The Tea Party Thread - Page 20

Alex Sink, the Dem, has a black mark on his past, but it's one shared by pretty much everyone in authority over the past two years, nothing like the naked criminality of Rick Scott.

That Rand Paul reaction to the near-curb stomping is almost as sickening as the act itself. "Uh, uh, there's a lot of um, passion on both sides and um..."

Jesus, how hard is it to say "This was a deplorable act and the perpetrator should be ashamed of themselves."?

Alex Sink is a she.

You mean... EVERYONE CHANGED SEX?!? It's all Jurassic Park dinos up in Florida!

Rick Scott does seem kind of effete. Maybe he's just running so he can get a free sex change if he wins.

Rick Scott can't even blink! This man scares me.

I showed that article to a co-worker, who commented that at first she thought it was The Onion.

I replied that there's a point past which American politics becomes stupider than anything The Onion can come up with, and we passed that point quite some time ago.

These teabaggers are pretty vile. Plus, they are so delusional that they always see themselves as victims no matter what the facts are.

I hope Johnny Knoxville constructs a giant boot to land on this guy.

Continuously.

D'oh!

This is small beer. I really thought one of those lunatics would have shot someone during the summer. Personally about now is when I'd be arming myself against these clowns.

Rachel Maddow v. Milller supporters v. Reality:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908...show/#39860555

About what you would expect.

I'm catching up on last night's Countdown, and seeing repeated footage of those guys accosting the protester is making me nauseous. It's like I can feel the hate oozing through my television.

Truthiness isn't a joke anymore.

Truthiness was never a joke; it has been the lynch pin of the Conservative/Republican playbook for the last 10 years.

True, that is true. Unfortunately.

"Can you give me specifics?"

"IT'S TRUE BECAUSE I WANT IT TO BE TRUE"

Jesus...

My feeling is that this lunacy has now gotten officially out of control.

That this has all gotten so far without any substantive reaction is one of the most frightening things I've seen in my life. I think we've reached the point where even the most sane, optimistic and rational people left in this country are going to have face up and embrace the horror.

Tea party founder defends attack on congressman’s Muslim faith

Ellison's winning, by the way. Thank fucking Christ.

I can't believe it's real. It must be like Jay Leno's or Rick Mercer's shticks, where all the right answers are edited out giving us a chance to laugh at the ign'ant.

I'll tell you what though, if I were at a rally and people were saying such stupid things, I'd have to jump in and say something to keep us from looking like a bunch of yokels, but no one's doing that. I have no trouble believing that's representative of Miller's hardcore base.

What I'm about to say may seem a bit extreme, but whatever remains from the Left in the US needs to seriously get its balls back.

You're well past the point of reasoned debate. You're going to have to match crazy with crazy. And not patchouli wearing hippie crazy. "You're not the only ones with the right to bear arms" kind of crazy, instead. I don't understand how there can be a movement in your country that talks with thinly veiled threats about "taking back the country" and "revolution" and "reckoning" and there's not an opposing movement basically saying "Go ahead, fuckers, give it a try."

Appeals to logic and requests for sanity aren't going to work on them.

I don't know that this is the best place to put this, but I'm not really interested in starting a thread for Tuesday's election....

My local news reported this morning that 15 counties in my state of Missouri, including four or five in my region of the state, have been found to have more registered voters than population residing in them.

I don't have a clue as to who or how, but I figured I'd share with you guys. Missouri is freakin contentious and divided in the best of times, and right now things are a little nutso here. Hope things are running smoothly in your part of the country.

Problem is, two crazies don't make a sane.

Not to mention that would lose the left their base that respects, y'know, logic and sanity, and alienate on-the-fencers leaning away from the crazy.

If the answer to crazy was more crazy, every mental-hospital worker would be wearing mustard hats and talking to imaginary fish as part of their patients' therapy.

Besides, what we're seeing isn't crazy so much as stupid shrewdly exploited by smart and rich. What we're seeing is really smart vs. stupid. Republicans know how to speak Stupid and fan the flames of class resentment and racial unease, thus making stupid into crazy. Democrats need to learn how to speak Stupid and pull stupid back from crazy. They used to be able to do this; populists used to come from the left. With Reagan, the GOP stole the jes'-folks playbook and used it for purposes that ran counter to the interests of jes'-folks.

So with the Tea Party, what we're seeing are candidates who convincingly speak Stupid because they are stupid. Many of them hit the hot buttons quite uncynically, because that's how they actually think. In a perverse way, Tea Party candidates are appealing to a group cynical about politicians and starved for — for want of a better word — "authenticity." They want to see someone in power who's just like them. Obama doesn't fit that bill any way you look at it: he's black, he's smart, and he has money. The effect is not racism so much as tribalism: a frustrated, easily emotionally swayed part of the population wants a tribe leader who's like them, not someone from outside the tribe. (A good part of it in many cases is also racism, of course.) If you've got two white candidates and one speaks Stupid and one doesn't even know what to do with Stupid, stupid votes for the Stupid-speaker.

Well put, M.B..

This. Though I wouldn't call it crazy. Crazy is thinking you can reason with those who have made it perfectly clear that they are neither interested in or capable of being even slightly reasonable. We're dealing with bullies.

I agree with everything you said except this. The Tea party candidates are just as cynically pandering as the average politician, they're just willing to double down on the stupid and cut loose the sane moderates entirely. Some of them are ignorant when it comes to intellectual matters or, like, doing their jobs (I really believe Christine O'Donnell can't name another Senator) but they're "smart" in the sense of being savvy politicians who know how to play to their base.

The Tea Party message is just the hardcore right-wing Republicanism we've always known, now with new branding! We already know their views on economic policy are typical hardcore conservativism gone all proto. In other words, the same lame shit that got us into this corporatist nightmare. But ask anyone of these teabaggers if they have a different view about social libertarianism than say, a "social conservative" and you will find that they sound A LOT like traditional Republicans. Their idea of small government is virtually indistinguishable from the GOP.

Oh, definitely. You can absolutely be stupid in some ways and shrewd in others. I think I may have clouded the distinction between being shrewd-smart, in terms of knowing how to get your demagogue on and get votes, and smart-smart, in terms of, well, not being ignorant.

What I wonder is, how many of these candidates are actually shrewd, instead of being advised by shrewd people on what to say? We've seen what happens when O'Donnell or Palin (who by now looks like a fucking wisewoman next to some of these other waterheads) go off-script.

Democrats need to be a little more shrewd and come off a little less smart-smart. Appeals to emotion help, since -- and I say this as a citizen -- America is by and large intellectually infantile. This cuts both ways, by the way; during the Biden/Palin debate, when he talked about some personal tragedy or another (I forget what) and then Palin just fell back on talking points and didn't acknowledge what he'd said at all, I had a feeling that cost her some fence-sitters.

Republican does not equal stupid, and a lot of them -- Dennis Hopper is always the example that leaps to my mind -- switched votes to Obama because Palin was the deal-breaker. A lot of them are Reagan or pre-Reagan Republicans privately aghast at the party's flirtation with retards; I can only imagine what WFB would've made of Christine O'Donnell. In the end, I suspect the balance will be righted (no pun intended), with people of good will, conscience and sense on both sides saying "Look, is this really the country we want?"

The problem is too many Republicans are willing to let the Tea Baggers go unchecked because it's helping knock down the Democrats. They're riding the tiger without a care for the consequences. And that's why I had no qualms this year about voting for every Democrat on my ballot just based on the "DEM" next to their name; if the Republicans want to embrace this idiocy, they don't deserve my consideration.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-1...restore-sanity

Signs. Good ones.

Did any Chewers happen to make it to the rally?Thoughts?

These signs give me hope for all of you.

my fav so far

'Is this the line for Justin Beiber Tickets?'

I was there. The rally itself was a blast. Contrary to what the tea party folks are trying to paint it as, it was a very diverse crowd (both in terms of age distribution and racial makeup that was very polite and respectful, and cleaned up after themselves when they left.

The show itself was beyond awesome. The Roots + John Legend gave a great warm-up show, followed by the Mythbusters leading the crowd in some "experiments" (it took nearly a minute for "the wave" to reach from one end of the crowd to the other). Then the actual show...well, let's just say I'm pretty sure there's never been another place where Yusuf/Cat Stevens and Ozzy Osbourne had "duelling trains" (Peace Train/Crazy Train) that segued into the O'Jays singing "Love Train." A Kid Rock song that I actually liked. Colbert and Stewart were on the top of their game, and Stewart's "closing remarks" were fantastic.

As far as the political sentiments of the crowd, there's no doubt it was left-leaning. I'd say the "sign ratio" was about 60/40 between "humorous/apolitical/"tone it down a notch" type signs vs. "openly Anti-Beck/Anti-Fox/Anti-Tea Party" (at least from among those that I saw...I was about in the center of the crowd...which is to say about 600 yards from the stage and about 600 yards from the Monument).

All in all though, the "vibe" was extremely positive. I dunno that it changed anything, but I think a lot of people left feeling better knowing that not everyone in the USA has lost their marbles.

Christopher Hitchens on the Tea Party in Vanity Fair.

Fuck.

I give up. I'm finishing school and, through the proper channels, moving to Vancouver, or Sydney, or Munich. Anywhere. The fact that the hammer hasn't fallen on this bullshit yet is a testament to its strength built upon its own disregard for logic. I'm done.

Just move to Cambridge?

Christopher Hitchens lets the Tea Party, Glenn Beck and their apologists have it as only Hitchens can.

the article so nice it was posted twice

It looks like this mongoloids may actually torch the tax cut "compromise", thus doing the right thing--and the best thing in their own interests--for the wrong reasons.

It goes to show you that the establishment Democrats do, in fact, hate the base of their party and the Republicans fear theirs.

d'oh!!!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/08/132764807/rep-gabrielle-giffords-d-ariz-others-reported-wounded-in-shooting

 

Motherfuckers

Yep. What a coincidence.

"Insurrection Timeline"

 

= pretty spooky stuff.

 

 

Just quoted for the heck of it

 

Anyway, posting today because of some truly repellent development in the Texas Text Book Massacre

 

Tea Party demands:

 

 

 This is pretty deranged. You're unable to discuss minority grievances if it makes the majority look bad? They're denying that the founders owned slaves?

 

 

 

 

Dr Jones seeks text book approval