Reloaded

Tea Party Waltz

"They really need to realize that the rhetoric ... we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, you gotta realize there's consequences to that action." - Gabrielle Giffords.

"3.49 pm Various Palin sites are frantically removing various incendiary materials - which is both gratifying, but also, it seems to me, an acknowledgment of previous rhetorical excess....Palin's Facebook page simply cannot cope with the number of commenters blasting her" - Andrew Sullivan

An online comment:

I am standing in the aisle at Costco when I found out my Congresswomen, Gabrielle Giffords, has been shot dead up on the north side.

While I’m scrambling with my phone, two couples in front of me are talking about it and suddenly I hear one of the women say, “Well, that’s to be expected when you’re so liberal.”And the other woman says, “Ohh, so we get to appoint a Republican?”

I did not trust myself to speak. I’m a Soldier. Please remind me what country I am fighting for? At least seven people are dead. She happens to be the only member of Congress married to an active duty military.

An eyewitness:

Dr. Steven Rayle, a former emergency room doctor who now works in a hospice, said that he had witnessed the shootings. He said the congresswoman was standing behind a table outside the Safeway greeting passersby when the gunman approached her from behind, held a gun about a foot from her head and began firing.

“He must have got off 20 rounds,” he said. Ms. Giffords slumped to the ground and staff members immediately rushed to her aid, Dr. Rayle said.

Dr. Rayle said he performed CPR on some of the victims. He said one of the victims was a young child and appeared to be in critical condition with a gunshot wound.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said Giffords was among at least 18 people wounded in the melee that killed six people, including Arizona's chief federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and an aide for the Democratic lawmaker. He said the rampage ended only after two people tackled the assailant.

The sheriff pointed to the vitriolic political rhetoric that has consumed the country as he denounced the shooting that claimed several of his friends as victims, including U.S. District Judge John Roll. The judge attended Mass on Saturday morning like he does every day before stopping by to say hello to his good friend Giffords.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," the sheriff said. "And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Spencer Giffords, 75, was rushing to the hospital when asked if his 40-year-old daughter had any enemies. "Yeah," he told The New York Post. "The whole tea party."

The price of Tea

Sleeper sell

See Jared Loughner's YouTube clip here.

Tea license

Pathology

Angling for disaster

Mistress

 

Christine

Pretty evil

Outing the Black Tea Party

Which craft?

Feculent

Outreach to Albion

Albion – place name, archaic or poetic Britain or England (from Latin, of Celtic origin)

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Memo to United Kingdom
c/o Simon Jeffery
The Guardian

Hello,

Just an ordinary American citizen here. Wanted to let you know that we're not all insane on this side of the salty pond. Glen Beck, who is otherwise unqualified for any form of gainful employment, has an audience of only 1% of the adult US population. Yes, he's a complete fraud. But only one percent buy his rubbish.

Sarah "Death Panels" Palin appeals to the same demographic. White, generally middle-aged+, less educated, dis-empowered, bitter, not terribly bright and wallowing in ignorance. We have 307 million people here and the bell curve applies like a human law of physics. Of course we're going to have millions of stupid people. It's just that the confounded Internet has everyone clacking away, even the illiterati.

 

Carl Paladino can only be described as someone who seeks suicide but lacks requisite courage. As opposed to flinging himself off a bridge, he'd rather self-combust by giving voice to antique notions precisely aligned with his age, gender, ethnicity and political representation in the Tea Party. Paladino would be a breakout star in South Carolina. Perhaps he just needs a map.

Christine no-ohhh'Donnell is another dreary huckster who discovered the stupid demographic as a road to riches. It's no coincidence she looks like Palin's little sister. At least the American Right has the decency to serve female ignorance in distasteful packaging. Palin, Coulter and Gellar are "sexy" or "attractive" only if you're sight-impaired. Seeing women prostitute truth for filthy lucre becomes untenable in a smart package.

Which brings us to Michelle Malkin. Why would a bright, well-educated babe like Malkin forge a career of filthy lies? She earns $300,000/year from her blog alone. Throw in book deals, TV and speaking engagements and she's easily at a half-mil per year. At least we know her price.

And then there's Rich the idIott, Tea Party candidate for Ohio's 9th Congressional district. This is the SS 5th Panzer Division fool who claims ignorance while impersonating someone who understands history. It's the same story, with O'Donnell's broomstick swapped for symbols of genocide. He's badly trailing a seasoned opponent. Republican party reaction was swift and furious. This signals that IdIott's chances weren't terribly good to begin with and that SS optics retain their luster after all these years.

All things considered, America's sudden lurch towards the late 19th century isn't as bad as it appears. Ratios of education attainment have never been higher and the proportion of people holding university degrees tracks higher still in younger cohorts, even in our developing states. This explains a paucity of young adults at Tea Party events.

No, our seeming return to populism is more like a system purge. Stupid was contained for so long that a pressure release is prudent. Recent displays of mass ignorance are due more to Republican disintegration, and less to Democrat rule. Reagan put a lid on Stupid and Rove let it slip off. Michael Steele isn't exactly a disciplinarian.

It should come as no surprise that a black, democrat outsider to national machine politics in the White House has sparked visceral reaction from the stupid demographic. Obama is only the best President since Truman and he may prove to be the best since Roosevelt. That would be Teddy Roosevelt. The Right simply has no answer - they've got no one who comes close. Scare-mongering is always a last resort but it was the only Republican option. The eruption of Stupid calls to mind an old saying regarding care in what one asks for.

 The real America is urban, literate and worldly. Millions of us ordinary folk have good command of history. Not university professors, hobbyists or military fetishists. People with mere bachelors degrees who study American history and quickly learn that mastery is impossible without also studying Europe's. Do we counter-balance Stupid?

Time will provide an answer. Meanwhile, I offer this bit of weighty evidence. David Hackett Fischer is an American professor, historian and prize-winning author. Fischer's treatise on the origins of American culture is worshiped by professional historians and read by all serious students of history. No other book provides so many answers regarding modern America.

It's called Albion's Seed.

Best to all,

TRS

Lunacy in better focus

Glenn Beck's use of the racially coded phrase "Planet of the Apes"  in yet another of his idiotic rants caused the TheRaven to ponder his target audience.

Congressmen Bob Inglis' remarkable interview with Mother Jones revealed a genuine conservative's perspective on the Tea Party. Inglis is the real deal. He's about as far from liberal as you can be without crossing the line on delusionalism. He offers a compelling case for the Tea Party as a collection of crack-brained wing-nuts.

The very next day another piece has fallen into place. This post on AlterNet is reporting that a Massive Censorship at Digg has been uncovered. Digg is the leading social media website.As reported on AlterNet:

"A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots, and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. Digg Patriots was founded on 21 May 2009. This group is the heart of a complicated web on various networks, including Twitter, Propeller, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook, all dedicated to ramming an extreme right wing viewpoint down the throats of those communities and censoring opposing viewpoints. 

This includes such means as cyber stalking, bullying, and terror, as exposed on YouTube yesterday (something not one of the Digg Patriots group condemned).  Not surprisingly, there is also a heavy contingent active on the ultraconservative FreeRepublic.There are a few differences of opinion within Digg Patriots, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective.

• They hate Obama. 
• They hate progressives. 
• They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. 
• They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. 
• They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it.
• They hate the secular nature of our nation. 
• They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. 
• They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. 
• They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. 
• They hate abortion rights. 
• They hate public schools and really hate higher education. 
• They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. 
• They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. 
• They just love to hate.

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present..."

The only thing worse than wing-nuts is well-organized wing-nuts. A tip of the hat to the folks at Digg who ferreted out this nonsense and put a stop to it.

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UPDATE 1: TheAtlantic discusses an idea that may seem radical to right-wing extremists: we are each entitled to our own set of opinions, but we aren't entitled to our own set of facts. Abandonment of truth in the Internet age is yet another manifestation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Atlantic piece opens with Alternet's discovery of Tea Party trolls carrying on like Grant's wolves. Read all about it, here.

Conservative politician vindicates TheRaven

Perhaps you thought TheRaven had too much fun at the expense of all those sincere Tea Party folks.

Perhaps you don't agree that Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Inhofe, et al lead the risible class or that their followers are even more contemptible.

Well, guess what?

A republican congressman from South Carolina now understands. This fellow has a 93% approval rating from the American Conservative Union and he recently lost a primary to a Tea Party candidate. In fact, he got thumped. The final tally ran more than 2:1 in favor of his opponent.

Meet Bob Inglis, a soon to be unemployed, conservative Christian, Republican congressman.

Congressman Inglis unburdens himself in this interview published by Mother Jones. The interview confirms of our worst fears about the Tea Party. If you thought the Tea Party was just innocent silliness, please, don't read any further.

"They (campaign doners) were upset with me" Inglis recalls.

"They are all Glenn Beck watchers" 

About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, They say, 

"Bob, what don't you get?"

"Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn the U.S. into a Muslim nation.'" 

Inglis didn't know how to respond.

Give Inglis credit for decency. He had previously encouraged constituents to cease watching Glenn Beck. He also called on Joe Wilson to apologize for his unseemly outburst at the President. He's a Christian who actually practices the teachings of Christ. He notes that calling Obama a socialist would violate the 9th commandment.

While he was campaigning, Inglis says, tea party activists and conservative voters kept pushing him to describe Obama as a "socialist." But, he says, "It's a dangerous strategy to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible...This guy is no socialist." 

The Tea Party demographic skews toward older, white voters. One-third of South Carolinians aged 65 or older didn't complete high school vs. 22% who have attained higher education. Sixteen percent of South Carolina's 45-64 age group (one in every six people) also didn't complete high school. South Carolina is not a well-educated state. (Click here for charts covering all age groups)

If the Tea Party attracts a disproportionate number of credulous, uneducated people, we'd expect to hear some really strange myths and superstitions. What did Bob Inglis, the "firebrand conservative", hear from voters?

Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:

I sat down, and they said "on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks."

I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative.

So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!"

And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

Has Inglis seen the light?

Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven "demagoguery" that he believes will undermine the GOP's long-term credibility. And he's freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

You might be thinking that Inglis is just another politician who lost and this is nothing but sour grapes. Perhaps, but his conservatism is genuine and his story has the ring of truth.

"I hated Bill Clinton. I wanted to destroy him. Then I had six years out (after leaving Congress in 1999) to look back on that, and now I would confess it as a sin. It is just wrong to want to destroy another human being and to spend so much time and effort trying to destroy Bill Clinton—some of it with really suspect information."

Even though Inglis had previously won six congressional elections since 1992, perhaps his story is pertinent only to South Carolina.

"We're being driven as herd by these hot microphones—which are like flame throwers—that are causing people to run with fear and panic, and Republican members of Congress are afraid of being run over by that stampeding crowd." 

Inglis says that it's hard for Republicans in Congress to "summon the courage" to say no to Beck, Limbaugh, and the tea party wing. "When we start just delivering rhetoric and more misinformation...we're failing the conservative movement," he says. "We're failing the country." 

Yet, he notes, Boehner and House minority whip Eric Cantor have one primary strategic calculation: Play to the tea party crowd. "It's a dangerous strategy," he contends, "to build conservatism on information and policies that are not credible."

Republican weakness in the face of mass ignorance shows that political machines can't learn new tricks. The Democrat party followed an old playbook by nominating Al Gore in 2000. Bill Bradley would have been the inspired choice. Eight subsequent years cause anyone who remembers Bradley to wonder what could have happened if the Dems had a clue. The Democrat party subsequently doubled down with John Kerry, a politician even more lacking in personality, charisma and credibility than Al Gore. The Democrats co-own the 43rd President. It took an unknown outsider to turn the Democrat machine in a new direction.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Instead of feeble Democrat attempts at the moral high-ground we have the Republican party drowning in its own quicksand. Decades of cynical appeal to so-called values created an environment ripe for takeover by media demagogues. Having traded away legitimate positions for swift-boat style politics, the Republicans are now in no position to appeal to reason over racism, ignorance and hate.

Can it get worse?

Inglis points out that some conservatives believe that any issue affecting the Earth is "the province of God and will not be affected by human activity. If you talk about the challenge of sustainability of the Earth's systems, it's an affront to that theological view."

A lot worse.

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UPDATE: 8/26/10 - Timothy Egan weighs in at the New York Times with a pitch-perfect critique of American ignorance. Early in the 21st century, we're reliving the 19th. A growing number of people who think for a living are climbing on TheRaven's bandwagon, for a War on Stupid.

A meaningless victory

Rand Paul's Kentucky win is being booted around the dumbisphere and Atlantic correspondent Joshua Green weighs in here with a decent but incomplete analysis. Green is an earnest sort, seems like your typical, bright, well-educated, liberal / progressive journalist. Ironic that this representative of the so-called elitist class, in explaining why Rand Paul signifies nothing, forgot that education is biggest reason why.

In Kentucky's case, lack thereof.

Kentucky is a poorly educated state. Kentucky has the highest ratio of people over 65 who didn't complete high school (42%) and big chunk of that group didn't make it past the ninth grade. Older, uneducated white people are the big, fat core of the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh/Coulter/name-your-dumbass demographic.

Click to see complete, full-size image

How uneducated is Kentucky?
 
* Dropouts - Kentucky has the 3rd highest ratio of high school dropouts in the adult (18+) population. Only Texas and Mississippi are worse.

* College graduates - Kentucky has the 4th worst ratio of college graduates in the adult (18+) population. Only Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia are worse. (Ratio includes people whose educational attainment stops at an associates degree).

Click to see complete, full-size image

This is not to say that Kentucky isn't making progress. In the 18-24 age group, Kentucky improves by 10 positions in higher education attainment and by 12 positions in the dropout ratio, vs. the all-adults averages.

Click to see complete, full-size image

There's a similar picture 25-34 age group, as Kentucky improves by 5 positions in higher education attainment and by 16 positions in the dropout ratio.

Click to see complete, full-size image

 The 35-44 age group is only slightly better than average for all Kentucky adults.

Click to see complete, full-size image

Education attainment in older groups of working-age adults falls like a rock: almost 20% of Kentuckians aged 45-64 didn't graduate high school and only 27% have a college degree, vs. (for example) 40% in North Dakota.

Click to see complete, full-size image

The data show that Kentucky adults are significantly less-educated than the national average. The difference between Kentucky and more developed states, typically in the northeast, is stark.

Therefore, a huge reason why tea bagger "success" will be hard to repeat outside of states where uneducated white people have undue influence is that they will not benefit from a preponderance of credulous adults, primed by lack of education to swallow Faux drivel.

(Analysis by TheRaven, Data source - U.S. Census Bureau)

Risible Class II

Following up on our first Risible Class post, it's time for the Tea Party signage edition. What makes the Tea Party crowd such contemptible fools? Could it be their spelling?

This mom sure set an example on the importance of learning English.

Yup, people in Canada, Denmark & Sweden are revolting against state oppression!

Note to 'baggers: not only are some educated people armed, they have better taste in handguns.

Did she plan on sitting when she wrote the sign?

Obviously, an expert.

Why are racists stupid?

Glenn Beck's Tea Party

 Click to see full-size image

What kind of people follow a babbling high school graduate, an alcoholic Mormon convert with a penchant for illegal drugs, a man who washed out of morning zoo radio only to stumble into a talk-radio lottery ticket served up by rapacious corporate greed. Glenn Beck is a tool wielded by a thug named Roger Ailes, who is Rupert Murdock's lackey. What does that make the Beck faithful? People who either don't mind or aren't cognizant of their own exploitation.

What do you call such people?