Five Traits Shared by Every Teabagger

This is taken from Matt Taibbi’s article, “Tea and Crackers: How Corporate Interests and Republican Insiders Built the Tea Party Monster” in the current Rolling Stone.

It’s an excellent article. (The same issue of RS also has an interview with Obama.) If you’ve been following the news closely, the teabagger article probably won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. Hopefully this article will reach the jillions of Rolling Stone readers who don’t surf leftwing websites.

Taibbi says:

“So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street?” And:

“A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.”

My favorite part is the author’s personal observations about teabaggers, based on conversations and interviews during the past year. Most of them share these five traits:

I. You probably think most teabaggers were happily oblivious during the GW Bush years, and they suddenly developed a pulse when that Kenyan Muslim hijacked the White House. Nope. You’re Wrong! Each and every teabagger has been out there for the past ten years, protesting against Big Government and High Taxes. Funny how we didn’t start seeing them until a year and a half ago, but by golly, they’ve been out there all along, yessireebob!

II. They all know the Constitution inside and out, and each one of them thinks they’re the only person in America with this unique qualification.

III. They all play the “Race Card” card. They insist that poor homeowners (mostly minorities) caused the trillion-dollar meltdown (enabled by that socialist Community Reinvestment Act of the late ‘70s); they’re obsessed with “news” stories about ACORN and the New Black Panthers; and they claim Obama is a Muslim who was born in Africa. And then they’re just shocked — shocked! — that people accuse them of being racists.

IV. Some of their best friends are black.

V. They think anyone who disagrees with them is an America-hating leftist. This attitude is nurtured by their mentor, Dick Armey, who regularly tells his inbreds that their opponents are “people who do not cherish America the way we do.”

If you’ve done much arguing with teabaggers — in person or online — you’re probably familiar with these Big Five talking points; especially the first one.

Dick Armey: Teabagged By His Own Teabaggers

Just as surely as the Black Widow kills her mate, herds of stampeding Teabaggers will kill other members of the herd (figuratively) — even the leader of the herd — over the tiniest disagreements.

Dr. Frankenstein is just about to be killed by the monster he created. Dick Armey, founder of FreedomWorks and probably the best known icon of the teabagging craze, might be pushed out by his own minions. Yes, his own bots are turning on him. He’s too liberal.

Tom “Kill All The Mud Races” Tancredo hates him because he actually wants to let some of those icky brown people into the country. Yuck!!!

Other members of the species Knuckledraggus Teabirthus are turning on Armey because he didn’t fight hard enough against ObamaCare. Damn right! How many windows did Dick Armey break? How many propane lines did he cut? How many death threats did he make against liberals? The answer to all three of those questions: None. Pussy!

They’re also turning on him because — and this is just too twisted for words; I can think of only one comparison here. Sorry, brief digression:

A high school history teacher once told us that Josef Stalin murdered one of his top executioners because he was horrified at some of the atrocities committed by this executioner — even though he had committed those atrocities because Stalin ordered him to! Now, whatever you’d call Stalin’s mental state at that exact moment — absent-mindedness, schizophrenia — just try to imagine that state of mind, and now hold that thought:

OK, some of Dick Armey’s minions are turning on him because of all the corporate money he’s brought in to finance their cause. HEELLLLOOOOO!!!!!!!

This corrupt corporate money that Dick Armey has raised is The Reason there IS a teabagging movement. DUUUHHH!!!

These simplefucks actually believe that one day last April, millions of everyday citizens got out of bed that morning and simultaneously thought to themselves: “I’ve had it up to here with that Kenyan president and his fellow communists. I’m gonna make a hand-lettered sign and carry it to the town square and wave it around at passers-by. I know — Taxed Enough Already. God, am I clever or what? And, oh my God, those three words form an acronym. I’ll call it a Tea Party. Wow, I think I’m on to something here.”

Republican “Grassroots” “Populist” Anger

Believe it or not, the public’s unarticulated unfocused fury is actually being harnessed by Republicans. Republicans have spent eight years (or is that 28 years?) creating most of the problems that the public is angry and frustrated about. And now Republican leaders are actually channeling and using this mass fury for their own purposes. Go figure.

Maybe they’ve been inspired by the occasional news story about a firefighter who sets a fire and then charges in and rescues everybody so he can be a hero.

These two articles (here and here) both describe the Republicans’ recent success at manipulating a scared, confused and gullible public. It doesn’t seem to matter that Republicans don’t have any solutions of their own; not a single specific idea. Apparently it’s enough to just keep yelling “Obama Socialist Nazi Communist Fascist,” “government takeover of Your health care!” and “Death Panels!” and millions of gullible assholes will go “DUUUHHH, yeah that’s right.”

Personally I think it’s too early to make any predictions about the 2010 election. Until a few weeks ago, the “experts” were saying the Republican Party was shattered and they’d stay in the minority for a looong time. Now suddenly it’s “Obama is plummeting in the polls, Democrats will stay home and get stoned on Election Day since it isn’t a presidential election year, and Republicans will retake the House.”

One day at a time…

But it really is infuriating that the Democrats are just paralyzed by all this chaos and public anger, and the Republicans can just step in and start soothing and manipulating the masses. Sort of like an animal trainer who can calm a vicious snarling Rottweiler and then train him.

The newest issue of Rolling Stone has an article about this. The article isn’t available online. The website shows it on the table of contents — “The GOP’s Lie Machine” by Tim Dickinson.

If you’ve been reading liberal blogs and “alternate” news sites (Think Progress, Raw Story, AlterNet, etc.), this article won’t tell anything you don’t already know. But it’s encouraging to see a mainstream magazine like Rolling Stone publicizing this, since most of the mainstream “media” isn’t touching these issues.

The most revealing thing in the article is a quote from Dick Armey (former House Majority Leader; founder of FreedomWorks). Armey was asked why there wasn’t any of this populist fury over high taxes and “big government” when Bush was driving us trillions of dollars into debt. His response:

“We used to use the old saying in the West, that you got outta town just one step ahead of the hangman. That’s pretty much what happened with Bush. And poor old President Obama walked into town, y’know, just at high noon.”

Straight from the horse’s (ass’s) mouth.

“Reformed” Rightwing Rabble-Rouser Tells All

Straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Francis Schaeffer is a veteran of a militant Fetus-Worshipping cult — oh, sorry, they use the term “Pro Life” — that started in the 1970s. He’s been closely allied with Dick Armey, among others.

It’s hard to tell how much he’s “changed” or “reformed,” but he gives an insider’s view of the Republican scorched earth policy against Obama’s health reform plans.

He says: “The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama's election has driven them over the edge.”

As we already know by now, there’s been a team effort between the multi-billion dollar health insurance industry and gangs of rightwing rent-a-thugs. Their sole purpose is to intimidate people who speak publicly in favor of health care reform. As he puts it, this operation is “a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect the profits of the insurance business.”

Comparing today’s Neanderthals to his own checkered past as an anti-abortion activist, Schaeffer says: “What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.”

You probably don’t like this guy, but he sounds credible. Think of him as a criminal who rolled over on some larger criminals in return for a lighter sentence.

FreedomWorks (closely tied to Dick Armey) is one of these infamous Astroturf groups using the orchestrated top-down approach that, as Schaeffer says, has “been the norm for conservative organizations for years. How do I know this is the norm? Because I used to have strategy meetings with the late Jack Kemp and Dick Army and the rest of the Republican gang about using their business ties to help finance the pro-life movement to defeat Democrats. I know this script. I helped write it.”

Schaeffer says Dick Armey used to be a decent guy, and asks rhetorically what happened to him:

“How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today? I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.”

“Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they've wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people…So now all the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can't win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!”

Schaeffer sums up his article with:

“It's time that this whole shabby (and insane) business be exposed, vilified and run out of town on a rail by whatever responsible Republicans — if any — that are still in the party and who want to see the fortunes of their party revived. Republican leaders taking insurance industry money via lobbying firms and using it to organize what amounts to roving bands of thugs not only need to be exposed but thrown out of the public debate forever. They should become absolute pariahs. It's time to give this garbage a name: insurance industry funded fascism.”

cross-posted at Bring It On!