Teabaggers are stupid whiny bitchez

P.M. Carpenter

From yesterday's NY Times/CBS News poll on the Tea Party movement and its 18 percent of supportive Americans, the bad news -- in fact, I'd say worst news -- was that they reject the idea of a conservative base-dividing third party. Drats. They're smarter than we thought.

The good news was that ... actually, there was no good news (except perhaps a dollop, noted at this column's end), but the old news was that the movement's supporters on average are "white, male, married and older than 45" -- you know, the sole surviving face of modern Republicanism, or, as political historian Rick Perlstein put it yesterday, in the Times' "Room for Debate," "they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government."

They are trapped in nostalgic whimsy; they long for the era of 19th-century American smallness -- yeoman farmers and apprentice artisans, that sort of thing, real rugged (and mostly white) individualist stuff -- which of course will never return. And in that sense their movement parallels that of 1930s' populist demagoguery, as Perlstein's fellow political historian Alan Brinkley so marvelously traced in his 1983 work, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression.

"The real issue," continued Brinkley, and rather indisputably, I think, "is a sense among white males that they are somehow being displaced, that the country is no longer 'theirs,' that minorities and immigrants are becoming more and more powerful within society. And, of course, they are right about that. They just fear it more than many other Americans."

That's your party, you Tea Party guys -- the corporate-backed, corporate-catering, corporate-financing-and-financed Republican Party. It loves the idea of J.P. Morgan buying the next election on behalf of bigger and bigger corporate bigness in the service of middle-class displacement. Do you?

And then there's that little matter of your GOP fighting financial reform, what with its argument amusingly housed in the Luntz-tested, crypto-corporate Big Lie of "permanent bailouts."

You see, folks, you're not so much stupid as you are just plain duped.

Sorry, P.M., they're plenty stupid to be conned/taken in like that. Worse, they wanted to be duped. They got their wish.