Revised version of the Special Comment: Vote Backward! Vote Tea Party!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/30/915217/-Vote-Backward!-Vote-Tea-Party!The full list through which I waded -- all the while remembering Michael Palin’s warning to his fellow insurrectionaries from the movie Life Of Brian that they’d be traveling through Pilate’s sewer (“so don’t wear your good sandals”) – was twice, perhaps three times as long as the 32 finalists I selected for the latest Special Comment.
They left me with a headache and a dim view of the future, and a reminder that some of them will become elected officials of our government on Tuesday, not because Democrats and Liberals acted too boldly nor too emphatically nor too loudly, but because they compromised with those who see compromise only as weakness and opportunity. Last year many of us hoped we had an entered a time when the rhetoric could be tamped down and the edges softened. And the Right’s response was to move further to the Right than the rest of us moved towards the middle. You do not have to extrapolate very far from what John Boehner and other GOP leaders have said about compromise, to the Swiftian conclusion (I am being consciously hyperbolic here) that the goal of the Right and the Corporations is not to compromise any more than is necessary to offer us a choice of sauces to be served in after they figuratively kill us and eat us.
And sadly we are still being encouraged to move to the middle, even with the stark of evidence of the results in the list below. Forgive me for quoting verbatim from my Comment about the Tea Party (plus a couple of Non-Tea Republicans). We all are familiar with at least some of them and some of these quotes. To me, though, to see them all in one place is to understand the true nature of the mayhem they intend.
(As part of the blogathon I’ll stick around and respond to comments until the happy diversion of the World Series starts. The only plug here is that the Comment will be aired again on a special Sunday night edition of the show).
It is as if a group of moderately talented performers has walked on stage at a comedy club on Improv night. Each hears a shout from the audience, consisting of a bizarre but just barely plausible fear or hatred or neurosis or prejudice. And the entertainment of the evening is for each to take their thin, absurd premise, and build upon it a campaign for Governor or Congressman or Senator.
The problem is, of course, when it turns out there is no audience shouting out gags, just a cabal of corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce and political insider blood-suckers like Karl Rove and Dick Armey and the Chicken Little Chorus of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
And the instructions are not to improvise a comedy sketch, but to elect a group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told, in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get, backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the '30s, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the Trusts and the Robber Barons.
Result: the Tea Party. Vote backward, vote Tea Party!
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