A Conservative Spits Out His Tea - "more John Birch than John Adams."

[jefferson_dem]

A Conservative Spits Out His Tea
by BarbinMD

A Conservative Spits Out His Tea Wed Feb 10, 2010 at 07:06:09 PM PST
An interesting look at the recent teabagger convention, as told by a disenchanted Jonathan Kay, via Balloon Juice:

... After I spent the weekend at the Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, Tenn., it has become clear to me that the movement is dominated by people whose vision of the government is conspiratorial and dangerously detached from reality. It's more John Birch than John Adams.

Like all populists, tea partiers are suspicious of power and influence, and anyone who wields them. Their villain list includes the big banks; bailed-out corporations; James Cameron, whose Avatar is seen as a veiled denunciation of the U.S. military; Republican Party institutional figures they feel ignored by, such as chairman Michael Steele; colleges and universities (the more prestigious, the more evil); TheWashington Post; Anderson Cooper; and even FOX News pundits, such as Bill O'Reilly, who have heaped scorn on the tea-party movement's more militant oddballs.

... <...> none of them seems to realize how off-putting the toxic fantasies being spewed from the podium were.

Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin's Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room.

Really, the only aspect of the story that could be disputed is him saying that it is distressing that the media doesn't bother "to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts," or note that teabaggers "will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room.

It's more like par for the course.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/10/835963/-A-Conservative-Spits-Out-His-Tea?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29

[Cha]

1. Brwawawawawa ..some

freakin' teabagger unrec it..:rofl:

[These Eyes]

2. K&R!

I'd love to know who unrec'd and why.

[NYC_SKP]

3. Even Fox News viewers polled that Baggers are "Fruitless mix of racism, conspiracy theories."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7684916

By 69%, last time I checked.

[struggle4progress]

4. I'd like to be sympathetic but: (1) Nixon began courting the southern racists in 1968,

and Reagan continued the wooing by launching his 1980 run with an appeal to states' rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi -- which cannot be misunderstood: Philadelphia was the site of an infamous triple murder of civil rights workers by segregationists fond of "states' rights" sloganeering; (2) Reagan also reached out to rightwing "Christian" extremists, regularly red-baited anyone slightly more liberal than he was, put ideologues on the Supreme Court, abolished the Fairness Doctrine, engaged in union-busting, and appointed Ayn Rand's protege Alan Greenspan to the Federal reserve; (3) under the guidance of Rove, Bush II continued to reach further and further into extremist America as his independent and centrist support eroded

The Republicans reinvented themselves as a party of extremists. And they will be the party of extremists for at least the next ten or fifteen years, because they will not quickly develop the political will to jettison the extremists

[Hekate]

5. Yep. The Repubs created this monster, and all we can do is hope it takes the Party down before ...

... they take the country down.

Hekate