Every few years the system turns over in its grave and brings us a new bounty of horrors on the political front. The current cycle of childish nonsense has delivered to us the newest abomination known as the tea party. These tea-baggers are so politically far-a-field they would be frightening if they weren’t so funny. I guess they could be funnily frightening. Fortunately for the entire country United Statesians ( ‘Americans’ to me includes both American continents. Only United States citizens are arrogant enough to think they are the only ‘Americans’ ) have very short attention spans and are easily discouraged or distracted. Which means that even though these movements flame up quickly and take on all the rage of the latest “if you tickle me there you go to jail” Elmo, they tend to burn out to a smolder before they can do any serious damage to our fledgling society. Remember something from a few years ago calling itself the Promise Keepers? A bunch of overweight conservative white guys clogging up arenas raising their hands and bibles, singing and crying like a bunch of giant babies with pituitary gland problems and loaded diapers promising to lead, protect, and spend time with their families. You know, the kind of stuff they should have been doing all along. This movement burst into a furor as middle-class America clamored to not be left out or to be the last to conform to the latest pointless craze. And for a while you could not go hardly a day without hearing about these bandwagon jumpers (“Hey, look what they’re doing! ). But as it turns out, not only is doing the right thing a thankless and unappreciated job, it is also a lot of hard work. Disillusionment led to boredom as dedication and resolve began to wane. So all too soon they slowly drifted away and went back to playing golf, ignoring their children, cheating on their wives, and hanging out in titty bars. The point is that a grass-roots movement like this has limited longevity as it loses cohesion due to internal power struggles and the inability to structure its efforts into a common organized goal. Usually that life span is about two years. Three tops.
I see this new tea-baggers (my name for them) movement as possibly being the last gasp of the extreme right of the republican party. This group cannot see how increasingly isolated they are making themselves with their exclusionary rhetoric that appeals primarily to the angry and the fearful. Alienating just about every minority or ethnic group because they feel that they alone are right and are therefore unwilling to listen or empathize with any dissenting viewpoints. What they don’t (or refuse) to understand is that in a very short time all of the groups they so easily dismiss will together outnumber themselves and that their unwillingness to compromise will leave them a marginalized and powerless fringe of society. Tea baggers see their country changing around them and it scares the hell out of them. So badly in fact that out of a sense of desperation they espouse ideas and policies that most reasonable candidates would keep hidden in the darkest recesses of their own minds. I really believe that this particular movement is actually dangerous. It is intolerant, inflexible, divisive, and borderline militant. Accusing anyone who disagrees with them of “hating or trying to destroy America” (there goes that word again) or of being a “unpatriotic traitor”. If these people get any real power you can just say goodbye to any personal freedoms such as speech, religion, or privacy. As well as any social programs that even slightly helps any of the under privileged citizens of this great country. It is hard for me to believe that any of these hard line fanatics could be serious contenders in this election. Their candidates are remarkably laughable possessing little to no practical experience and zero credibility . I guess it is simply a testament to how angry everyone has become, but if any of them somehow manage to get elected I’m sure they will be one-termers once the electorate sees how ineffective they will be.
If you think that that these Republicans or their Tea-bagger friends are going to cut taxes and/or spending, think again. There is no way that they can at this point. We need to spend seventeen trillion dollars on bridges, dams, levees, roads, and the electrical grid right now. The government has neglected the critical infrastructure of this country for decades and now we have to pay the price or there will not be a bridge left that is safe to drive across. If they do cut spending then the whole nation is likely to fall apart before our very eyes. If spending is cut the first thing to go will be any help for the poor, sick, and old. Followed closely by any protections for consumers, workers, or the environment. However don’t completely despair, military spending should just about triple.
Now that Wall street is again making record profits and plans to hit new astronomical records in bonuses, why is there still no job creation in this country? Could it be that corporations are delaying hiring to help their easily controlled candidates in the upcoming election? If so it would be a despicable and unconscionable act to continue to allow people to suffer and take away a party’s fair chance to at lease try a new idea when they could have been helping to make things better instead of protecting their own selfish interests. Unfortunately I believe you have to spend to create jobs, just like in WWII. That worked doubly well as a lot of the unemployed were conveniently killed. Maybe this time we could learn a lesson and just execute the jobless and save the expense of destroying and rebuilding half the world. As for creating jobs I have no idea what kind of jobs they would be after corporate greed was allowed to send the entire manufacturing industries over seas. “We can’t afford to make our expensive cheap products here” is the age old refrain. Here is how you make it feasible to manufacture here- a five hundred dollar per product import tariff. Where else could they sell their products? Only United Statesian consistently overconsume on a scale large enough to keep them in their giant bonuses.
Unbelievably, some of these morons are still calling for the privatization of the social security system. What were these people doing during the last three years while Wall street was flushing the entire U.S. economy down the toilet? Watching SpongeBob Squarepants reruns? Social security is far from a perfect system but it is vital to the very survival of most of the elderly and disabled in this country. You cannot risk putting that much temptation into the greedy hands of the unscrupulous dirtbags that seem to ruin our economy every decade or so. Wall street has been salivating over the s.s. fund since it was first created, to them it is nothing but a free source of wealth that they can plunder at will. Losing a large portion of the fund to the fees of a private managing company would be bad enough but it wouldn’t stop there. It would all be “lost” in risky investments or traded back and forth between companies until it is completely swallowed up by fees or just embezzled at which time the bankers would simply throw up their hands and say “oh well” and walk away scot free and that much richer for their trouble. Either way you will end up paying twice as much to refill the fund because I do not believe that even a group as heartless as the tea baggers will stand for millions of geriatric homeless dying in the streets.
The Republican party has dusted off some of their oldest and worst ideas in the not so new ‘pledge to America’. Sounds just like their old ‘contract with America’ that for some reason most everyone thought was a good idea. Which it was not. Basically it consisted of forcing all the new Republican Congressmen to vote only how the party told them to, if they did not they would not be endorsed in the next election. Why in the hell would anyone want a Senator who would vote against the best interests of his district and its citizens because of the aims of the party. This sounds like lunacy to me, but both parties believe that the power and well being of their party is their primary responsibility and infinitely more important than the people they represent.
After seeing the most recent sound bite from Tea-bagger empress Sarah Palin (“we can see 2012 from our house!”) I nearly became physically ill. The snide condescending hatred in her voice permeated her words and sickly sweet smile. Fine, you don’t agree with the current president, then how about coming up with some useful ideas instead of a bunch of pointless slogans. You had your chance and you lost- so if you are not willing to help, shut up. As far as the rest of the tea bagger candidates go, all I can do is quote Derek Jacobi from ‘I Claudius’ who said in reference about the progeny of his family tree “ We’ve certainly had a terrifying crop this season”.
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