We do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote. People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House.” – Tom Tancredo, who can always be counted on to up-crazy any situation, crazying up the Teabagger Prom in Nashville a couple weekends ago.
OK, Tom. You want a literacy test? Here’s a literacy test. Use the phrase “committed socialist ideologue” in a sentence describing someone who exhibits at least one of those three qualities. Whoops, you failed. I hereby instruct the state of Colorado to revoke Tom Tancredo’s voting rights, and if he doesn’t like that, he can buy a fucking dictionary or take a Kaplan class or something.
“The Six Republican Ideas Already in the Health Care Bill”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/five_compronises_in_health_car.html
Haiti’s “Pact With the Devil” Myth: How Pat Robertson turned a country’s origin myth into a cheap invocation of Satanism
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2010/01/13/haiti_satan_pact/index.html
Here’s a poll that shows more people believe Republicans have no interest in compromise:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/behind-the-numbers/2010/02/americans_spread_the_blame_whe.html
“After I spent the weekend at the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tenn., it has become clear to me that the movement is dominated by people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality. It’s more John Birch than John Adams…..
I consider myself a conservative and arrived at this conference as a paid-up, rank-and-file attendee, not one of the bemused New York Times types with a media pass. But I also happen to be writing a book for HarperCollins that focuses on 9/11 conspiracy theories, so I have a pretty good idea where the various screws and nuts can be found in the great toolbox of American political life.
Within a few hours in Nashville, I could tell that what I was hearing wasn’t just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society.”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/233331
“But this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.
The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry’s campaign to thwart Mr. Obama’s proposals for tighter financial regulations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/us/politics/08lobby.html?hp
“Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant “independent.” (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn’t disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some of it. She hadn’t exactly said that God was on our side in Iraq, only that God and the United States were on the same side. She says that she left Hawaii Pacific College after only one year because the climate was too sunny for an Alaskan*; her father (whom she considers practically infallible) tells her most recent biographers that she quit because of the preponderance of Asian and Pacific islanders: “They were a minority type thing and it wasn’t glamorous. So she came home.”” –Christopher Hitchens, whose first article about Sarah Palin defended her against the “liberal screech” that erupted at her nomination
http://www.slate.com/id/2237638/
“Andrew is my friend,” said Farah. “He has the right to disagree, and he has the right to say anything to a socialist newspaper that he wants. And if he wants to criticize his friend to you, and he’s dumb enough to do that…”
Breitbart raised his eyebrows. “I’m dumb to do what?”
“Criticize your friend to this socialist newspaper.”
“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart, pointing to Schilling. “I was talking to you. And I was saying that I disagreed on the birther stuff.”
“OK, well, did you know that Dave Weigel from The Washington Independent was”–
“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart. “She was asking me if I thought it was wise to bring it up, and I said, no. We have a lot of strong arguments to be making, and that is a primary argument. That is an argument for the primaries that did not take hold. The arguments that these people right here are making are substantive arguments. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were all won not on birther, but on substance. And to apply to this group of people the concept that they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–”
“It is a winning issue!”
“It’s not a winning issue.”
“It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility–”
“You don’t recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order.”
“Nothing exposes the president’s–”
“Then prove it!”
“The press isn’t asking the question–”
“Prove it!”
“Prove what?”
“Prove your case.”
“I should prove, what, a birth certificate that may or may not exist?” Farah had gotten irritated. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t even understand the fundamental tenets of what journalism is about, Andrew. It’s not about proving things. It’s about asking questions and seeking truth.”
Breitbart tensed up after that insult. “Right.”
“I know you’re not a journalist, so that’s fine. But don’t diminish people who’ve been doing this for 35 years.”
“So you’re going to go on record saying that I’m not a journalist?”
“Are you? I’ve never heard you claim to be. Are you?”
“I’ll let it be answered by you.”
“Well, I knew Drudge didn’t consider himself a journalist, so I assumed that you were. … I don’t know, I’m not trying to insult you.”
“You did.”
At that point, Judson Phillips — who had spotted a very small crowd around us — walked into the fray and tried to simmer everyone down with a joke.
“I can give you absolutely conclusive and definitive proof that Obama’s birth certificate does not exist. How else do you explain why Joe Biden is vice president?”
Every time I read an article about Palin, I can’t help but thinking she sounds like a sociopath.
Replace “sociopath” with “crazy” and I’m with you. Though I think sociopath is more correct. For all my thinking she did have a point about the use of the word “retard”, someone else–an actress who was on family guy–pointed out that she uses Trig like a prop. Made me rethink some stuff there. Meh. It’s why I go independent in my voting usually.
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