10 fictitious Tea Party beliefs
By John Amato and David Neiwert
We’ll admit up-front that the title of our forthcoming book,“Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” indulges in some rhetorical imprecision: conservatives in the United States are of course not really insane in any clinical or legal sense, and we are not suggesting they undergo sanity hearings to determine if their rights should be suspended. We mean “insane” in the common-sense meaning of the word -- having taken leave of their senses.
What other word, after all, can properly describe the behavior of people who adamantly insist on believing things that are provably untrue? Einstein facetiously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Defiantly clinging to exploded fantasies and thoroughly debunked false “facts,” even when evidence of their falsity is planted directly in front of them, is a kind of insanity too.
The numbers of things that the American Right -- embodied in its wildly popular new “grassroots” Tea Party movement – believes but that are provably untrue is actually a pretty long list. But we’ve put together the Top 10, listed by importance in their increasingly Planet Bizarro-like worldview:
1. The birth-certificate conspiracy. Reality: Not even official birth certificates from Hawaii, newspaper clippings from 1961, and the testimony of state officials will convince the true-blue Tea Partiers. Which is why WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah lectured the National Tea Party Convention for an hour about the “truth” of the birth-certificate story.
2. Death panels. Reality: PolitiFact named Sarah Palin’s Facebook invention its “Lie of the Year,” and the belief was thoroughly exposed as a falsehood by every news network (even Fox). Yet Palin still insists that the panels exist somewhere in the health-care reform bill that was signed into law, its actual language notwithstanding.
3. Obama is a Muslim/Socialist/Fascist. Glenn Beck’s fantasy of the week -- one week Obama was a Socialist, the next he was a Communist, then a Fascist. Then it was on to Marxism and Maoism -- was avidly adopted by sign-bearing fans at Tea Party gatherings, who sometimes shared Beck’s confusion by just calling Obama All of the Above. Reality: Give us a break. Obama’s self-evident cautious centrism, embodied by his health-care reform package stripped of a public option, as well as his more recent embrace of a limited offshore drilling program, has infuriated liberals in his party -- but it hasn’t stopped Tea Partiers from denouncing the president as a radical anyway.
4. Obama is going to take away our guns. Well, the NRA managed to scare a whole lot of people into buying up every gun and piece of ammunition in sight the first year or so after Obama’s election. And at least five police officers died because the suspects they were arresting feared Obama was going to take away their guns. But Obama not only has adhered to his promise not to address gun-control issues, there hasn’t been even a breath of it from his administration. Which, of course, just makes the paranoids that much more paranoid: It’s proof that he’s really up to something.
5. Obama is raising our taxes. Reality: Obama lowered taxes for 95 percent of working Americans in his first year in office. But, you know, he’s a liberal Democrat – and for true-blue right-wing folks, that ALWAYS means a tax hike.
6. Fascism is a left-wing phenomenon. We can thank Jonah Goldberg -- with a big assist from Beck -- for the popularity of this one, even though Goldberg’s thesis has been demolished and angrily dismissed by academic historians. It’s especially come in handy for Tea Partiers with Obama-as-Hitler signs, who are not impressed by those pointy-headed professorial types anyway.
7. Global warming is a hoax. So Sean Hannity assures us, citing the Climategate brouhaha -- which was itself shown largely to be a hoax of its own. Meanwhile, the world’s ocean levels keep rising, and glaciers and the polar ice cap keep receding -- regardless of the endless words thrown up denying that they are.
8. Some 16,000 new IRS agents will enforce the new health care reform act by throwing you in jail. Reality: The IRS is actually only increasing its spending in the coming budget year as it normally would -- but some Republican operatives decided to figure out how many positions its increased budget would buy, and came up with 16,000, a figure that then became gospel on Newt Gingrich’s lips. According to the same mythmakers, this nonexistent new army of health care police was going to start throwing people in jail if they failed to buy health insurance -- though in fact, the only penalties contemplated for such failures are fines and taxes.
9. Two million people were at the 9/12 March on Washington. At the culmination of a monthlong promotion (highlighted by a national Tea Party Express bus tour) by Beck and Fox News, about 70,000 people gathered on the National Mall on September 12 to protest. Beck cited an erroneous early report that over a million had shown up. Later that grew to be two million, the figure now commonly cited by Tea Party leaders as evidence of their tremendous numerical force.
10. The Tea Parties are a non-partisan, broad grassroots movement. Sure, if by non-partisan you mean rabidly paleo-conservative, to the point of even dismissing Republicans, and by grassroots you mean fake populism organized and whipped up by the most popular cable-news network on television, with a heaping helping of corporate financing.
Tea Party folks and their defenders also want to believe that they’re just ordinary Americans who want to be serious about helping their country. But it’s pretty hard to fit that description when you embrace plain old nuttiness.
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Benjy Sarlin | September 2, 2011, 3:19PM 3711
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It seems Sarah Palin has worn out her welcome with Republicans. An astounding 71% of GOP voters say they don't want Palin to run for president, according to a new poll by FOX News, with 25% supporting a bid and 4% unsure.
The numbers are brutal for Palin, who was long regarded as a potential frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. Even among Tea Party-identifying Republicans she fares poorly: 68% say she shouldn't run versus only 28% who say she should. The numbers aren't that far off from the general electorate, 74% of whom don't want her to run versus 20% who do. Outside of Tea Partiers, more than 70% of every demographic broken out in the poll's crosstabs -- men, women, white voters, non-white voters, voters with college degrees, voters without college degrees -- are against a Palin run.
As TPM noted this week, there hasn't exactly been a clamor going up among Republicans for a Sarah Palin run while she's tested the waters in recent weeks. Maybe the disastrous box office returns for a movie celebrating her Alaska governorship were an early warning sign.
I applaud bringing these points to light here.
Kudos!
The sad fact of these matters is that the Tea baggers are the minority, Spathy.
They are the radicals.
By the way, we can read your posts just fine without the bold, Friend.
:)
What I find refreshing about this blog, is that no one is discouraged from posting their thoughts, unlike sebastianjer, who only wants to preach to the choir.
Food for thought, tea baggers.
Crazy Train: Sarah Palin Wants to Eliminate All Federal Corporate Income Tax
Pres Obama has no idea what he is doing..
and his cabinet has never held a real private sector job in all their lives combined..
neither has the President.. he is a community aggitator...
And was never equiped to hold the office he holds now, nor is his cabinet..
Without speach writers and telepromtors he is lost. He could never do a real "off the cuff" interview or press conference..
just saying...
...Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. [emphasis mine]
Yes, Spathy, we do... and with great confidence. And if you believe that's cause for people like you to be worried, well, you're right. You should be very worried. Things, ultimately, will not go your way. There are too many reasonable, caring people in this country, regardless of their political labels, to let that happen.
Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.
What few realize is that the secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.
The comrades were good to the Kochs. Today Koch Industries has grown into the second-largest private company in America. With an annual revenue of $100 billion, the company was just $6.3 billion shy of first place in 2008. Ownership is kept strictly in the family, with the company being split roughly between right-wing brothers Charles and David Koch, who are worth about $20 billion apiece and are infamous as the largest sponsors of right-wing causes. They bankroll scores of free-market and libertarian think tanks, institutes and advocacy groups. Reason magazine, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute are just a few of Koch-backed free-market operations. Greenpeace estimates that the Koch family shelled out $25 million from 2005 to 2008 funding the “climate denial machine,” which means they outspent Exxon Mobile three to one.I first learned about the Kochs in February 2009, when Mark Ames and I were looking into the strange origins of the then-nascent Tea Party movement. Our investigation led us again and again to a handful of right-wing organizations and think tanks directly tied to the Kochs. We were the first to connect the dots and debunk the Tea Party movement’s “grassroots” front, exposing it as billionaire-backed astroturf campaign run by free-market advocacy groups FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity, both of which are closely linked to the Koch brothers.But the Tea Party movement—and Koch family’s obscene wealth—go back more than half a century, all the way to grandpa Fredrick C. Koch, one of the founding members of the far-rightwing John Birch Society which was convinced that evil socialism was taking over America through unions, colored people, Jews, homosexuals, the Kennedys and even Dwight D. Eisenhower.
By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business
!
Paul's 2008 campaign manager, Kent Snyder, went through a strikingly similar experience to Blitzer's hypothetical one, dying of complications from viral pneumonia just two weeks after Paul ended his presidential bid. Snyder was uninsured, so family and friends were forced to raise funds to cover his $400,000 in medical bills. Their efforts included setting up a website soliciting contributions from Paul supporters.
A Republican aide told the publication, “Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?” Economists estimate that passage of the jobs act could create 1.9 million new jobs.
Spathy, I have no disagreements with what the Tea Party stands for, politically. My biggest concerns, with the Tea Party, is that they wish to walk into the control room and start flipping switches and adjusting dials without any real sense of what those switches and dials control or what interlocks may be in place. There is a process and this process, by design, moves at a much slower pace than the Tea Party leadership wishes to use. That is never the right approach unless a split second decision must be made. Even then, someone more familiar with the processes should be making those split second decisions.
Here is a site
Get the facts. Fight the smears. — AttackWatch.com,
here is their twitter feed
Attack Watch (AttackWatch) on Twitter
and here is the reaction
Twitter / Search - #attackwatch.
Apparently facts scare them senseless, LOL!
In reality facts only scare the manipulating liars and the senseless will believe whatever those manipulators tell them. One of the lies the senseless have been told is that they *are* the American Right.
At least Obama's campaign staff received health insurance. I worked for the company that provided said insurance.
Ron Paul's Campaign Manager died without any insurance.
Link
Sep 5, 2011 2:51 PM EDT
Mike Lofgren loyally served the GOP on Capitol Hill for 28 years. But no longer. Michael Tomasky on what the defection of a Republican staffer tells us about the state of the party.
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