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Hoping Against Hope

The latest story coming out of Washington D.C. about Shirley Sherrod, the African American Agricultural Department official, who was humiliated and forced to resign her post after a douche bag conservative blogger named Andrew Breitbart released a terribly misleading video that supposedly showed her admitting antipathy toward a farmer who was Caucasian. To make a long story short, instead of investigating the claims of Mr. Breinart thoroughly, the Obama administration tucked their tail between their legs and ran scared. As egregious as the handling of Ms. Sherrod’s story by the administration is and was, that’s not the point of this post. The thing that set me off about this story was the details coming out about how the Obama administration had to make sure that Ms. Sherrod got the boot before Fox news went on air about the story and made them look bad.

Not long after Ms. Sherrod was asked to resign, she went on CNN and said that a White House liaison told her to resign, “because you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.” This is the most ridiculous and cowardice thing that I have seen so far from the Obama White House. When the President of the United States of American is afraid of Fox News and Glenn Beck, you know something is wrong. Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama consistently drops to his knees and bows down to right-wing conventional wisdom. How many times can this administration screw things up before we acknowledge the fact that they have no idea what they are doing? I’m so sick of the Obama supporters (of whom I was one) telling us that we just don’t understand the administration, and that they are very intelligent and know what they are doing…I call bullshit.

This website is no longer anonymous, my name is in the title, and I’ll tell you upfront, I supported and
voted for Barack Obama. If you have read this blog in the past then I’m sure you’ve already figured this out, but this Shirley Sherrod story is the straw that broke the camels back with me. I’m sick of this administration constantly making decisions out of fear from Fox News and the right-wing pundits. President Obama is a coward and has chosen to screw his supports up and down. Say what you will about George W. Bush being an idiot, but at least he had a set of balls. Do you think that Bush gave a shit about MSNBC and what the progressive blogosphere thought about him? If you do, then you must have been in a coma the last ten years. Even when Bill Clinton was in office, and Newt Gingrich said that he was going to, “shut the government down” because he was mad at the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton basically told him to bring it on. That is why Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were so beloved by their supports, because they had courage of their convictions.

What is it going to take for Obama to step up and do his job!? Something is going to have to happen that is so jarring, where he thinks his ass is on the line, before he does anything that we were promised in the election. The question I’ve been asking myself lately is why is President Obama not fulfilling any of his campaign promises? The conclusion that I’ve come to is that he knows that the liberals and progressives are not going to vote for a Republican come next election no matter what, so he does whatever the right-wing wants to try and appease them and get some of their votes, since he already has the progressive vote no matter what. This, I think, is a terrible way to run an administration, and a decision that is going to bite him in the ass in the long run.

If you look at the polling from the 2008 election, a major reason why President Obama won was because he energized the younger vote. Never before in a Presidential election have college kids and people under 30 come out to vote in such record numbers. The thing is, they came out to vote because they were fed up with the Republicans and the war, they were energized and excited to get out the vote. I was living in New York City at the time of the election, and I remember a friend of mine’s girlfriend went to Philadelphia to canvass for votes. If you remember, at the time Pennsylvania was a big swing state, and this girl drove hours away from her home on a Saturday to get people to vote for President Obama. She did this because she was excited and had hope that Obama was going to be different, he was the one who was finally going to get some progressive change in this country. Well the joke was on her, because Obama has done the exact opposite of what he was elected to do. Do you think that come next election these same people are going to fight anywhere near as hard for Obama to win as they did in 2008? There is no way! President Obama has been so disingenuous towards these people, he has screwed them. Sure, the liberals and progressives who do decide to vote surely will vote for Obama again rather than vote for a Republican, but what’s going to happen when the under 30 crowd says, “I’ve had enough?”

I personally guarantee you that after the mid-term elections this year, after the Democrats get their asses handed to them by the Republicans, they are going to blame the voters. They will blame their huge losses on the voters being lazy and not coming out to vote. Well guess what, that’s what happens when you don’t do your fucking job. President Obama had one job to do when he got in office, do what your supporters asked you to do by supporting you. But no, instead he spat in their faces, Rahm Emanuel called us, “fucking retards.” The Obama supporters (myself included) should have known better. We should have known what was coming the moment Obama announced Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff.

I’m not an idiot. I know that they’re all just politicians and we should expect this kind of bullshit from them, but let’s face it, Obama put a lot of hope into a lot of people’s heads. President Obama energized a large group of people who usually don’t give a shit about politics, and then he screwed them over. If you look at the current polls, when you factor in all voters, the Republicans and Democrats are virtually tied. The problem is, when you look at the polling of “likely voters” the Republicans are ahead.

If you wonder why I shut this blog down for a while and got sick of the political posts, this administration is the reason. I’ve become so disengaged by the actions of this administration. President Obama is the epitome of a greasy politician. Make no mistake about it; President Obama has one concern and one concern only, TO GET RE-ELECTED! I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of hoping against hope.

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A Mighty Pale Tea

The Tea Party is not made up of independents as they would like us to believe.  In fact, their views are even more extreme than your everyday, run of the mill Republican.  They portray themselves as non racist, and encompassing all nationalities of Americans.

We hear a constant barrage of, “we just want OUR country back.”  They whine about government involvement as they take advantage of our social safety net.  They scream for lower taxes as they take advantage of the tax cuts they receive.

They are a party of disingenuous, misinformed, unapologetic, right-wing morons who don’t seem to have the ability or desire to understand facts and figures.  When presented with contradictions to their arguments, they act smug and blame the “left-wing media” for spreading lies.  There is no reasoning with them, they are the Tea Baggers.

Charles M. Blow from the New York Times had a great op-ed piece today.  Mr. Blow was present at a Tea Party rally this weekend, here is his account…

A Mighty Pale Tea

By Charles M. Blow

NY Times – April 17^th, 2010

GRAND PRAIRIE, Tex.

On Thursday, I came here outside Dallas for a Tea Party rally.

At first I thought, “Wow! This is much more diverse than the rallies I’ve seen on television.”

Then I realized that I was looking at stadium workers. I should have figured as much when I approached the gate. The greeter had asked, “Are you working tonight?”

I sat in the front row. But when the emcee asked, “Do we have any infiltrators?” and I almost raised my hand, I realized that sitting there might not be such a good idea.

I had specifically come to this rally because it was supposed to be especially diverse. And, on the stage at least, it was. The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God. It felt like a bizarre spoof of a 1980s Benetton ad.

The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities like the young black man who carried a sign that read “Quit calling me a racist.”

They saved the best for last, however: Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel. According to his Web site, Zo, who is black and performs skits as “Zo-bama,” allowed drugs to cost him “his graduation.” Before ripping into the president for unconstitutional behavior, he cautioned, “I don’t have the education that our president has, so if I misinterpret some things in the founding documents I kind of have an excuse.” That was the understatement of the evening.

I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?

It was a farce. This Tea Party wanted to project a mainstream image of a group that is anything but. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. It’s almost all white.

And even when compared to other whites, their views are extreme and marginal. For instance, white Tea Party supporters are twice as likely as white independents and eight times as likely as white Democrats to believe that Barack Obama was born in another country.

Furthermore, they were more than eight times as likely as white independents and six times as likely as white Democrats to think that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

Thursday night I saw a political minstrel show devised for the entertainment of those on the rim of obliviousness and for those engaged in the subterfuge of intolerance. I was not amused.

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Debunking The Cloward-Piven Conspiracy

Lately, I have heard many conspiracy theorists talk about the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy. For those of you who stay away from Glenn Beck and all of the other right-wing crazy people, the ones who believe the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy to be true, are the same people who believe that the government orchestrated 9/11.  Basically, the Cloward-Piven Conspiracy says that the government, through orchestrated crises, seek to expedite the fall of capitalism through overloaded government bureaucracy and social welfare.  In reality, the Cloward-Piven Strategy as it’s called, is a political strategy outlined by two sociologists and political activists at Columbia University in the 1960’s.  The definition that can be found on Wikipedia really explains it best:

Cloward and Piven’s article is focused on forcing the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to take federal action to help the poor. They argued that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare “would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas.” They wrote:

The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.

Of course, the crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists go nuts about this strategy, they think that President Obama is a puppet put into office to carry this strategy out, it’s ridiculous. Normally I wouldn’t even take the time to sit here and point out every stupid conspiracy theory that comes around (I would have to start a separate blog for that, and right now Snpoes and FactCheck do a great job at it already) but this particular conspiracy seems to be gaining some traction.  From YouTube videos to Fox News pundits, people are getting entirely too worked up about this ridiculous conspiracy.

With that being said, Richard Kim from The Nation magazine does a wonderful job completely debunking this absurd conspiracy.  Mr. Kim does a much better job of describing the real facts behind this conspiracy than I could ever hope to.  The Nation is a subscription based magazine/website, so Mr. Kim’s article is not as accessible as some other sort of free media.  I have decided to re-post this article so that people who are not subscribers to The Nation can read it.  Enjoy…

The Mad Tea Party

By Richard Kim

The Nation Magazine - April 12th, 2010

Leftists like to say that another world is possible, but I was never quite sure of that until I started reading tea party websites. There, a government of leftists is not only possible, it's on the cusp of seizing permanent power, having broken American capitalism and replaced it with a socialist state. Down that rabbit hole, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are communists, and "The Left"--which encompasses everyone from the Democratic Leadership Council to Maoist sectarians--is a disciplined and near omnipotent army marching in lockstep to a decades-old master plan for domination called the "Cloward-Piven strategy" or, as of January 20, 2009, "Cloward-Piven government."

What is this plot? According to David Horowitz, who apparently coined the expression, Cloward-Piven is "the strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis." Named after sociologists and antipoverty and voting rights activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who first elucidated it in a May 2, 1966, article for The Nation called "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty," the Cloward-Piven strategy, in Horowitz's words, "seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse." Like a fun-house-mirror version of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine theory, the Cloward-Piven strategy dictates that the left will exploit that crisis to push through unpopular, socialist policies in a totalitarian manner.

Since Obama's election and the financial crash of 2008, Horowitz's description has been taken up by a clutch of tea party propagandists--from TV and radio hosts Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin to WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, National Review editor Stanley Kurtz and The Obama Nation author Jerome Corsi--to explain how both events could have happened, here, in the U-S-A. In their historical narrative, it was Cloward and Piven's article that gave ACORN the idea to start peddling subprime mortgages to poor minorities in the 1980s, knowingly laying the groundwork for a global economic meltdown nearly thirty years later. Beck calls Cloward and Piven the two people who are "fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system." It was Cloward and Piven who had the diabolical idea of registering (illegal or nonexistent) poor and minority voters through Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, thus guaranteeing Obama's "fraudulent" victory. And it is the Cloward-Piven strategy that guides the Obama administration's every move to this day, as it seeks to ram through healthcare reform, economic stimulus and financial regulation (all of which, in reality, have enjoyed majority support in many polls taken during the last two years).

As proof, Beck & Co. point to what they see as a shadowy web of associations: Cloward and Piven worked in alliance with welfare rights organizer George Wiley, who mentored Wade Rathke, who went on to found ACORN, which sometimes coordinated registration drives with Project Vote (whose board of directors Piven just recently joined), a previous incarnation of which employed Obama to run a Chicago chapter in the early '90s. They also repeatedly cite Emanuel's statement, made in November 2008 after the passage of TARP but before the stimulus, that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." From The Nation's pages to the White House's brains and muscles--it took only forty-four years!

All of this, of course, is a reactionary paranoid fantasy. Rahm Emanuel is no more Frances Fox Piven's stooge than Obama is a Muslim. But the looniness of it has not stopped the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory from spreading across tea party networks. And the left's gut reaction upon hearing of it--to laugh it off as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery--does nothing to blunt its appeal or limit its impact. In order to respond, alas, we have to understand, and that means going through the looking glass.

Horowitz first wrote of the Cloward-Piven strategy on his website Discoverthenetworks.org, which claims to be "a guide to the left." His description is a crude and false account of what Cloward and Piven argued. For example, the words "capital" and "capitalism" never appear in their article. The piece is about precipitating a crisis in the welfare system by legally enrolling masses of eligible recipients, which the welfare bureaucracy could not handle, thus creating a demand for more radical reforms, like a guaranteed minimum income--a proposal that Nixon, of all people, floated in 1969 and that, in fact, Democratic-majority Congresses voted down through 1972 [see Peter Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich, page 15]. Moreover, as Piven recently explained to me, although the article was written as a strategic thought experiment, in many ways it described and reacted to changes already sweeping the nation, chief among them the civil rights and welfare rights movements, which created newly politicized constituencies to which the Democratic Party had to respond. "The mainstream," Piven says, "was responsive to the idea that we could end poverty because of these movements." In short, the stresses placed on the welfare system were caused by a confluence of factors, of which an article published in The Nation, it is safe to say, was but one, and most likely a minor one at that.

Nevertheless--history and facts be damned--it is Horowitz's caricature of Cloward-Piven that is now the Rosetta stone of American politics for the tea party's self-styled intellectuals. Glenn Beck has brought up Cloward and Piven on at least twenty-eight episodes of his show over the past year. Beck is sometimes aided by a blackboard on which he has diagramed something called "The Tree of Revolution," which links Che Guevara, SEIU and ACORN's Wade Rathke to Saul Alinsky, the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, Bill Ayers and, perhaps most improbably, to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. In the center of the tree's arching trunk, above SDS and Woodrow Wilson (!?) but below Barack Obama, who adorns the tree's crown, Beck has scrawled "Cloward & Piven."

Beck's tree, however, is derivative of and pales in comparison with the flow chart created by Jim Simpson, a self-described businessman and former George H.W. Bush White House budget analyst and the leading proponent of the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory. Cribbing from Horowitz, but adding his own very special embellishments, Simpson has penned an 18,000-word, six-part exposé of the "Cloward-Piven strategy," which can be found on the websites Americanthinker.com and Americandaughter.com. I have read it so you don't have to. The central innovations of this wild and woolly compilation of right-wing myths, published in installments during the summer and fall of 2008, are to attribute nearly every past, present and future crisis to Cloward and Piven and to link them to Obama's political past and agenda. Among the schemes Simpson credits to the Cloward-Piven strategy are healthcare reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, cap and trade, immigration reform, hate crimes legislation and public financing of elections. For Simpson, the Cloward-Piven strategy is vast, vast--"a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s." And beyond: somehow, Gorbachev's Crimean dacha is implicated, as are Saddam Hussein's palaces.

Most integral to Simpson's theory, however, and where his rather impressive skills as a collagist descend into the orthodoxy of Fox News, is ACORN, which he says has been "the new tip of the Cloward-Piven spear" since 1970. In what is by now a familiar right-wing story line, ACORN is responsible for the global economic crisis. By using the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act--itself a conspiratorial response to the bogus crisis of housing discrimination--ACORN enrolled masses of low-income people in subprime mortgages, creating a housing bubble that caused stock markets around the world to crash, paving the way for bank nationalization and socialism via the bailout and the stimulus. Whew! There are, of course, more than a few pages missing in this whodunit--for instance, that it was ACORN that tried to warn Congress about risky and predatory lenders; that it was too-big-to-fail banks and complex financial instruments that spread the contagion across the worldwide economy; and that in fact the banks have not been nationalized. [For a debunking of this myth, see Peter Dreier and John Atlas's "The GOP's Blame-ACORN Game," October 22, 2008.]

If Simpson's chain of events is not particularly original, his theory of intentionality is: according to him, the left, guided by the Cloward-Piven strategy, was fully aware that subprime mortgages would produce a calamitous financial bubble; it supported subprime lending not to help minorities become homeowners but to sabotage capitalism from the inside. "The failure is deliberate," he writes repeatedly in italics.

Like others on the right, Simpson sees Obama's election itself as a machination of ACORN, which registered millions of felons, illegal aliens and dead citizens to vote through Project Vote and the Motor Voter Act, which Cloward and Piven championed and which Bill Clinton signed in 1993. (Voter fraud seems to be Simpson's enduring preoccupation and the subject of an early 2007 article on Cloward-Piven.) By the logic of the Cloward-Piven strategy, he suggests, voter registration efforts were aimed at corrupting democracy, not expanding it. This argument depends on the denial of several key realities: that changing demographics have altered the balance of party power, that legally increasing the voting rate of key constituencies is a common and legitimate practice of both parties, and that the Republican Party consistently fails to win over minorities because of the policies it promotes. What Simpson and Beck want to cast doubt on is that the democratic process could elect Obama, or that democratic majorities would endorse the agenda Obama has proposed. In the months before the 2008 election, Simpson wrote, "It is not inconceivable that this presidential race could be decided by fraudulent votes alone."

Beck and Simpson have played the tea party's Paul Reveres, warning the masses of the Cloward-Piven assault. But nearly the entire orbit of tea party luminaries have taken it up in some way. In October 2008 the Washington Times ran an op-ed by Robert Chandler called "The Cloward Piven Strategy," and Stanley Kurtz wrote about it in National Review Online. Mark Levin, author of the bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, has discussed it on multiple occasions on his radio program, as did Rush Limbaugh on the March 4 broadcast of his show. In a January 13 interview, Beck asked Sarah Palin if she had seen and believed in the case he had been making on Cloward and Piven. Palin replied, "I do. I do believe it.... It has to be purposeful what they are doing. Otherwise--otherwise I would say, Glenn, that there is no hope, that there are no solutions."

In February, Kyle Olson, a GOP hack who runs an ersatz education nonprofit called the Education Action Group, posed as a student and requested a videotaped interview with Piven, which she gave in her home. Olson posted a portion of the interview on BigGovernment.com, a website run by Andrew Breitbart, who released the "prostitute and pimp" undercover ACORN sting in 2009. Olson captures nothing so dramatic: Piven lucidly discusses homeowner civil disobedience during the Great Depression as a model for how foreclosed homeowners today could refuse to leave their homes and thus create pressure on banks to renegotiate mortgages--a strategy advocated by Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and, yes, ACORN.

Suffice it to say, if Beck and crew believe half of this crap, they belong in an asylum in the middle of Shutter Island, where they can tend to their survival seeds and sleuth out imagined conspiracies apart from the rest of the human population. The danger, however, is that they will maroon a sizable portion of the electorate there with them. Since Obama's inauguration, references to the Cloward-Piven strategy have popped up with increasing frequency in op-eds and letters to the editor of local newspapers, including those in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Snippets of Simpson's tome or Beck's rants appear frequently in the comments section of blogs and articles; a search for the term "Cloward-Piven strategy" generated more than 255,000 Google hits.

Why does the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory hold such appeal? And what, if anything, does it accomplish? On one level it's entertainment. It allows believers to tease out the left's secrets and sinister patterns. Since none of the evidence that supposedly confirms the existence of the Cloward-Piven strategy is, in fact, secret, this proves rather easy to do, and so the puzzle is both thrilling and gratifying.

On another level, the theory is an adaptive response to the tea party's fragmentation. As Jonathan Raban pointed out in The New York Review of Books, the tea party is an uneasy conclave of Ayn Rand secular libertarians and fundamentalist Christian evangelicals; it contains birthers, Birchers, racists, xenophobes, Ron Paulites, cold warriors, Zionists, constitutionalists, vanilla Republicans looking for a high and militia-style survivalists. Because the Cloward-Piven strategy is so expansive, it allows tea party propagandists to engage any one--or all--of the pet issues that incite these various constituencies. For some, the left's "offensive to promote illegal immigration" is "Cloward-Piven on steroids." For others, it is the Cloward-Piven "advocates of social change" who "used the Fed, which was complicit in the scheme" to "engineer" the 2008 fiscal crisis. In his speech at the tea party convention in Nashville, WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah notes that Obama was just 4 when the Cloward-Piven strategy was written. "We think," Farah said. He paused dramatically before adding, "Without the birth certificate we really just don't know," as a sizable portion of the audience broke into applause.

Racial and class resentments, however, are never far from the surface, no matter which subject is slotted into the great Cloward-Piven conspiracy machine. The word "radical," for example, is almost always preceded by the word "black" when it can be (George Wiley), but nobody is ever called a "white radical" (Bill Ayers). Whenever grammatically possible--and sometimes even when it is not--Cloward and Piven are identified as "Columbia professors" and Obama as a "Harvard graduate." (Beyond just heaping Nixonian scorn on elites, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy credits the left with an almost divine intelligence.)

And as of now, the Cloward-Piven strategy is most often used to put two classes of people on the tea party's enemies list: those who work for the Obama administration and those who work to increase the political power of poor people of color. (Doing both--as was the case with Van Jones--can be fatal.) It is the latter target that is particularly appalling: here is a so-called populist movement promulgating a master narrative that holds poor people to blame for the world's woes. The precise impact of this conspiracy theory and the broader movement it incites on Obama's legislative agenda is, as of now, unclear. But the toll it has taken on organizations that advocate for poor people of color could not be more stark. On the weekend the healthcare reform bill cleared the House, tea party activists descended on Washington to decry "the end of America"; their bitter pill was soothed by front-page coverage of the end of something else--ACORN announced it was on the verge of bankruptcy, the victim of what CEO Bertha Lewis called "a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right-wing attacks."

Perhaps most critical, the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory pushes the tea party's kettle closer to a boil. In its obsession with voter fraud and the potential illegitimacy of the 2008 election--and the democratic process itself--the conspiracy suggests a tit-for-tat strategy for victory: if the left is going to cynically manipulate the system to produce tyranny, then so will we. How? To begin, there's the tried-and-true tactic of suppressing the poor minority vote--which would next place Project Vote in the tea party's cross hairs. But why stop there? Like every good conspiracy theory, this one too is a call to arms.

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The Party of Misinformation

As if we needed any more proof, there is a new survey out that shows members of the Tea Party to be grossly misinformed.  The survey was conducted by the Conservative leaning poll and strategy firm, The Winston Group. The survey also confirms our assumptions that the Tea Party consists predominantly of older, white, moderate to low income, not highly educated males, who overwhelmingly favor Fox News Channel as their primary source of information.

A shining example of Tea Party misinformation is represented in their assessment of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts this year.  Among self proclaimed Tea Party members, 86% think that their taxes will go up as a result of the expiration.  The Bush tax cuts affect those making over 250,000 per annum.  Since we know that the majority of Tea Party members fall into the moderate to low income bracket, it is safe to assume that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will not have any real effect on them.  In fact, thanks to tax cuts put in place by President Obama, who the Tea Party despises so much, their taxes will actually go down.  But we have to be careful not to confuse the Tea Party members with the facts.

A recent article in the New York Times, confirmed the misinformation represented by The Winston Group survey.  The article highlights the views of three Tea Party members who demonstrate a scary, but typical example of the misinformed people that the rest of us have to deal with.  This interesting group of Tea Party members consists of Ms. Reimer, Mr. McQueen, and my favorite, Mr. Grimes.

Ms. Reimer, 67, is a Tea Party member from North Carolina.  She enjoys directing protesters to Congressional offices on Capitol Hill, and knocking on doors in order to spread the good word regarding Conservatives running for public office.  Ms. Reimer is a proud recipient of government benefits, which include Medicare and Social Security.  Ms. Reimer told the New York Times that she has no patience for what she calls the, “Obama administration’s bailouts.”  It is apparent that Ms. Reimer is completely unaware of George W. Bush having just as much, if not more, to do with the financial industry bailouts as President Obama.

Mr. McQueen, 50, is a Tea Party organizer in Ohio and Michigan.  In addition to organizing, Mr. McQueen’s claim to fame is the production of flags, which he calls the flag of the Second American Revolution.  According to the New York Times, Mr. McQueen drove 700 miles to campaign for the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown.  Mr. McQueen blames the government for his unemployment because of, “what they’ve done since the 1980’s.  The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”  While Bill Clinton certainly has a part to play in the lack of regulation in the markets, I recall Ronald Regan being one of the pioneers of deregulation.  Interesting how Mr. McQueen hates President Obama so much, but doesn’t seem to mention the right-wing’s Christ incarnate, Ronald Regan.  The New York Times had a great line referring to Mr. McQueen and his cohorts, “He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.”  Unfortunately, but not at all surprising, Mr. McQueen is having difficulty selling his Second American Revolution flags.

Finally, we come to my favorite misinformed Tea Bagger, Mr. Grimes.  Mr. Grimes is known for mobilizing 200 Tea Party activists to protest a Democratic Senator who supported President Obama’s health care legislation.  Mr. Grimes is a recipient of that popular government social program known as social security.  In the backseat of Mr. Grimes' Mercury Grand Marquis, he carries around a copy of Glenn Beck’s Arguing with Idiots, as well as a book titled The Law, which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”  Mr. Grimes is responsible for a great quote, which I feel sums up the mentality of the Tea Party movement.  “If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.

I don’t necessarily think that Ms. Reimer, Mr. McQueen, and Mr. Grimes are representative of everyone that participates in the Tea Party movement.  But according to articles in the New York Times, and this most recent survey by The Winston Group, it is certainly safe to say that they do represent the majority.  I just don’t understand it.  The Tea Party openly admits that they don’t care about the facts.  There is no hope of ever having a logical policy discussion with people of this mentality.  They only watch Fox News for their information, and they are unwilling to listen to any other points of reason.  The Tea Party claims to be in favor of the Constitution.  They are always referring to the Founding Fathers, yet they are completely unaware of historical data that directly contradicts their beliefs.  I should have come to this conclusion sooner; it is a waste of time trying to have a rational conversation with Tea Party members.  It is time to stop trying to rationalize with them and start ignoring them.

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Right-Wing Extremism

I want to expand a bit on a previous post of mine titled “Tea Party Hypocrisy.”  Frank Rich had an article in the New York Times recently titled, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care,” where Mr. Rich wrote about how Republican politicians have been playing on their bases fear of a Democratic federal government which manifests itself into a violent rage.  Mr. Rich talks about how this type of divisive politics has been rampant since the Nixon era.  This notion of divisive politics perpetuated by right-wing politicians throughout history has also been talked about in a book by Richard Perlstein titled, “Nixonland,” as well as in a recent article in The Faster Times, by T.R. Donohue  titled, “Why Do Republicans Insist on Fanning the Flames of Domestic Terrorism?”

The general theme in all of the above mentioned titles is, the driving wedge in right-wing politics, talk of these people over here (referring to the left), they want to take what you have (i.e. guns, religion, money…) and give it to these other people who aren’t like you.  These titles talk about how the Republican Party, all throughout history, has played off their bases fear of these “others,” referring to homosexuals, minorities, and college educated individuals who they don’t understand and therefore have a fear of.

The real problem with right-wing politicians, is their willingness to court and even embrace the radical rhetoric coming from these extremist groups and individuals.  Republican politicians consistently stoke the fear and rage that runs rampant amongst their base.  They know that if they play on people’s fear, they have a better chance of retaining power and passing their agenda.  Even when they are in power, they are constantly seen playing the fear card to pass legislation.  We have seen recent examples of this under George W. Bush, with his talk about mushrooms clouds, and the famous line, “we have to fight them over there so they don’t fight us over here.”  Journalists have written numerous examples of the Bush administration mysteriously raising the terror threat level almost every single time there was a dip in administration approval numbers.  Remember how the Patriot Act was passed?  It was passed right after 9/11, when the country was overreacting to a fear of Islamic extremists.

The fact that domestic extremism skyrockets under Democratic administrations is undisputable.  The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, said that in 2008 there were 42 right-wing militia groups in the United States.  Today, they report 127 right-wing militia groups operating in the United States.  Why is this?  I think that it is an undisputable fact that the hate and vitriol coming from the right has much more to do with culture than with the issues.  As I talked about in, “Tea Party Hypocrisy,” the right-wing doesn’t care about the issues.  They don’t care about big government, the budget, the deficit, and the constitution, it is all a ploy.  If the right-wing really cared about these things, they would have gone berserk under the Bush administration.  George W. Bush and company grew the national budget and deficit to unprecedented levels.  The Bush administration passed legislation that made unwarranted search and seizures legal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  The right-wing, especially the Tea Party, claim to be constitutionalists.  Where were these people when George Bush trampled all over fourth, sixth, and eighth amendment?

The right-wing politicians in this country embrace this extremism.  We saw blatant examples of this during the presidential campaign of 2008.  Remember Sarah Palin referring to President Obama, “palling around with terrorists.”  What do these politicians think is going to happen when they say things like this?  Their ignorant base believes them when the accuse President Obama of not being a United States citizen.  These right-wingers believe their politicians when they tell them that, “we need to take our country back.”

They are telling their base that we need to take the country back from this socialist who is not an American citizen and pals around with terrorists.  How do they think their base is going to react?  If someone honestly believes that President Obama hangs around with terrorists, is not an American citizen, and is a communist, they feel that they need to take their country back by any means necessary.  It is no wonder that a recent Harris poll showed the following percentages of self proclaimed Conservatives believe the following things to be true:

-President Obama is a socialist: 67%

-He wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns: 63%

-He is a Muslim: 51%

-He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government: 52%

-He has done many things that are unconstitutional: 53%

-He resents America’s heritage: 49%

-He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do: 38%

-He was not born in the United States and is not eligible to be president: 41%

-He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of: 45%

-He is a racist: 42%

-He is anti-American: 43%

-He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers: 40%

-He is doing many of the things that Adolph Hitler did: 36%

And now for my favorite one:

-President Obama might be the Anti-Christ: 24%

Is any of this a surprise?  Ok, the Anti-Christ part is certainly surprising.  It is amazing to me that 24% of Conservatives believe in the Anti-Christ, let alone think that President Obama might be him.  Do you think that it is in the realm of possibility that these people may think that it is ok to take violent action against President Obama and his administration.  If I believed in the Anti-Christ, which I certainly do not, I would probably think that it's ok if someone took action against that person.

Instead of explaining to their base that these ridiculous things are obviously untrue, Republican politicians, along with pundits like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the right-wing crazy people, continue to encourage and reinforce these false accusations.  The Republican Party plays on their bases fear because it works.  Their base has an obvious fear of people they see as different from them.  If they don’t understand something, then there is this rage that builds up and manifests itself into violent outbursts.  It is just like when Ronald Regan, who is the second coming of Christ to Conservatives, talked about, “welfare queens driving Cadillacs.”  They see anyone who is not a white Christian male as different, and looking to, “take their country from them.”

The good news that comes with all of this, is that the demographics of this country are rapidly changing.  In the near future, white Christian males are going to no longer be in the majority in this country, and this scares right-wingers to death.  As America becomes more of a melting pot, the right-wingers are going to see their power erode.  While I can’t wait for these right-wingers to lose their majority grip on the country, I fear for what will come along with their loss of power.  I think that the violence and extremism has only begun.  The more these people feel that they have their backs against the wall, the more they will want to fight back.  I hope that for once in history, these right-wing politicians will take a look at what they have created, and do something to stop it.

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Tea Party Hypocrisy

I really don’t understand the Tea Party movement.  Do they not realize that they are currently the most hypocritical group of people on the planet?  Or are they just too stupid to realize that their arguments make absolutely no sense?  They bitch and moan about too much government control, unless of course the government wants to control something that they are in favor of, like same-sex marriage.  They complain about President Obama supposedly taking away their civil liberties, but when Republicans trample all over our civil liberties, not a peep from them.  They also complain about the recent health care legislation being unconstitutional, but do they not recall the Patriot Act and the suspension of habeas corpus by former President George W. Bush.

One of the current arguments made by the Tea Party is that they want less government control of health care, business, and their lives in general.  We’ve all heard the argument that less government intervention and control is the way to go.  I want the Tea Party to explain why they are in favor of controlling what Americans put into their bodies and what Americans do in their bedrooms.  Why is the Tea Party in favor of the government telling us who we can marry and what we can do with our sexual partners in the privacy of our homes?  You would have a hard time finding a Tea Party member who is in favor of same-sex marriage, and up until the early 21st century, 36 states had laws against sodomy. These laws present a textbook case of government control.  Why doesn't the Tea Party protest about this?  The fact of the matter is, those affiliated with the Tea Party are perfectly fine with government control and regulation, as long as the type of control vibes with their personal agenda and beliefs.  Either you are in favor of government control, or you aren't.  You can’t have it both ways, unless you're hypocrite.

The Tea Party is in favor of control when it comes to marijuana.  If the government tries to mandate you to buy health insurance, in order to provide health care to more people, that is wrong.  But if the government outlaws marijuana and other drugs, that is ok.  Do they not see the hypocrisy of their argument?  I don’t get it.  They are against government control, unless of course it is something that they want controlled.

The Tea Party says that President Obama is infringing upon their civil liberties, but where were the protesters when George W. Bush was taking away a persons right to a fair trial?  We still have prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not even been charged with a crime, let alone had access to legal counsel, or a fair trial.  These are basic human rights that George W. Bush denied people.  Where was the Tea Party then?  Were they all asleep when Bush was destroying civil liberties?  Why do they only protest when Democrats are in office?  They are hypocrites.

The Tea Party complains about President Obama’s health care plan, they say the mandate is unconstitutional.  Where were they when the Patriot Act was being pushed through Congress?  The Constitution strictly prohibits unwarranted search and seizures.  Where was the Tea Party when this unconstitutional bill was being passed?  Where were the protests?  Where was the “revolution” that that they are calling for when George W. Bush was in office?  They are hypocrites.  Republicans can enact any piece of legislation they want without a peep from these hypocrites.  Make no mistake; they don’t care about the Constitution.  They are protesting because they hate President Obama and the Democrats, that is the ONLY reason.

President Obama has done many things that liberals are not in support of, but how can you complain about President Obama and the Democrats, and stay silent when the Republicans do far more shameful things?  There are only two conclusions that we can come to based on their behavior.  They are either too stupid to know what they are complaining about, or they are hypocrites.  I can guarantee everyone reading this post of one thing.  If President Obama is not re-elected in 2012, and we get a Republican in office, I can promise you that the Tea Party will disappear into the shadows.  There will be no more protests.  The Tea Party will go away, only to re-surface the next time a Democrat comes into office.  Don’t be fooled, the Tea Party is comprised of hypocrites.  They are only concerned with their own self interests.  They don’t care about you or me.  They only care about themselves.

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Whose Country Is It?

I try and make a point to post as much original content, written by me, on the site as I possibly can.  But every now and then I come across an article that is too good not to post.  That being said, Charles Blow from the New York Times posted an op-ed piece on Saturday that I couldn’t have said better myself.  I have decided to share his article with you.

Whose Country Is It?

By Charles M. Blow

NY Times – March 27^th, 2010

The far-right extremists have gone into conniptions.

The bullying, threats, and acts of violence following the passage of health care reform have been shocking, but they’re only the most recent manifestations of an increasing sense of desperation.

It’s an extension of a now-familiar theme: some version of “take our country back.” The problem is that the country romanticized by the far right hasn’t existed for some time, and its ability to deny that fact grows more dim every day. President Obama and what he represents has jolted extremists into the present and forced them to confront the future. And it scares them.

Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.

Hence their anger and frustration, which is playing out in ways large and small. There is the current spattering of threats and violence, but there also is the run on gunsand the explosive growth of nefarious antigovernment and anti-immigrant groups. In fact, according to a report entitled “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism” recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “nativist extremist” groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment “patriot” groups more than tripled over that period.

Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement. It may have some legitimate concerns (taxation, the role of government, etc.), but its message is lost in the madness. And now the anemic Republican establishment, covetous of the Tea Party’s passion, is moving to absorb it, not admonish it. Instead of jettisoning the radical language, rabid bigotry and rising violence, the Republicans justify it. (They don’t want to refute it as much as funnel it.)

There may be a short-term benefit in this strategy, but it’s a long-term loser.

A Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday took a look at the Tea Party members and found them to be just as anachronistic to the direction of the country’s demographics as the Republican Party. For instance, they were disproportionately white, evangelical Christian and “less educated ... than the average Joe and Jane Six-Pack.” This at a time when the country is becoming more diverse (some demographers believe that 2010 could be the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite), less doctrinally dogmatic, and college enrollment is through the roof. The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

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