Reid: ‘The tea party is dying out’

[Playinghardball]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) appeared on Meet The Press Sunday morning, expressing his belief that the tea party’s influence is diminishing.

Reid talked about his frustration again with Republicans in Congress, citing last month’s payroll tax debate as a potential turning point for improved relations.

“I would hope they understand that everything doesn’t have to be a fight,” he said. “And I hope the tea party doesn’t have the influence in this next year they had in the previous year.”

Host David Gregory decided to question Reid on a previous comment.

Read more and see the video at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/15/reid-the-tea-party-is-dying-out/

[DCBob]

1. agreed... their influence is waning.

The GOPer leadership increasing see them as radioactive.

[DJ13]

2. #OWS forced the MSM to stop covering the TP

The MSM wants nothing to do with #OWS, and they dare not cover the TP instead, as it would be seen as an obvious bias to the right.

[radhika]

3. I think you nailed it. n/t

[graywarrior]

6. Yes indeedy!

[randome]

16. Good God.

OWS is not the Universe. The TP is dying out because it's dying out.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

49. there is no god, and she sure ain't any good. But OWS is NOT the universe, although Toilet Paper

rumors of dying out has caused painful shortages in several locations, including within the US.

[zeemike]

21. Never thought of that

But it sounds right.
But then my guess is that Reid's comments will set off a new burst from the wallet of the Kock's and they will re emerge in time for the election....and then the media can say that the tea party is back so they are covering it....It's always a gotcha any way you go if they control the message.

[RainDog]

32. exactly. their bias was already present

I have screen caps of the major networks that put the teabaggers on the front of their pages when nothing was going on with them while they ignored the Wisconsin protests - the largest in the U.S. for decades.

This is the reality - the corporate news media that created the teabaggers showed their bias already and I am SO GLAD that they Occupy movement pushed them off the front pages.

[lunatica]

38. I think the Teabagger party is dying out from its own actions and words

There is a minority in this country who are throwbacks to the neanderthal days when no one except white men had rights.

And as the teabag party dies out it's making sure to take the Republican party with it.

I think the only people who force the MSM to cover anything are the 1% who own them. They don't give a shit about the teabaggers, unless it's to use them to pursue their own goals.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

50. the artificial carcass is dead and defunct, but there are pockets of them

especially in southeastern bible belted areas where their brains are permanently starched into some bizarre, irrational shape.

[Jackpine Radical]

40. Wow--interesting.

So the only significant OWS news is via the alternative & social media--and the TP just isn't there. They keep killing their smartphones by drooling on them.

[barbtries]

42. lol

is there a nominating process for duzy's?

[Populist_Prole]

4. They're really not needed anymore as such, since the GOP tone is so hard-right now

That's all the TP is anyway, just a way of presenting the hard-right dogma as some new and fresh movement. The whole GOP primary wingding has made most of the doofusses running trying to out-do each other in hard-right nuttery.

[cstanleytech]

5. I believe both you and DJ13 are correct.

Lets hope though that the majority of voters are able to pull their heads out of their butts this time and wake up to the fact that the republicans in office regardless of what party or movement they claim to be are not looking out for America or the American people.

[Doctor_J]

8. That's all we ever do is hope

Ain't gonna happen

[cstanleytech]

10. Thats because in the end its all we can do.

Its not like we can put a gun to voters heads and tell them they will vote for a liberal.

[Doctor_J]

51. well, no

yours would have been a hell of an attitude for the founders to have.

[RainDog]

33. They've been hard right for years

the tea party was just astro turf created by fuxed news.

[Doctor_J]

7. Only in name - they're now called the Republican Party

Harry's as dopey as he is weak.

One of the main reasons we have been completely overrun for 20 years is that we continue to claim that the far right is losing influence. The worse they get, the more loudly we proclaim that they're fading away.

Edit: You know, I think I understand why Harry was and continues to be the Dem "leader". He is so weak, so appeasing, so uncharismatic. Anyone on our side who would dare to speak the truth - that the GOP is nothing more than a fascist criminal organization - would never be placed in a leadership position, or interviewed by Rove's buddy Gregory.

There is very little hope for the party until media purge takes place.

[Lasher]

25. Their purpose was to gain impunity from the disastrous Bush years.

They are all independents and/or libertarians you see, not Republicans. They never changed their ideology that ruined our economy, but they are somebody else now and they made that retroactive. They've all voted exclusively for Republicans all their lives but they're not Republicans.

It worked. Instead of asking themselves why we should bring back the same old people who gave us the Great Recession and lied us into war, stupid voters fell for this scam in the midterms. Nobody ever took them to task for this deception - not the press, and certainly not milquetoast Democrats like Harry Reid. Tea Party clowns can safely put away their costumes now and go back to calling themselves Republicans.

[Norrin Radd]

30. Exactly. Been saying this myself all along.

[Doctor_J]

34. +1

I hadn't thought of it that way, but that's it exactly. You can even find some sites where the congressional profile is broken in three parties - Dem, Repuke, and TP. As if the last group isn't really a part of the 2nd. Another scam pulled off by the far right and Big Media.

[onehandle]

9. What? Influential billionaires have stopped using the weak-minded to get their way?

Let's celebrate!

wait...

[Deep13]

11. Here, Harry, you'll need one of these to make sure it stays dead.

[HopeHoops]

12. Mostly by natural attrition.

[Faygo Kid]

13. They have been useful idiots.

They have served their purpose for the Kochs et al, but now K Street takes over, and Romney is their guy. The Tea Party buffoons are dupes of the Kochs/K Street/Fox News elites. Lots of noise signifying nothing. But, they served their purpose. Now they can go away, vote for GOP candidates who promise them anti-gay and anti-reproductive rights policies, and then ignore them as they loot the nation.

[rhett o rick]

14. Like Hitler's Brown Shirts, the Tea Party's usefulness is over. nm

[dballance]

15. Their demise couldn't happen too soon

[hue]

17. RIP n/t ...and no resurrection!!!

[lib2DaBone]

18. TeaBags are not dying out....

With society moved so far to the right.... with Citizens United and Republican control of all media.... there is no need for the Tea Baggers.

David Gregory and Meet The Press will squelch any remaing opposition and insure that we are delivered to the Reich Wing.

[Thaddeus Kosciuszko]

19. “I would hope they understand that everything doesn’t have to be a fight,”

Harry should pray, because the nature his hope, requires more power.

[jmowreader]

20. The tea party's ideals are not dying out, but the tea party itself is

The tea party was created by Dick Armey at FreedomWorks for one specific purpose: to attack any Democratic attempt to reform the healthcare system. If you look at Armey's funding sources, you will understand immediately why this is important: FreedomWorks is, by and large, a lobbying shop for health industry interests. (They also do a lot of right-wing rabble rousing, but their money comes from the lobbying.)

They weren't supposed to run for office, and once they got there they weren't supposed to completely destroy the Congress' ability to operate. The problem is, those guys are "government is bad" (and God only knows why anyone who thinks government is bad would want a job there) and "any government spending on anything but the military is waste" absolutists. And there are enough of them to stop anything from going through.

It is possible to find people who are very far to the right who understand that the government has some worthwhile functions besides shooting brown people, and that the government must spend some money to perform these functions, and those people will replace the teabaggers in the next session.

[Alcibiades]

22. Bingo

Of course, FreedomWorks (TM) wasn't the only corporate sponsor of the Tea Party, but most of their largest rallies were run by them.

And also, if you check, it's interesting to see where the largest tea party rallies were. Had this been a genuine grassroots uprising, you might have found them to be:

equally distributed by all states according to population

This wasn't the case. If you see it as only a conservative revolutionary movement, you might expect them to be:

largest in the most conservative states

But this wasn't the case, either. The largest rallies and the greatest number of rallies were held in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Texas. The Tea Party movement was about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but it was also about mobilizing and creating an astroturf movement in key battleground states. It will be active this year in the general election, but they will take their marching orders from the D.C. GOP. In reality, they always did, but they will now have no use for their "grassroots" leaders.

[BadGimp]

23. Harry Reid is so incurably Naive

the man defines milquetoast...

[backtomn]

27. I hope he is right, but.........

.....this knucklehead is never right about anything.

[Gman]

24. I don't like David Gregory

He's antagonist more than he is a journalist. I watched no more than 3 or 4 Sundays after Tim Russert died, got disgusted, and haven't watched it since.

[kenfrequed]

43. Sunday shows...

Most of them have long held a conservative bias, particularly in choice of guests. Even back in the 90's Clinton defenders were always outnumbered 4 to 1 on most sunday talk shows. Anything to the left of Clinton was practically invisible or rare to the point of being unique.

[Javaman]

26. In order for something to die out, it had to exist in the first place...

a astroturf front group for the 1% does not a protest make.

While the half wit ball licking tea party morons love to go on and on about being "a grass roots organization", using money from corporations and the koch brothers is not "grass roots".

[CTyankee]

37. somebody got testy with me when I said essentially the same thing.

I just cannot believe a "grass roots" group that suddenly emerged full blown complaining about government spending only after a black man is elected president, when it was silent about that same damn government spending for YEARS under GW Bush. A group that then falls completely in line with the Republican Party (surprise!).

By contrast, OWS emerged in this country after similar uprisings occurred in many countries all over the world and the issue of income inequality became a huge concern. AND, also in contrast to the Tea Party, OWS wasn't covered by the MSM until the media could no longer ignore it, try as they did!

[Mosaic]

28. And Good Riddance

The teabaggers were always more a meme for the cons than a real thing. It was a gimmick to move their damn party to the "right", the greedy bastards. All the concern for a war debt, and a huge tax break to the 1%, and a trick to get the middle and poor to transfer their wealth to the thieves at the top. Truth is hard to find, but we know it well on the internet.

[SoapBox]

29. With Citizens United...the KKKoch Brothers and Dickhead Armey, no longer need the "puppets"...

Why would the TeaHaters need to be around anymore.

After Dickhead and his ilk, played STOOPID Americans like a cheap banjo, they got the Citizens United
decision from the Biased and Radical Supreme Court judges. End result, they no longer need the puppets.

I would however like to see the "Occupy Party" come to life and become permanent.

[DFW]

31. As long as there are the following, they will be there:

1.) Lavish financing to perpetuate the impression they are still out there in force

2.) Wealthy or wannabe-wealthy people who are ruled by anger, fear, and the need to shout louder than the next person

then there will still be a "Tea Party" movement.

Case in point: at the latest Renaissance Weekend gathering, which is mostly progressive, but with some right wing representation for counter-balance and to liven discussions up, there was, for the first time a genuine, bona-fide Teabagger woman there. She was middle-aged, white, and overweight. Her face was almost always frowning, and when involved in any discussion, she shouted rather than talked, and took three times as long as anyone else to make her point, whatever the hell it was. She was not a paragon of clarity or logic.

[tanyev]

35. Just like the dodo birds.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

36. We can only hope

for the sake of our country that it is. The whole Republican Tea Party *experiment* has felt like one huge national hangover and more and more people are waking up to it. It's looking more and more like the Tea Party won't be selecting the Presidential nominee this year (though they may have some influence on the VP candidate). Republicans like John Boehner even seem to be coming to that recognition as well given his reported plan to cut the Tea Party out of the upcoming payroll tax negotiations. It remains to be seen, however, whether or not he follows through with that or ends up caving to them again however. Hopefully, by 2013 the Republican Tea Party will be remembered as small "fit" that briefly "reanimated" the post-2008 rotting corpse of the GOP or, as Chris Rock put it, the final childhood temper tantrum before falling asleep.

We'll see.............

[certainot]

39. wrong- the teabaggers are just dittoheads lured out of the limbaugh/talk radio closet with free bus

passes from the koch bros but they've been the 1%'s invisible army for 20 years- the GOP talk radio base - well misinformed and ready willing and able to get frothed up and mobilized with whatever team limbaugh passes on to them from the 1%'s think tanks.

and they are still going to be there, a made to order constituency coordinated and loud for any right wing purpose, to enable and intimidate media and politicians, ignored by the left, slowing down and obstructing any liberal, democratic, and progressive reforms.

[Bohunk68]

41. I agree with you

To think that the Teabaggers are going to go away or fade into the background is sheer folly. They've always been there and as long as the knuckles can drag the ground, they'll still be there. To dismiss them is not to understand history. We on the left have too often dismissed these folks. Just go as recently as 2010. Sure, they're all funded by the Koch Bros and egged on by Dick Armey and Faux Snooze, but they haven't gone away.

Just another thought. We dismiss the religious conservatives by saying they may opt out of the election if Romney, the Morman gets the nomination. REPUBLICS ALWAYS VOTE. IN EVERY ELECTION. AND, THEY ALWAYS VOTE FOR THE REPUBLIC CANDIDATE. So, we need to keep our act together and get the vote come November, especially for the candidates down-slate.

[certainot]

47. vote vote vote! GOP 1% trying everything they can, and with citizens united they can use the money

they need....

[blm]

44. Dems need to LET TeaParty die out and NOT poke at the embers with public statements like this

.

[Guy Montag]

45. Good riddence; the tea fleas are a blight and a bother.

I wouldn't even bother to kick dirt on their tombstone when they do enter the dustbin of history.

[Scuba]

46. Psst. Harry, there never was a Tea Party, except in the minds of the Koch's, Rove's and Armey's.

[Orsino]

48. Um, no. They just being echoed by every other Republican now.

It doesn't matter that we see fewer actual tricorn hats in public nowadays.