Tempest in a Teapot? … or another Teapot dome?

March 25, 2010 in Racism, Regressives, Republicans, Tea Party

by JC

wingnuts

This week is seeing an escalation of right-wing craziness egged on by republicans. I don’t hardly need to provide any links, but anyone who was watching the health care bill vote saw republican representatives on the balcony outside the chamber cheering on the tea baggers as they protested outside Congress. The same protestors who were throwing racial and homophobic slurs at Congresspersons as they marched up the steps.

We’ve got bloggers posting the wrong address for a Congressman, and tea baggers severing gas lines. Bullets. Bricks. An upcoming April 19th open carry rally in DC on the anniversary of Tim McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah building, the burning of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian complex and the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. Sarah Palin using gunsights on the districts of Congressional districts she’s targeting. Michael Steele referencing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fall election as a “firing line.” Former Congressman Dick Army’s funding of the apparatus that is stirring up all this hate. Former House Speaker Newt Gingritch blaming Democrats for all the violence because of their policies and actions–even though they are duly elected and ran legislation through a regular process. The ex-Vice President’s daughter fomenting McCarthyism over public defenders as she gears up a possible run for the Presidency.

This list goes on and on. It is what is passing for politics in the GOP these days, as the organization teeters from spectacle to spectacle. Birthers. Deathers. Deniers. Haters. At some point, though, this ignorance and fomenting of anger will have consequences. People will get shot, offices burned and bombed, and chaos will reign.

Maybe this is really the future the GOP wishes on this country. A future where liberty equates anarchy. Freedom is synonymous with bigotry. Where compassionate conservatism is reserved for the ~~worthy~~, wealthy. It is a slash and burn mentality that is taking hold, one where the GOP “Party of No” wishes this country to fail, so they can ride in–white knight in shining armor–to save the day.

I’ve heard references to how this is beginning to parallel the anti-war movement sentiments of the 60′s, in that it is painting a picture of a political party that will endure in people’s minds for generations. Heck, we’ve got commenters here who still hate on hippies. I can see it in 2040, my grandkids will be saying: look grandpa, another dirty teabagger with his hate signs!

I’ve only pointed to the tip of the iceberg here. What think all of you?

34 Replies

Steve Dogiakos

March 25, 2010 at 1:05 pm

I think I’ve heard of the same threats at rightwing activists in the past couple of days, and it’s fueled by left wing anti-conservative sentiment like yours.

Reply
- JC
  
  March 25, 2010 at 1:40 pm
  
  What we’ve seen this week are not threats. Violence is occurring. It is no longer isolated incidents. It is a trend egged on by the GOP.
  
  And it is on a level far greater than any left-wing extremism. And the Democratic party has distanced themselves from their radical left wing, instead of using them to foment anger and violence. It is domestic terrorism, plain and simple: threats of violence to achieve political goals. No better than bin-Ladenism.
  
  And because you “think [you've] heard the same threats” that makes it ok for the right wing and tea baggers to do this?
  
  Thanks for making my point, Steve.
  
  RWCs will stoop to any rationalization to attempt to legitimize their behavior.
  
  Reply
- Wulfgar
  
  March 25, 2010 at 2:26 pm
  
  Steve, other than Eric Cantor’s as yet unsubstantiated allegations of having his office ‘shot at’, do care to enlighten us all about the Democratic politician using gun sight targeting in campaign advertising? Any bricks through windows at GOP headquarters? How many campaign fundraising ads screaming “deliver a bomb” to John Boehner? Perhaps a cartoon likening John McCain to gang-rapist? Any of those? You said it was the “same threats”, so certainly you can show something, right? It’s not like I think you’re full-of-it or anything …
  
  Oh wait, it’s exactly that. I think you’ve been issued your double-speak talking points, and you’re going to stick to them, no matter how ridiculous they are, or foolish you look for spouting them. Right, this is all the liberals fault …
  
  Reply
  - Big Swede
    
    March 25, 2010 at 7:38 pm
    
    Here’s one, Wolf.
    
    http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/89065-gop-lawmaker-now-reports-threat-over-healthcare-stance
    
    Reply
- Kevin
  
  March 25, 2010 at 9:59 pm
  
  Yep, you’ve been parroting your GOP talking points. You get a cookie. Good job Steve Dogiakos.
  
  Reply
problembear

March 25, 2010 at 1:36 pm

are you saying we are not entitled to our sentiments here stevie?
or are you just playing some three dimensional chess here?

left wing people don’t carry firearms and shout n*****
at our duly elected president.

Reply
Lizard

March 25, 2010 at 4:44 pm

this is what i was afraid of when i noted last spring how glenn beck was stealing conspiracy angles and weaving them into his ridiculous schtick.

the right-wing fringe is much more dangerous than the extreme left, and having a gun-toting rally on the day 200+ people were murdered, including children, is beyond incendiary.

and the fact these same assholes were gleefully patriotic for eighty years of bush dumbfounds me. it’s not like obama is cutting back on killing brown people on the other side of the world, or otherwise impeding the ability of business as usual to move recklessly forward (toward the cliff)

no, instead it’s the healthcare uber-compromise to that insurance industry (which they are totally incapable of understanding) getting them ready civil war 2.0.

Reply
- Lizard
  
  March 25, 2010 at 4:46 pm
  
  whoops, should be just “eight.” it only felt like eighty.
  
  Reply
problembear

March 25, 2010 at 5:13 pm

teabaggers are just characters in a punch and judy show to keep us diverted while the nobles ransack what’s left of the treasury…and our wallets as gas prices rise.

the republican senate is using this diversion to hide while they attempt to hold up legislative progress. why? to delay or stop the next bill due up- regulation of our banking system.

this whole charade has big bank’s fingerprints all over it.

Reply
Jim

March 25, 2010 at 5:28 pm

Just found some good news:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/3/25/850844/-Schweitzers-Say-Uncle-Tour-to-Expose-GOP-Stimulus-Hypocrisy

Reply
problembear

March 25, 2010 at 5:32 pm

by the way, while we slug and fist fight over a hopelessly watered down health care bill that was written by the health insurers that it purports to regulate, small banks are folding accross the country at accelerating rates as junk mortgages are taking dozens of them down per week….

but only small banks are at risk?

as this toxic asset sludge regurgitates it’s way up the food chain, how much more is at stake for big banking.

no one is talking about this.

Reply
Pronghorn

March 25, 2010 at 5:41 pm

Best to wait awhile after eating before you view this–you might get the bends or spew or something.

Reply
Big Swede

March 25, 2010 at 8:00 pm

Ok guys I want you to listen very carefully for racial and homophobic slurs as the congressmen approached the steps.

Skip to 1.20 when they arrive.

And the spitting incident was when the guy with cupped hands spayed it when he sayed it. Questioned and released.

Keep trying to make something stick.

Reply
- problembear
  
  March 25, 2010 at 8:16 pm
  
  More diversion swede?
  
  Not interested.
  
  Reply
  - Big Swede
    
    March 26, 2010 at 6:37 am
    
    Diversion?
    
    How ’bout the 2nd and 3rd sentences of the post?
    
    ” I don’t hardly need to provide any links, but anyone who was watching the health care bill vote saw republican representatives on the balcony outside the chamber cheering on the tea baggers as they protested outside Congress. The same protestors who were throwing racial and homophobic slurs at Congresspersons as they marched up the steps”
    
    She didn’t want to post because there’s no proof.
    
    Reply
    - JC
      
      March 28, 2010 at 1:37 am
      
      So if it’s not on YouTube, it didn’t happen?
      
      Reply
      - Big Swede
        
        March 28, 2010 at 5:28 pm
        
        Unless we’re talking about some other stairs.
        
        Reply
Lizard

March 25, 2010 at 9:53 pm

i ran across a personal reflection from poet ron silliman about health care and teabaggers which i found very compelling.

here’s a big chunk of it:

In the 1970s, when I worked as a lobbyist for a coaltion of prison movement organizations in Sacramento, I had little difficulty in working with Republican members of the legislature. In fact, when we introduced legislation to end the draconian indeterminate sentence, our sponsor was State Senator John Nejedly of Walnut Creek, the former district attorney of the county & a career lawman whose nickname was “Iron John” (that was pre-Robert Bly). Nejedly would have told you that he was a Goldwater Republican, which is to say that he understood himself to be a man of the right. But he also believed that laws should mean what they do, and do what they say. He understood instinctively why sentencing everybody to either six-months to fifty years or one year to life fundamentally undercut not just the lives of prisoners, but the ability of the prison system to operate fairly. And he understood that fairness, both in practice & perception, were essential to the criminal justice system. He was a smart guy with a ready wit – he used to wear a Mickey Mouse watch just to remind people that the indeterminate sentencing system was, in his words, “Mickey Mouse time.”

All of his staffers also happened to be Democrats. In fact, in the early 1970s, this was true for almost all Republican legislators in Sacramento. There was an assumption – with good cause – that any young person fresh out of college who was a Republican wasn’t smart enough to work for a Republican legislator. (There was a corollary to the effect that a “serious Republican” didn’t become one until they were in their 30s or even 40s.) The notable exception to this was another state senator, H.L. Richardson. Richardson made no bones about the fact that he was close to the John Birch Society. He also made no bones about the fact that he was the one state legislator who routinely carried a pistol, as did his chief aide-de-camp, an ex-cop.

In the 1970s, John Nejedly was a mainstream conservative, while everybody around Sacramento used to laugh at & about Richardson, especially members of his own party. I don’t believe that the same would be true today. And the person who set that transformation in motion, more than anyone, was someone to whom Nejedly once introduced me, then-governor Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan, both in his runs for the White House & in his two terms as president (tho not, it is worth noting, his terms or campaigns as governor), who first demonized government. Everyone by now knows his joke that the “9 scariest words” are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” and his motto that government is the problem.

It’s worth considering what that means and why that has become the wedge issue in the divide between the two Americas. What is government but ourselves? It’s the institutionalization of our collective being in order to accomplish some things we agree need to be done. Stop signs for example. Police for another. Schools for a third. Government may not work well, it may be bloated, sclerotic, bureaucratic. But it is ourselves. We have nobody else to blame. When Ronald Reagan argued that government is the problem, what he meant was that we are our own problem. His slogan was a direct assault on the fundamental principle of democracy: collective, communal action.

Ronald Reagan did not invent the anti-tax movement whose slogans he co-opted as his own. But he certainly recognized its potency & made great use of its potential. And he appears to have understood that the fundamental premise of the tax revolt, the right’s great perception about the 1960s that still drives that movement to this day, is that we are not ourselves. Government isn’t us, it’s not even about us, it’s about Them.

They are the people who have “invaded” “us.” The hippie commie queers, the blacks who “snuck in” on slave ships, Africans, Asians & Latin Americans who took Emma Lazarus at her word. Ultimately, I think that this is what all this lack of comity is about – one group of Americans (largely tho not entirely white males) look in the mirror & what they see does not look like America, although they may pretend that it does. That other America of difference & diversity has in their view wrested control of the government. Which of course is why everything government does has, for them, become illegitimate. (Tho they would like government, such as the courts, to do whatever it can to preserve their dying stranglehold on power.)

Time will, of course, resolve this precisely because these demographics are headed for change. If the tea-party Mad Hatters think that the socious today looks bizarrely non-white, non-male & non-straight, wait till they look at it circa 2020 or 2050. But between now & then, we can anticipate that this same cluster of conservative – or at least reactionary – values will only get more upset, more hyperbolic, more dislodged from reality, more extreme, and definitely more dangerous. The whole “Obama birth-deniers,” for example, aren’t complaining nearly so much about where the president was or was not born as they are expressing their incomprehension that a man with an African father & who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia could become president. That is the unimaginable & everything else just flows from that.

All of which is to say that we should not anticipate that the political discourse in this country is going to improve anytime soon. If the right is acting panicky, it’s because they’ve been spooked: they can taste the day when they no longer control the institutions in this society, not just on a vote or two, not just a few elections. So the right’s program can be characterized as a longterm strategy of postponement. And the real question is just how far the right will go to preserve whatever shards of privilege remain. The fact that they own the majority of weapons in this country should not be lost on anyone. 150 years ago, we saw an earlier group of Americans go to war to try to hold onto what had already become untenable & obsolete. Don’t think that couldn’t happen twice.

Reply
Lizard

March 25, 2010 at 9:56 pm

from poet ron silliman

In the 1970s, when I worked as a lobbyist for a coaltion of prison movement organizations in Sacramento, I had little difficulty in working with Republican members of the legislature. In fact, when we introduced legislation to end the draconian indeterminate sentence, our sponsor was State Senator John Nejedly of Walnut Creek, the former district attorney of the county & a career lawman whose nickname was “Iron John” (that was pre-Robert Bly). Nejedly would have told you that he was a Goldwater Republican, which is to say that he understood himself to be a man of the right. But he also believed that laws should mean what they do, and do what they say. He understood instinctively why sentencing everybody to either six-months to fifty years or one year to life fundamentally undercut not just the lives of prisoners, but the ability of the prison system to operate fairly. And he understood that fairness, both in practice & perception, were essential to the criminal justice system. He was a smart guy with a ready wit – he used to wear a Mickey Mouse watch just to remind people that the indeterminate sentencing system was, in his words, “Mickey Mouse time.”

All of his staffers also happened to be Democrats. In fact, in the early 1970s, this was true for almost all Republican legislators in Sacramento. There was an assumption – with good cause – that any young person fresh out of college who was a Republican wasn’t smart enough to work for a Republican legislator. (There was a corollary to the effect that a “serious Republican” didn’t become one until they were in their 30s or even 40s.) The notable exception to this was another state senator, H.L. Richardson. Richardson made no bones about the fact that he was close to the John Birch Society. He also made no bones about the fact that he was the one state legislator who routinely carried a pistol, as did his chief aide-de-camp, an ex-cop.

In the 1970s, John Nejedly was a mainstream conservative, while everybody around Sacramento used to laugh at & about Richardson, especially members of his own party. I don’t believe that the same would be true today. And the person who set that transformation in motion, more than anyone, was someone to whom Nejedly once introduced me, then-governor Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan, both in his runs for the White House & in his two terms as president (tho not, it is worth noting, his terms or campaigns as governor), who first demonized government. Everyone by now knows his joke that the “9 scariest words” are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” and his motto that government is the problem.

It’s worth considering what that means and why that has become the wedge issue in the divide between the two Americas. What is government but ourselves? It’s the institutionalization of our collective being in order to accomplish some things we agree need to be done. Stop signs for example. Police for another. Schools for a third. Government may not work well, it may be bloated, sclerotic, bureaucratic. But it is ourselves. We have nobody else to blame. When Ronald Reagan argued that government is the problem, what he meant was that we are our own problem. His slogan was a direct assault on the fundamental principle of democracy: collective, communal action.

Ronald Reagan did not invent the anti-tax movement whose slogans he co-opted as his own. But he certainly recognized its potency & made great use of its potential. And he appears to have understood that the fundamental premise of the tax revolt, the right’s great perception about the 1960s that still drives that movement to this day, is that we are not ourselves. Government isn’t us, it’s not even about us, it’s about Them.

They are the people who have “invaded” “us.” The hippie commie queers, the blacks who “snuck in” on slave ships, Africans, Asians & Latin Americans who took Emma Lazarus at her word. Ultimately, I think that this is what all this lack of comity is about – one group of Americans (largely tho not entirely white males) look in the mirror & what they see does not look like America, although they may pretend that it does. That other America of difference & diversity has in their view wrested control of the government. Which of course is why everything government does has, for them, become illegitimate. (Tho they would like government, such as the courts, to do whatever it can to preserve their dying stranglehold on power.)

Time will, of course, resolve this precisely because these demographics are headed for change. If the tea-party Mad Hatters think that the socious today looks bizarrely non-white, non-male & non-straight, wait till they look at it circa 2020 or 2050. But between now & then, we can anticipate that this same cluster of conservative – or at least reactionary – values will only get more upset, more hyperbolic, more dislodged from reality, more extreme, and definitely more dangerous. The whole “Obama birth-deniers,” for example, aren’t complaining nearly so much about where the president was or was not born as they are expressing their incomprehension that a man with an African father & who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia could become president. That is the unimaginable & everything else just flows from that.

All of which is to say that we should not anticipate that the political discourse in this country is going to improve anytime soon. If the right is acting panicky, it’s because they’ve been spooked: they can taste the day when they no longer control the institutions in this society, not just on a vote or two, not just a few elections. So the right’s program can be characterized as a longterm strategy of postponement. And the real question is just how far the right will go to preserve whatever shards of privilege remain. The fact that they own the majority of weapons in this country should not be lost on anyone. 150 years ago, we saw an earlier group of Americans go to war to try to hold onto what had already become untenable & obsolete. Don’t think that couldn’t happen twice.

Reply
Big Swede

March 26, 2010 at 7:46 am

And let’s compare and contrast.

This is the way Dems protest.

http://www.black-rose.com/seattle-wto.html

Make sure you scroll about a third of the way down to see the “Don’t Tread on Me’ Banner” on the Pike Plaza.

Reply
- problembear
  
  March 26, 2010 at 7:55 am
  
  BS- as the teabaggers sink slowly into political oblivion, it is only expected that the propaganda gets more and more desperate….
  
  Pass on your pathetic links.
  
  Reply
  - Big Swede
    
    March 26, 2010 at 8:08 am
    
    I’m thinking an ostrich would be a better avatar for you, pb.
    
    Reply
problembear

March 26, 2010 at 8:40 am

just focused on who the real culprit is BS. this sideshow between tea-baggers and the left doesn’t interest me much.

i am more interested in what big money banks, the saudi’s and in the looming toxic asset mess. abramoff’s spin-off astroturf talking points are just a smokescreen to keep us busy while they plunder what is left of u.s.

Reply
- Big Swede
  
  March 26, 2010 at 8:48 am
  
  The post on finacial matters was two days ago.
  
  Reply
problembear

March 26, 2010 at 8:57 am

keeping everything seperate and compartmentalized is another way for the aristocrats to keep you under their thumb BS. bears think for ourselves. we don’t get any talking points from anyone.

i will comment where and when i deem appropriate.

you go kneel before your masters, BS and i will enjoy my freedom.

Reply
D Jones

March 26, 2010 at 10:39 am

It is difficult to shame really ignorant people but this would work. Have all progressives quit and work for the most extreme right winger. Let the Tea party win a majority in 2010 and attempt to actually govern. It would be a painful month or at most two but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Reply
ghost killer

March 27, 2010 at 10:29 pm

So I guess it’s ok now to call someone a n(($$(#@ and spit on them if they make you mad.

Reply
ghost killer

March 27, 2010 at 10:49 pm

…and then cut a gas line and boehner can say “he’ll be a dead man if he votes for this” and DeMint the senator from the slave-breaking capitol of the world can say “this will break Obama” / This is so sad and depraved

Reply
Pogo Possum

March 28, 2010 at 11:51 pm

For all those living in glass houses, you might like to take a trip down memory lane.

Death Threats Against Bush at Protests
(Since I can’t figure out how to post pictures on this site, you will have to click on the link to see the pictures of your fellow Democrats, Progressives, Leftists etc. behavior in previous years. I have included just a few captions off the protest signs to give you the general idea)

http://www.binscorner.com/pages/d/death-threats-against-bush-at-protests-i.html

A protester with a sign saying “Kill Bush” and advocating that the White House be bombed, at the March 18, 2007 anti-war rally in San Francisco.

A protester with a sign saying “Kill Bush” and advocating that the White House be bombed, at the March 18, 2007 anti-war rally in San Francisco.

Two different pictures of the same sign saying “Bush — the only dope worth shooting,” at the March 15, 2008 anti-war rally in Los Angeles.

A protester with a sign showing Bush being beheaded.

Bush being beheaded by a guillotine, at an Obama campaign rally, Denver, October 26, 2008.

An effigy of Bush being killed, at the April 10, 2004 anti-war rally in San Francisco.

**********

Here is a recap of an anti-Bush rally in Portland. Apparently even gay softball players and grandfathers in wheel chairs aren’t safe when Progressives get angry.

Analysis: Press Largely Ignored Incendiary Rhetoric at Bush Protest
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/12/analysis-press-largely-ignored-incendiary-rhetoric-bush-protest/

“. . . When Bush visited Portland, Ore., for a fundraiser, protesters stalked his motorcade, assailed his limousine and stoned a car containing his advisers. Chanting “Bush is a terrorist!”, the demonstrators bullied passers-by, including gay softball players and a wheelchair-bound grandfather with multiple sclerosis.
“. . . . One protester even brandished a sign that seemed to advocate Bush’s assassination. The man held a large photo of Bush that had been doctored to show a gun barrel pressed against his temple.

**********
And let’s not forget John Kerry’s little joke about personally killing the President on Bill Maher’s show:

(Maher asks Kerry what he got his wife for her birthday)
kerry: I did not get her Ketchup
*laughs*
maher: … you could have gone to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.
*laughs*
kerry: I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.
*laughs*

Reply
- JC
  
  March 29, 2010 at 12:11 am
  
  And this makes everything we are seeing ok? You’re good with racism, homophobia and mass movements to intimidate the government with force?
  
  Reply
Pogo Possum

March 29, 2010 at 12:35 am

No……I am saying you are the one who is good with mass movements to intimidate the government with force as long as it is your movement doing the forcing.

One or two people out of thousands attending a Tea Party yell an ignorant stupid statement and liberals brand the entire gathering a mob of violent racists. Thousands of people calling for the death of a President, roughing up innocent bystanders, terrorizing people and destroying property (e.g. ‘Battle of Seattle’ )to oppose Bush or the WTO and liberals call it a demonstration of the people’s will.

Reply
- JC
  
  March 29, 2010 at 1:13 am
  
  “you are the one who is good with mass movements to intimidate the government ”
  
  And what evidence do you have that I am good with that?
  
  And the WTO protesters were not operating out of bigotry or homophobia. You look at any tea bagger rally, and it is full of signs portraying such. You want to identify with that sort of sentiment, that is your prerogative. But the vast majority of Americans see it just as marginal, or moreso, than any left protests that have occurred in the past.
  
  Tea baggers damage the conservative movement by resorting to issues that have nothing to do with conservatism: hatred bigotry and homophobia. That is unless you accept those traits as part of the movement, which increasingly is what mainstream America is seeing.
  
  Reply
Pogo Possum

March 29, 2010 at 12:52 am

Before I forget…….Lizard criticizing anyone for “conspiracy angles” is hillarious considering Lizard is one of the biggest conspiracy believer on this blog and believes the CIA and Mossad brought down the World Trade Center and the Diabold machines were rigged:

http://4and20blackbirds.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/looney-tunes/

“. . . oh, and that precious real estate in manhattan where the towers once stood actually treated like a crime scene and vigorously investigated.” Lizard

“. . . . the intelligence world is a dark, interrelated world with some surprising overlap. you would have to be pretty naive to think the attacks were a complete surprise to the CIA/ISI/Mossad factions. . . . ” Lizard

Reply
- Lizard
  
  March 29, 2010 at 6:20 am
  
  yep, that’s me. crazy conspiracy theorist. what’s your point, pogo?
  
  maybe instead of ridiculing me, you should check out that paul craig roberts’ good bye piece i linked to in the other thread, if you think only tinfoil hatters don’t buy the conspiracy theory sold to us by the government.
  
  roberts mentions a peer-reviewed scientific journal that published finding traces of nano-thermite in debris from ground zero, and goes on to discuss how just reporting the findings of this scientific article is virtually banned across the entire landscape of corporate media.
  
  Reply

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