Women Are "Too Diabolical" to Vote

That remark actually came from a woman,  Tea Party leader Janis Lane, a former marketing manager who is now the Central Mississippi Tea Party president.  Okay, now brace yourself.

“Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting. There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how [they] can skewer a person.  I do not see that in men. The whole time I worked, I'd much rather have a male boss than a female boss. Double-minded, you never can trust them.”

Asked about what part of the Tea Party platform would appeal to minorities, [conservative talk show host and former Nation of Islam member, Kim] Wade said, “Our position on charter schools is incoherent as black people. We're sitting up here watching our kids be destroyed because our leadership says we're supposed to dislike private schools because they were born out of segregation.”

Lane, the female Tea Party leader, came out strongly against reproductive rights as well. “I do not agree with the federal government supporting killing a preborn human. A child is a child from the moment of conception,” she said. 

How can you possibly heal a terminally divided nation that has a sizeable population that thinks like these women?

Could the Tea Party Be America's Salvation?

No seriously, just bear with me for a moment.  Tea Party members of America's House of Representatives appear intent on bringing their government down.   These excerpts from der Spiegel illustrate what's happening:

..the [US] system only works when all branches of government play the role designed for them. For almost 235 years, the system worked reasonably well. But, about a year ago, things started to go wrong in the US capital; the system began to melt down. The friction is no longer propelling the country to greatness, rather it is hastening its decline. Members of the right-wing conservative Tea Party movement, which is well represented in Congress since the last elections, want friction. But at the expense of results.
These lawmakers no longer view themselves as part of the political system. Instead, they identify themselves as its enemy. They see themselves as outsiders, even as they sit in Congress and enjoy the kinds of job benefits they would like to strip from their fellow Americans.

...Experts agree that America can only reduce its vast mountain of debt by both cutting expenditures and raising taxes -- at least a little. Tea Party politicians are eager to slash spending, but they are adamantly opposed to allowing the government to increase tax revenues. Their refusal to compromise has led economists to warn of " Armageddon " should the US become insolvent.

In response to such "fear mongering," the Tea Party group Campaign for Liberty wrote on its blog that, even if the debt ceiling isn't raised, "the sun will still rise in the East and set in the West, as it has for all time." What, after all, do the experts know?

As a result, America has come to a standstill . The branches of government were designed to both exercise and yield power. More than anything, though, they are supposed to work together. But working together would appear to be contrary to the Tea Party movement's creed. Members aren't interested in making Washington better, they want to annihilate it. Their Holy Grail is a stripped down state.

But maybe, just maybe, bringing the government crashing down would be the best thing for the American people.  It would certainly wake them up and make them look at what the radical right has been doing to their government.  They would see it and, more importantly, they would feel it.  Let  them see what this homegrown radical insurgency would do if it ever gained real power.

A greater threat to America might be some harebrained compromise bill that adds more federal debt but does nothing to cure the malignant madness of the nihilistic far right.   A compromise debt bill that simply buys time may actually empower the Tea Partiers, expand their base and then what?

America should be saved but not at any cost and if the cost demanded is extortionate then the country could be better off by hitting the "reset" button.   The real threat facing America, as pointed out in the Spiegel article, isn't fiscal but governmental.   It's a structural failing and one that a debt compromise may only perpetuate.

Is the Tea Party America's Khmer Rouge?

So Wrong, In So Many Ways

The struggles underway between Congressional GOP leaders and the White House over America's debt ceiling have an eerie, nihilistic air to them.

Some attribute it to the struggles Republican House leader John Boehner and Senate leader Mitch McConell are having with their caucuses divided between sane members and radical Tea Party legislators.  I've found these Tea Partiers fascinating, in an ominous way and I just realized why.  I figure they're America's equivalent of Cambodia's old Khmer Rouge regime.  From WiKi:

This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of social engineering, which resulted in genocide.^[1] Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Brutal and arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1976 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide.

Now, obviously, I don't think the Tea Partiers are going to trigger a genocide, they've seen to it their public is far too heavily armed for that, but they are into a twisted form of social engineering laced with essentially nihilistic ideological dogma.  Like the KR, the TP is basically irrational and immune to logic and reason.

My suspicions are only reinforced by this assessment of the Congressional GOP in today's New York Times:

...Not only is Michele Bachmann, a leading Republican presidential candidate, saying a government default is nothing to worry about, but a core group of 59 House Republicans have indicated they will not raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

That’s right: no matter how much President Obama gives them — from curbing entitlements to cuts in excess of $3 trillion — this cadre of radical Republicans is taking the burn-it-all-down position. They don’t want to see the terms of a deal because there is no deal they will accept. That’s their stated position.

With this step, what the chaos caucus has proven is that they have no interest in governing. They didn’t go to Washington to find solutions; they went there to destroy the place.

Based on Boehner’s math, the anarchists make up perhaps 25 percent of the G.O.P. House. At the other end of party control are the moneyed interests who’ve long bankrolled Republicans. They’re happy, of course, that their favored politicians are willing to go to the brink of catastrophe to keep even the most egregious tax loopholes from being closed. But now they’re getting scared, as the anarchist wing indicates it is serious about bringing the whole government down — and with it a lot of private money.

Does the Tea Party Harbour Terrorists?

A poll conducted by Daily Kos found that 13 per cent of respondents who identified themselves as Tea Party supporters responded yes when asked whether they thought violence against the current American government was justified.

Last April, PBS reported that Tea Party supporters totaled 67,000.  That would give the party some 8,700 members who consider violence against their government justified.  I don't think the Taliban has 8,700 fighters inflicting violence against the Karzai government.

I don't know but it sure sounds to me like the Tea Party is a seditious, terrorist organization.

The Tea Party Disease - Anti-Intellectualism

It's hard work.  Trying to conjure up rational explanations for irrational behaviour, especially mass irrational behaviour, is hard and frustrating work.  But that's the Herculean chore that befalls anyone trying to make sense of modern American, rightwing populism exemplified in the Tea Party movement.

In his new book, Griftopia, journalist Matt Taibbi warns that there has evolved, among the American people, a powerful bloc of angry voters happily wallowing in willful ignorance, simpletons who are puppets in the hands of his country's genuine "elite", the powerful few at the very top.  Here are some excerpts:

"...it’s so pathetically easy in the TV age to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, with the Tea Party being a classic example of the phenomenon. If you want to understand why America is such a paradise for high-class thieves, just look at the way a manufactured movement like the Tea Party corrals and neutralizes public anger that otherwise should be sending pitchforks in the direction of downtown Manhattan.

There are two reasons why Tea Party voters will probably never get wise to the Ponzi-scheme reality of bubble economics. One has to do with the basic sales pitch of Tea Party rhetoric, which cleverly exploits Main Street frustrations over genuinely intrusive state and local governments that are constantly in the pockets of small businesses for fees and fines and permits.

The other reason is obvious: the bubble economy is hard as hell to understand. To even have a chance at grasping how it works, you need to commit large chunks of time to learning about things like securitization, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc., stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor."

So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter class is going to skate on almost anything it does -- because the tendency of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised socialism.

That’s why it’s so brilliant for the Tea Party to put forward as its leaders some of the most egregiously stupid morons on our great green earth. By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn’t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics."

" ...Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions -- just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are."

NAACP Links Tea Party to Racist, Fascist Groups

The NAACP has released a 94 page report detailing the cozy relationship that exists between various branches of the Tea Party movement and white supremacist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant groups.  The study examines six "core" Tea Party organizations: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and the Tea Party Express.   From AlterNet:

Citing one of the links between the movement and extremists, the report says Dale Robertson, the chairman of the 1776 Tea Party, invited Martin "Red" Beckman to be a guest on the Tea Party Radio hour that he co-hosts. Beckman, who was introduced as a "great guy" and "an authority on the Constitution" has been publishing anti-Semitic writings for over twenty years.

Moreover, the report claims that Robertson endorsed a pastor who believes that Jews are a "satanic force" and that "people of color" are less than fully human."

...The report also details the relationship between the white supremacist group the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Tea Party movement.

"The Council of Conservative Citizens promotes the idea that the United States is or should be a white Christian nation; and that Barack Obama and black people generally oppress white people," page 60 of the report describes.

...Anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia also permeate the ranks of the Tea Party, says the report.

"We are at a point of having to take a stand against all Muslims," the ResistNet Tea Party website claimed. "There is no good or bad Muslim. There is [sic] only Muslims and they are embedded in our government, military and other offices...What more must we wait for to take back this country of ours."

My take?  This is almost inevitable when the political centre drifts too far right and society's keel, its moderator, the middle class is eliminated as an effective force.   The middle class is the driving force of genuine progressivism.  Knock it out and you can feed what remains a rich diet of frustration, fear and anger and - voila! - the Tea Party.

America's Disgusting Descent into Its Darkest Past

It's happening again. America's radical right is on a racist rampage that could, unless it is checked forcefully and rapidly by their own side, usher in a return to the vilest side of America of the past.

Color of Change is sounding the warning about Tea Party racism reaching into the top echelons of the movement:

"...yesterday, one of the Tea Party's biggest leaders proved the NAACP's point. Mark Williams, the public face of the Tea Party Express, attacked the NAACP as a "racist" organization, and said "they make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever."3,4 He went on to write a blog post implying that Black people don't like to work or think for themselves, that we depend on welfare, and that we want to benefit from White people's tax dollars so we can have a widescreen TV in every room.5 Sadly, we're not exaggerating.

If Tea Party leaders want to have any credibility on race, they need to start by kicking Mark Williams out of their movement. If they refuse, it will be clearer than ever that Tea Party leaders accept and rely on racism as an integral part of their approach to politics.

You can help us take the first step. Please join us in challenging Tea Party leaders to reject Williams' statements and remove him from his position at the Tea Party Express. And please ask your friends and family to do the same. It takes just a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/teaparty/?id=1846-947344

The NAACP was absolutely right in calling out the tea party, and we applaud them for doing so. The NAACP has a history of combating racism and seeking a more just country for all Americans, and their action was a demonstration of that commitment.

While some of us want to brush the Tea Party off as fringe, the reality is that they are attempting to build political power, and it's important that they not embrace the kind of racism that Mark Williams represents. Of course, if they choose to do so, then it's important to make clear to all Americans that they are a home for racism and bigotry.

The racism we've seen within the Tea Party movement is dangerous — it's the promotion of a hateful agenda under the guise of political empowerment. Forcing the hand of Tea Party leaders is important if we want to prevent bigotry and hate from driving mainstream political conversations, and worse, public policy."

What begins in America oozes north soon enough and with Harper's fundamentalist radical rightwing there'll be plenty of Tea Party sympathizers. There's no room in my Canada, none at all, for this sort of scum.

And our increasingly idiotic cousins south of the line seem startled at the return of the Black Panthers.