The Tea Partiers Are Anti-Reaganists

[purejuice]

Why are the Democratic party and MoveOn not all over this? How stupid are they? Shouldn't they be at Tea Party rallies, speaking, leafletting, rushing the people -- mostly laid-off boomers, apparently, who are losing their houses and their jobs, without any real chance ever of working again? These are the ice floe candidates. If you've ever been to a Medicaid old folks home, or stood behind an old person in the grocery store buying a can of cat food, a can opener, an onion and a fork, you will comprehend their fear. They are rightfully distressed.

[Jeff McQueen, 50, laid-off auto parts salesman] blames the government for his unemployment. “Government is absolutely responsible, not because of what they did recently with the car companies, but what they’ve done since the 1980s,” he said. “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”

He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/us/politics/28teaparty.html?scp=1&sq=jeff%20mcqueen&st=cse

It's always driven me crazy that the poor people should have been swept away by the anti-health care bill arguments which are, bottom line, the tool of the man. I think also there's a significant degree of racism operating here as a black president seems to be machinating these changes. The nigs have raised our taxes, as one of my former neighbors put it before leaving D.C. for more salubrious venues (in his case, I think it was North Carolina).

This piece in the NYT suggests, quite rightly, that the Tea Partiers are not the monolithic flash mob whiteys the Gotcha freaks in the blogosphere would have you believe. They are a flash mob, they are white, but their politics are by no means a foregone conclusion. The Dems are wasting a huge opportunrity by not proselytizing at these gatherings. There should be truth squads, caseworkers from the Dems' offices offering assistance with the mortgages, etc..

God, they're stupid. I can't get over it.

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

I'd bet money I don't have that Jeff McQueen, 50, has been a faithful Republican his whole adult voting life and still sees absolutely no connection between that and all that "allowing free trade and never [setting] up any rules." (For that matter, the health care plan they're all shitting their pants over now is copyright the Heritage Foundation, circa 1993.) There's a limit to how much pity I can feel for anyone who's that willfully obtuse for decades at a time to the fact that actions have consequences, particularly when they're out screaming "Commie!", "Nigger!", "Bitch!" and "Faggot!" at anything that moves and calling it populism.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

i think the nyt piece is important in that it touches on all these very disparate and inchoate political threads -- some of which are, and some of which are not, republican.
bigotry needs to be confronted and stopped. it's really important. for the dems or anyone else to be putting their heads in the sand while economically distressed people are flash-mobbed and hate-radioed into racial and gender crimes against humanity is -- well, a bad scenario in which hundreds of millions of lives were lost in the 20th century.
we need to be standing up to them and not writing them off as demon assholes.

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

"we need to be standing up to them and not writing them off as demon assholes."

This is true. There's going to be a huge reckoning for the economics of the past few decades and both parties' complicity in them.