Tea Party 'revolt' looks like a pity party to me

[Swede]

-snip-


There seemed about . . . and this is sensitive, so I'll tread carefully . . . 500 protesters, though the Tribune estimated 1,000 and the Sun-Times called it "thousands." So let's say 2,000, but if you want to make that 20,000, be my guest. I sure didn't count them, but took my place in the crowd.


But, to be honest, I found the whole thing harmless. Just because they've adopted the self-inflating rhetoric of revolt that so inflames every Saturday afternoon Young Communist League pep rally doesn't make them a genuine threat to anybody.

My feeling was, heck, if staging public gripe fests gives these people something to do, then great. It's outside. It involves handicrafts, the making of signs and costumes. It's like Scouting for irked middle-aged white people.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/2168642,CST-NWS-stein18.article

[Lex]

1. They are pretty pathetic looking with their misspelled signs and guts hanging

over their belt buckles. Pity party is right.

[niceypoo]

2. Mullets, misspelled signs, pot bellies, walrus mustaches

[KittyWampus]

3. Harmless hobbies don't lead to mob-mentality. Teabbaggers can decide to dial down

their rhetoric. But they seem to be more inclined to falsely blame supposed liberal-infiltrators.

[BlooInBloo]

4. A good time to recall one of the go-to Greenwald articles....

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/10/02/self_absorption

"The Right in this country -- meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years -- long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they're being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.).

The Right's rejection by the public can't possibly be due to anything they have done. It can only be due to some extremely vicious enemy that oppresses them uniquely and so very unfairly. For the moment, they're only losing because The Leftist Mainstream Media hates them and is deeply biased against them....

...

Go pick whatever right-wing journals or polemicists you want and (with some isolated exceptions) what you will find is this simultaneously self-loving and self-pitying worldview permeating virtually everything they say, think and believe. You can reduce most of their arguments, and all of their group-based drives, to a rudimentary logical proposition: "I am X, and X is both superior and treated with deep unfairness." It doesn't matter what "X" happens to be for any one of them -- conservative, male, Republican, Christian, Jewish, religious, white, Western, American -- that is the formula that expresses how they perceive the world and their role in it.

Petulance and self-pitying grievance is what fuels them. This endless need to self-victimize would be one thing if the groups to which they belonged were small minorities targeted by a hostile and more powerful majority. But the exact opposite is true. By and large, the groups to which they belong (and therefore see as oppressed and treated with unparalleled unfairness) are the most numerous and the most powerful in the country and always have been. Yet still -- nothing is their fault; they face hopeless obstacles imposed by Evil and Omnipotent Forces which hate them; "I am X, and X is both superior and treated with deep unfairness." "

[boobooday]

5. I heard Mark Levin say, "they're lucky the tea partiers weren't rioting"

And I had to laugh out loud, at the mental image of these elderly folk rioting in the streets.

[COLGATE4]

6. Are the Tea Partiers revolting?

Why, yes. Yes they are.

[zbdent]

7. I noticed something the other day (4/14) about reporting on the Akron Ohio "Tea Party" ...

they set up the "rally" pretty much in the central business district of Akron ... and reporting was going on about 5pm+ ... pretty much when people were leaving work to go home, waiting for the public transportation ...

So, you have people wandering around ... and, if they glanced over at the speaker, to see what the hell was going on ... they got counted as "attending" ...

I wonder how many they would have been able to attract had they been a mile away from the main intersection, at say, 2:15pm? The Port-A-Potties would have been underwhelmed ...

[doc03]

8. I know of three Teabaggers near me that have taken their

ENOUGH, TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK and SILENT NO MORE signs down in the last month.