Sometimes when you look at the Tea Party agenda, you think that you are looking at a Progressive’s dream come true. They want to cut down on the influence of party hacks and lobbyists in Washington. I’m a Progressive. I want that too!
Teabaggers want states’ rights, Constitutional rights, individual rights and financial safety for their families. Me too. They want bankers to stop getting away with stealing trillions of OUR dollars. They want an end to a horrific deficit that mostly goes into the pockets of fat cats. Those are agenda items that I too support 100%.
The Tea Partiers speak reverently of liberty, justice and freedom. And isn’t that the whole point of being a Progressive? It is for me. And what about Truth? Both sides seem to like the concept of Truth a lot.
And smaller government? The Teabaggers are definitely in favor of that — and so am I. I’d love to see the Pentagon budget get cut by half, all that pork-barreling stop, TARPS ripped out from under the wealthy and “No Child Left Behind” left in the dust.
There are so many things that Teabaggers and Progressives have in common. And yet the Tea Party turned to the GOP for hope, shelter and consolation. Isn’t that a bit like Little Red Riding Hood turning to the Big Bad Wolf for help? “Lie to me,” Tea Partiers begged the Republicans. And the GOP did. Bigtime.
And yet Progressives don’t lie. But the Tea Party hates us anyway. Why oh why is that? Progressives walk the walk. But the GOP just talks the talk. Why chose Them over Us? Forming a Tea Party alliance with the GOP just doesn’t make sense.
To quote Matt Taibbi in the Rolling Stone, “The GOP leadership largely succeeded this past fall in appropriating the political energy of the Tea Party for its own ends, pulling off a brilliant coup by using Tea Party rage to push through the long sought-after extension of the obscene Bush tax cuts. This was always going to be the model of how Republican Party hacks would deal with the Tea Party: Bash the living hell out of hated blue-state Gorgons like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, jack off the mob by incorporating the Tea Party’s Constitution-and-liberty rhetoric, hand the Tea Party those reforms that the GOP’s big campaign contributors want anyway (most notably, tax breaks for the rich and deregulation of big business), and then cough up a note from the doctor or some other lame excuse when the time comes to actually cut spending.” http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/4506-the-crying-shame-of-john-boehner
While I truly do not see what Teabaggers have against Progressives, I can see very clearly why Tea Partiers should hate-hate-hate the Republicans. And yet it is the GOP that Teabaggers choose to climb into bed with. And even as they are getting royally screwed by Republican fat cats, Tea Partiers apparently don’t even have the moxie to ask for payment for their services after the dirty deed is done.
Go figure.
PS: If Teabaggers and Progressives could finally begin to see their common ground and actually begin to work together, America might actually become an honest and decent place once again.
As Matt Taibbi clearly states, “Congress used to be an easy job for any man with a nice fairway stroke, a limited moral compass and a keen sense of bureaucratic loyalty…. But things are different now. America is so broke, there’s no longer really any money in the Treasury to give away — the job of overseeing corporate handouts that used to belong to the leaders of Congress has now moved to the Federal Reserve, which itself is so broke that it has to invent dollars out of thin air before it can give them away to influential billionaires. This leaves congressional leaders with nothing to do but their ostensible jobs — i.e., fixing the country’s actual problems — and few of the current leaders have any experience with that, Boehner being a prime example…. He now finds himself the party’s last line of defense against millions of angry voters who, for the first time in recent memory, are at least attempting to watch what Congress is up to.”
I’m an angry voter. And the Tea Partiers are angry voters too. So let’s stop all this hatin’ on each other, team up, work together, and take our American democracy back from the oligarchs and fat cats who own it now.
Boy, I bet that fat cats like Boehner, Beck, Palin and the owners of the New York Times and Washington Post would HATE to see Progressives and Teabaggers united — instead of happily at each others’ throats and distracted away from this oligarchy’s own lies and misdeeds.
Everything you say is true, Jane, but the honest and intelligent Teabaggers are being either corrupted by corpo money or shunted to the side.
Let’s recall that the post-Obama ‘tea party movement’ was launched in Feb. of 2009 by a wealthy commodities trader and CNBC analyst named Rick Santelli with a ‘spontaneous’ TV rant against deadbeats who supposedly bought homes they couldn’t afford — no mention of the banks pushing bad mortgages on people to fatten up their fraudulent investment packages.
Incredibly, when Santelli ‘spontaneously’ called for a tea party rally in Chicago, a website had already been set up and the name, Chicago Tea Party, registered.
You wrote: “And yet the Tea Party turned to the GOP for hope, shelter and consolation.”
Not quite the case. It seems the tea party movement was a creation of the corporations and their shills like Santelli to serve the interests of the corporations, the rich and the GOP, but it got out of hand when amateurs became involved by forming their own ad hoc groups unaffiliated with the ‘official’ tea party movement. Some of these ad hoc groups specifically did not want to support or condone either party, but those were the types who have since been driven out or compromised.
Aside from that, most of the Teabaggers are fundamentalist Christians, (I know: I’ve been having a running debate with one for months), and that rigid uber-religiosity could never square with the tolerant, open-minded views of progressives. (Could you really comfortably work with someone who didn’t think women should have equal rights with men? Who believed gays were tools of the Devil and had a ‘secret agenda’ to make their kids gay? Who believed progressives want to turn the nation over to radical Muslims to impose Sharia law? Who thought FDR and JFK were communists? Who believe we could have won the Vietnam War except for the ‘dirty hippie’ protestors? Who thinks Obama was born in Kenya?)
I don’t know how many Teabaggers you know, nor how close you are to them, but there’s one more thing that stands in the way of any rapprochement between Teabaggers and progressives: the alarming ignorance of most Teabaggers regarding history, science, politics, and most everything else, including their own religion. Many of them are convinced, for example, that this country was founded as a Christian nation and that their interpretation of Biblical law should be imposed. They also insist ‘war is the answer’ when dealing with other nations, and don’t bother speaking softly first, just use the ‘big stick’ to bring them into line. Do you really think you could work with someone like that, no matter how sincere they were about the issues on which you agree?
You might recall that, back in the ’80s, the left-wing group Women Against Pornography joined with fundamentalist right-wing Christians to pass anti-pornography legislation in Minnesota. WAP thought they were promoting a law that prevented the exploitation of women. The fundies, however, the moment the law was passed, tried to use it to close down gay and lesbian bookstores and places that made birth control info available. This is the danger of — excuse the pun — getting in bed with the Teabaggers, and the reason I don’t see any realistic chance of unity between Teabaggers and progressives.
Comment by RS Janes — January 8, 2011 @ 5:14 am