A RI Yankee's Tea Party

Obviously, I am an unabashedly liberal conservative in the strict-constructionist camp of non-revisionist history, geography and baseball hagiography. Certain things mystify me; others just bewilder me. Really, I just do not understand. As Elvis Costello sings, “I used to be disgusted, now I’m just amused.”

Well-off, educated, employed, older mainly European-Americans (so-called white folks) are the vast majority of Tea Party members and call themselves “Patriots.” The “system” has worked for them: they are well off, educated and employed or retired! They want to take “their” country back… from themselves? If the Tea Partiers that I see on TV or those who watch Fox (not really the) News, or Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, were aboriginal native Amerindians I would say “Go For It!” No, the Tea Party members are the actual Caucasian winners; so they want what? A bigger, better victory? A Marcus Garvey solution? A return to ante-bellum times?

The governors of Virginia (Bob McDonald) and Mississippi (Haley Barbour) are celebrating the memories of Confederate veterans. Virginia and Mississippi are part of the southern USA, an area that currently claims to be more American and patriotic than the east coast, west coast or the (Yankee) north. The Civil War (or The War Between the States, in the southern idiom) was not about slavery or rebellion against the greater United States, it was about “states rights.” In a narrow way I agree: a state’s right to allow slavery within its borders. Slavery is/was wrong, therefore the Confederacy was wrong to insist upon slavery as a state’s right and was wrong to rebel against the federal government. The Civil War was a treasonous, terrorist act against the United States. Treasonous, terrorist acts against the United States are sometimes punished with execution (see Eddie Slovik, Sacco & Vanzetti, and Timothy McVeigh, amongst others). The treasonous Confederate rebels were compassionately pardoned (for the most part) and went on to found such stalwart American patriotic institutions as the Ku Klux Klan, the spiritual antecedent to many of today’s militias. They believe that the second amendment is gospel but want to repeal the fourteenth amendment. They believe that the founding fathers were perfect, a group that thought that slaves were worth only 3/5 of a human being for representation purposes, but not human for moral purposes. WTF, indeed.

Many of these American Patriots that are members of the Tea Party believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It should make no difference what folly a person believes in, so long as that person is performing their duties. Many of the same folks believe that Obama was born in Kenya and is, thus, not an American citizen. Many of the same folks equate Obama with Adolph Hitler, while calling Obama a Marxist. (OK, they are not that well educated, confusing a Marxist and/or a Nazi with a centrist Democrat. If you listen to Hannity and Beck religiously enough, anything is possible.) This as they shout out to Obama to “keep the government hands off my Medicare!” Many of these folks are screaming about their taxes, without realizing that they are paying less in taxes than they did under their fiscal god Ronald Reagan and his illegitimate acolyte George W. Bush. Hey, Ayn Rand used Medicare and collected social security.

The common thread here, to me, seems to be racism; similar to the racism that dominated baseball and caused the game to be restricted between the careers of Moses Fleetwood Walker and Jackie Robinson. How could a black man play baseball with a white man? How could a black person be president over white people?

And now, Sarah Palin has a WTF moment (she said it, not me) and gets it all wrong about sputnik; Michelle Bachman just gets it all wrong and misinterprets her own chart. I rather like this Tea Party stuff. Reminds me of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800’s.

Damn, that rant felt good!

The Ballad of John and Joe The Plumber (or was it Joe Six-Pack?)

The Obama campaign, the media and soft-in-the-head lefties such as me should lay-off John McCain on this one. (That one?) So Joe isn't really a plumber. So he isn't really buying the company he works for. So the company isn't for sale. So Joe made $40 some odd thousand last year. So the company didn't last year and won't this year make $250,000. So what?

Joe the Plumber and Joe Six-Pack have taken it on the chin and in the gut for so long that they are delusional about the reasons for their pain. They have seen hard work, blood, sweat and tears fail them as they get jerked around by credit card companies, mortgage brokers, banks, brokers, international corporations, big oil, the Supreme Court, and on and on ad nauseum. They must blame someone. For we white guys, the culprit is not the face in the mirror of self-delusion, it's not the broken promises of trickle-down economics, it's not what we refuse to acknowledge that is true (that we have been sucker-punched time and again by the GOP, their corporate allies and the sell-out by Bill Clinton). No, we blame Americans with different skin color, different names, different religions, different social experiences. We blame them for all the ills that the real culprits have brought upon us. We'd rather believe the lie that Barack Obama is an Arab terrorist who consorted with the Weather Underground than accept the fact that Todd Palin did consort with an anti-American fringe group and that Sarah Palin addressed the same group with the words "...keep up the good work and God bless you..."

Why? We love being ignorant of the facts because this excuses our belief in the phantasmagorical? We'd rather believe a talking snake or a burning bush than recorded data?

Just today I heard an interview with former MA Governor Jane Swift, a Republican, who is an education advisor to the McNasty campaign. Pell Grants will not be funded in the austerity economics program of a John McCain administration. No school for you unless you agree to borrow money from John's banker friends (Keating 5?). It costs too much. Well John, so does ignorance. Being ignorant is part and parcel of why we stupidly attacked Iraq. Not being trained to think for ourselves is part and parcel as to why we believe the lunatic ravings of Pat Robertson, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

No, let's shout for sanity, thoughtfulness, fair play, education, the Bill of Rights (all of them, not just #2), justice.

And by the way...what the hell is wrong with being an Arab? Or anyone named Joe?

My Fellow Prisoners...That One...Obama is a Liar...Not you, Tom

More lies, bone-headed ideas and obfuscations from the McCain campaign (in addition to the above):

1. He sang “Bomb, Bomb Iran” at a fundraiser, not as a joke with another veteran.
2. He had his wife Cindy attack Obama for voting against funding for troops in Iraq. What Cindy did not say was that McCain also voted against funding for the troops.
3. McCain missed more votes on veteran affairs (6 of 9 votes) than Senators Tim Johnson (in a coma most of the year) and Ted Kennedy (brain tumor). He skipped voting on the new GI Bill for a San Diego fundraiser. His veterans voting record this session has been rated a D, while Obama and Biden each rated a B. Dennis Kucinich had a higher rating than McCain.
4. McCain shares the connection between Obama and Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers. The Annenberg family that sponsored the forum on which both Obama and Avery served in Chicago is supporting McCain for president. How many degrees of separation are there here between Obama and McNasty?
5. McCain surrogates in FL yesterday raised the Islamic fear factor by having a law officer refer to Obama as Barack Hussein Obama. I know that this is his name, but when a white cop in FL is talking about a black man, you just know what he is really saying. A PA McCain surrogate (head of the GOP in that state) today also used Obama’s middle name. This obviously comes from the same Swift Boat team that slurred McCain in SC in 2000, Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004.
6. McCain surrogates on the Hannity-Colmes FOX News show featured a right wing McCain supporter who is a known anti-Semite. And they expect us to believe this guy?
7. McCain wants the Fed to buy foreclosed mortgages from the failed/failing banks at the full price of the mortgages but then sell them at market prices. Not only is this incredibly stupid, but also an incredible socialist windfall for our failed capitalist system. Strange that a free-market, cut taxes, deregulation “maverick” is promoting socialism for his bank(rupt)ing cronies. The moral of this story, the hero of the Keating 5 fiasco wants to reward his banking buddies for being stupid and place the burden on the middle class. Thank you, Senator McNasty, for driving that red-hot poker into our posterior orifices.
8. McCain is in trouble with rock bands “Heart” and “The Foo Fighters” for inappropriately using their songs in his campaign. Does his campaign know anything about respecting the rights of intellectual property?