Teabaggers upset Marvel Comics turned them into ’supervillians’

And rightly so. There's nothing 'super' about 'em.

Raw Story

It seems there's a new third rail in American politics -- don't mess with the Tea Partiers -- and Marvel Comics has inadvertently grabbed it with both hands. And even though members of the Tea Party movement have extracted a half-hearted apology and a promised retraction from Marvel, their anger has barely abated.

In a recent issue of Captain America, the long-time superhero and his African-American partner The Falcon travel to Idaho to investigate a white supremacist militia group, the Watchdogs, who are long-time villains in the Marvel Universe. On the way, they pass an anti-tax rally where the protesters are holding up signs bearing familiar Tea Party slogans, such as "Stop the Socialists!" and "Tea Bag the Libs Before They Tea Bag You."

This implied mockery of the Tea Partiers quickly aroused a firestorm of indignation on conservative blogs and message boards, made even worse by the implied association between the protesters and the local racist militia.

One particularly angry blogger, Warner Todd Huston, wrote, "So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just 'hate the government,' they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government."

That just about covers it. And your point is...?

The real bone of contention in this controversy, however, may be not whether Marvel consciously intended to link the Tea Parties to extreme right-wing radicals but whether such an association has any validity. In the current issue of Newsweek, for example, conservative Jonathan Kay describes (Don't miss! - G) his attendance at the recent Tea Party Convention and concludes that "the tea-party movement is dominated by conspiracist kooks."

"Within a few hours in Nashville," Kay writes, "I could tell that what I was hearing wasn't just random rhetorical mortar fire being launched at Obama and his political allies: the salvos followed the established script of New World Order conspiracy theories, which have suffused the dubious right-wing fringes of American politics since the days of the John Birch Society."

Heh. The resurgent* Birchers and the teabaggers are no doubt going to be accusing each other of being too far to the left.

*I thought they were safely dead and gone. Looks like they've clawed their way out of the grave. Probly smell bad too. Maybe they'll be in the comic book Tales From The Crypt?

From Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues":

Now we all agree with Hitlers' views,
Although he killed six million Jews.
It don't matter too much that he was a Fascist,
At least you can't say he was a Communist!
That's to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria.

The details and right-wing fringewads have changed a little, but they are still enemies of America. The song is as timely now as it was back then. Here's the rest of it:

Thanks to tomjunowak.