So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy.
In the new Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi, one of my very favorite writers, offers some of his recent reporting on the Tea Party, formerly known as the teabaggers. This is a scene from the parking lot outside a Sarah Palin rally, where half the audience is on Medicare-sponsored scooters, which ain’t cheap. But they are free…here is a segment from near the beginning of the article. Matt is being extremely tame in this article. This is him writing mellow like wine at about 2 on a scale of 10.
“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.
Such hypocrisy. I know someone who is continually complaining about government spending, yet he gets more in farm subsidies in a year than I earn working 40 hours a week.
What does it take to get a peasant to see the emperor’s new clothes for what they are? Why are more people not LOUDLY and incessantly challenging these smug, self-serving, hypocritical idiots? Where the hell are they?
The problem is that there’s no room in closed, selfish and simple minds for rational debate, compassion, or plain old common sense logic. It is only the loudest voices – not the clearest – that these people seem to hear.
We’ve got our work cut out for us.
Thanks, I used to read him in the New York Press and liked him.
Please note that you or an editor has switched the vowels around in his name a bit — it should be Taibbi
Thanks for posting this, Eric. Great piece. I always love a straight shooter.