Taibbi Cliff-Notes version: The GOP is using the Tea Party as a short cut back to power

[BurtWorm]

They stole the energy and enthusiasm from Ron Paul's insurgency. But their goal is to get impressionable "grass rooters" into power so they can mold them into the standard issue rich man's party pawns Republicans have always been. If their plan works, Ron Paul will be tomorrow's John Boehner. Not a speck of difference between them. (Or between them and Ben Nelson for that matter.)

Is there no way progressive Democrats can piss on the Republican parade by pointing this out to the saps at the edges who can be peeled off the tea party's momentum? Is there a phrase, an image or metaphor that makes plain what the GOP is up to and why the Baggers will never in a million years be permitted to have what they want without their paying a very steep, steep price?






http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=1

[nykym]

1. In the old west

I believe they were called Carpetbaggers, not too different me thinks!

[Botany]

2. the teabaggers were started and funded by republican activists

Dick Armey & Sol Russo both have 40 + years working for and being paid by republicans
and they are the moving forces behind much of the teabaggers.

[BurtWorm]

3. They had a ready-made 'core' of a 'movement' to take advantage of in Ron Paul's outsiders.

They could easily manipulate them by throwing rallies and then picking candidates to pour money into. They didn't even have to change a goddamn thing with their fucked up party. The rank-and-filers loathed them, but they're so easily played. Republicans are so experienced at channeling a mob of angry white people. That's their specialty.

[Botany]

5. Every last one of those teabaggers voted for Mc'Cain, W, H.W., and so on ...

.... they are not a new movement. W made the name republican toxic so the big money
"re-branded" republicans as "Tea party patriots."

[BurtWorm]

6. Yes. AND the suckers willing to populate the 'movement' don't know they're being played

the way they're being played. They're ready to delude themselves into thinking they're being acceptably (i.e., "conservatively") radical and that what they want is something new and fresh (and at the same time as old and pure as the constitution), something different, in other words, from what the party turned out (as it always turns out) to be all about.

These morons are just as ready to have the football yanked away from them by the Party... as a lot of lefties are by the Democratic Party! ( :wtf: )

[SoCalDem]

4. It's how they roll

They used the Southern Strategy to corral the racists to bolster Nixon's candidacy
and again in 80 they hooked up with the Über-religious to help Reagan/Bush

The stick-up-the-butt, monied-class republicans have NEVER been able to appeal to the masses without help from the crazies locked in the attic...but only during election cycles..

Once IN office, they only help their "own kind"

[BurtWorm]

7. Exactly.

:toast:

[BurtWorm]

8. Correction to OP:

I said "If their plan works, Ron Paul will be tomorrow's John Boehner."

I meant to write "If their plan works, Rand Paul will be tomorrow's John Boehner."

[Dawson Leery]

9. These paragraphs sum up what the teabaggers are all about

" This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford — and now the government was going to bail them out.

"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"

Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe."

[BurtWorm]

10. And these give an idea of how they work with the GOP

"Paul's animus toward the state's Republican overlords never seemed greater than in August 2009, when McConnell decided to throw a fancy fundraiser in Washington for the national GOP's preferred candidate, Trey Grayson. Attended by 17 Republican senators who voted for the TARP bailout, the event was dubbed the "Bailout Ball" by Paul's people. Paul went a step further, pledging not to accept contributions from any senator who voted to hand taxpayer money over to Wall Street. "A primary focus of my campaign is that we need Republicans in office who will have the courage to say no to federal bailouts of big business," he declared.

"The anti-establishment rhetoric was a big hit. Excluded from local campaign events by the GOP, Paul took his act to the airwaves, doing national TV appearances that sent his campaign soaring with Tea Party voters. "We were being shut out of a lot of opportunities in the state, so you go with what is available to you," says Adams. "And what was available was television."

"In the primary almost a year later, Paul stomped Grayson, sending shock waves through the national party. The Republican candidate backed by the party's Senate minority leader had just received an ass-whipping by a Tea Party kook, a man who tried to excuse BP's greed-crazed fuck-up in the Gulf on the grounds that "sometimes accidents happen." Paul celebrated his big win by going back to where he'd begun his campaign, The Rachel Maddow Show, where he made a big show of joyously tearing off his pseudolibertarian underpants for the whole world to see — and that's where everything changed for him."

...

[BurtWorm]

11. ...Paul's platform began to rapidly 'evolve.'

<<With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He had been flatly opposed to all farm subsidies; faced with having to win a general election in a state that receives more than $265 million a year in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than $2 million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party, now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop deployments overseas.

...

"When he was pulling no punches, when he was reciting his best stuff, I felt like I knew him," says Koch, the former campaign volunteer who now works with the Libertarian Party in Kentucky. "But now, with Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove calling the shots, I feel like I don't know him anymore.">>