http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904
Tea & Crackers
How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster
By Matt Taibbi
Sep 28, 2010 7:01 AM EDT
This is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.
It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea
Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The
red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at
something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a
gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with
thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin who earlier this
morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party
champion running for the U.S. Senate is railing against a GOP
establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched
Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it
seems, is nigh.
"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best
applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated
warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent
one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to
Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party
Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am
immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single
black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical
hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen
from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized
wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan
impression "Government's not the solution! Government's the
problem!" the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
Related Obama in Command: The Rolling Stone Interview In an Oval
Office interview, the president discusses the Tea Party, the war, the
economy and whats at stake this November.
"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They
have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your
scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has
one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing
against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries
as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP
establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea
Party represents, I can't imagine it.
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing
Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple,
Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their
views.
Related Get your dose of political muckraking from Matt Taibbi on the Taibblog.
"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound
Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her
hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a
check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your
wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve
it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have
already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what
it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the
phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils
down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the
voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious
about government spending only the reality is that the vast majority
of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms
of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing
not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's
Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against
government spending with the exception of the money spent on them.
In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting
government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all
about and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in
Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid
of conservative icons like Palin.
Related Get more political coverage from Rolling Stone.
Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising
libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized
medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing
Medicare payments to doctors like himself half of his patients are
on Medicare he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against
government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans
With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and
Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a
very logical reason. "Physicians," he said, "should be allowed to make
a comfortable living."
Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon
him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite
to win in November. Ha, ha, you thought we actually gave a shit about
spending, joke's on you. That's because the Tea Party doesn't really
care about issues it's about something deep down and psychological,
something that can't be answered by political compromise or
fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more
than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who
we are ("radical leftists" is the term they prefer), and they're
coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do and, it would
seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.
In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American
revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they
disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This
is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place
that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea
Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the
GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the
movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon
will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through,
it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets
castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country.
Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party
bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only
things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want
anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
The rest of it the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown
on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade will die on the vine as one
Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party
and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for
Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the
unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke
turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake.
[and it continues here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=1]
--
Larry C. Lyons
web: http://www.lyonsmorris.com/lyons
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/larryclyons
--
People need to realize that the plural of anecdo
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