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Sunday, October 31, 2010

"The Tea Party Isn't A Mirage"

Wow, and I thought I was feeling skittish and grumpy!

What BooMan said:
Jon Stewart and Frank Rich both spent the weekend before the midterms telling us that the Tea Party is really not reality. They tell us it is a mirage created with funhouse mirrors and Koch Brothers' money… The Tea Party isn't a mirage. It isn't something that the Trent Lotts of the world can control. If it were, Mike Castle and Charlie Crist would be cruising to election to the U.S. Senate. When you put people in government, particularly when you put them into government with six-year terms, you change that government. Whatever heat-fever of passion put them in there doesn't break as suddenly as it arose. It stays on... It eats away at the flesh of its host... We won't be politely waving each other through as we all go about making the little compromises we make every day just to get to work. Go out and vote. Vote because Stewart's happy vision may be inspiring but it ain't happening... [O]ther people told you everything would be okay if you just turn off cable news. It won't be okay. It won't be anything remotely resembling okay.

Of course what the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove and Fox News are doing is gaming a system that is only notionally representative into even more of a corporate-militarist plutocracy than it already was, which is not to deny that "Tea Party" views only represent a marginal minority of actual Americans in fact and hence are a mirage in the way the "Silent Majority" and the "Moral Majority" and the "Values Voters" were also mirages, but is indeed to deny that the "Tea Party" is a mirage if we think of mirages as too insubstantial to have pernicious impacts on the actual lives of a significant majority of Americans and precarious planet-wide targets of our bombs and neoliberal policies and catastrophic climate change. I think terrible things are going to happen over the next years if Republicans take over Congress, and I agree with BooMan that this is not at all okay, even if I do not mean by this that I think it is the End Times in the sense Stewart was lampooning either.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> "Tea Party" views only represent a marginal minority
> of actual Americans in fact and hence are a mirage in
> the way the "Silent Majority" and the "Moral Majority"
> and the "Values Voters" were also mirages. . .

Real grievances, real answers?

Noam Chomsky Compares Right-Wing Media to Nazi Germany
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MHEuudJ-o0