Tea Party Update
Gordonskene reports on the Santa Monica Tea Party where he ran into members of the John Birch Society:
Seems the JBS is alive and well and kicking up all sort of under-the-radar dust. This time it’s not communism but EU World domination and of course government meddling in private lives (read: guns, taxes, far-right ideology and oh yes, massive funding from people like the Koch family). So, you roll all those things together and its the same old Leopard of the 50’s and 60’s, only with new Millennium spots. So I stumbled across a news item from 1965, a review of a new film put out by the Society in an effort to drum up support.
Seems after over 50 years of being around, the John Birch Society is still around and paranoid as ever.
Sam Stein wrote on post-tea party fallout for the GOP on Huffpost:
While the anti-tax sentiment of the protests may have been sincere, the images pulled from the events have often been offensive, embarrassing, or politically problematic.
It is a development that has tripped up the GOP before. The rallies outside McCain-Palin events included some of the same bile that was seen at the tea parties: charges of fascism, terrorism and other malicious criticisms leveled at Barack Obama. And it did the Republican ticket little good in its efforts to bring moderate voters to the cause.
Sinfonian recounted his speech at a Pensacola Tea Party, and a video of the whole thing. Pretty awesome.
I enjoyed the part when I asked, “How many here make less than $250,000 a year?” and there’s a big cheer … then it goes quiet again when I tell them they’ll pay less in taxes under the Obama plan. That’s about when the murmuring started …
My favorite part, though, is as I continue to gripe about the years from 2000 to 2008 (yeah, it’s ‘01 to ‘09, but you have to “speak to your audience,” y’know), and then I hit them with “place the blame where it belongs: squarely on the Republican Party and the Bush administration,” they pretty much lost their shit at that point. That was fun.
The Racism of Fear
By J.J. Smite
Let’s be clear: McCain and Palin have not played the race card. They have played most of the deck of race cards, using standard code words, dragging Obama’s middle name into speeches, linking him to terrorists (Ayers may be white, but the connection with the “real” terrorists is clear), and questioning his background and patriotism. They had been demagoguing crowds into anger, threats, and hatred before “backing down” toward the end of last week under increasing criticism, even from within their own party–which itself has perfected the racism of fear for years.
Fear has always been a handy and useful political tool, and one of the most effective in maintaining or securing power. The culture of fear fanned by the Bush Administration since 9/11 has been extraordinarily effective. But long before Bush there was Nixon, who never really seemed to shed a penchant for McCarthy-era redsearches for enemies under every table. It was Atwater who later perfected the genre with his devilish love of the racism of fear that still shores up countless campaigns–he of Willie Horton fame; he of minions who Bushwhacked McCain himself in North Carolina in 2000 with blatantly racist attacks. Now the earlier victim himself has picked up the fiery torch that burned him.
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