The Hypocrisy Of The Teabaggers

Obama a black Nazi? In Tea Party Land, anything is possible.

As the enlightened followers of this site already know, the teabaggers are an extremely hypocritical group of people who are “fed up” with the government. Although they were nowhere to be found while George W. Bush was turning a surplus into record deficits, all the while shitting on the U.S. Constitution, they took to the streets less than two months after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Today, when a teabagger complained to Matt Taibbi in the comments section of his blog that the latter was not giving the movement its due respect, Taibbi responded with guns blazing:

What happened at the END of the Bush administration? What about before that, I wonder?

That’s why the Teabag movement has no credibility — none, zero. Bush, having inherited a budget surplus, added $5 trillion to the national debt, not only with his two idiotic wars but with massive giveaways to his campaign donors like the Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, which in spirit and in execution was basically no different from Obama’s health care plan.

Bush was a rampant spender and the only reason the Teabagger crowd didn’t perceive him as such until the end was because you always saw Tom Delay pushing for “cuts” in things like food stamps and heating oil whenever they needed to find money to pay for this or that asinine pork program.

I remember sitting in congress and watching in the months after Katrina and listening to Republican congressmen one after another patting themselves on the back for making the “tough” decision to pass the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which sliced $70 billion in food stamps, college tuition aid and Medicaid.

But of course this wasn’t a net cut overall — they passed it in order to pay for a tax cut that primarily impacted top-bracket taxpayers, a tax cut that was pushed through despite the fact that the federal government was going to take a huge bath on Katrina emergency relief and unexpectedly high Iraq expenditures.

So the entire maneuver was deficit-neutral at best, and in reality added to the deficit, because all the “cuts” did was offset a blatant giveaway in the middle of a gigantic budget disaster.

But the Teabag crowd was happy because what they saw was a cut for “entitlements” — in other words, you cut $10 billion in food stamps for Mexicans, no one cares if you add $20 billion in drug subsidies and corporate tax breaks and outmoded weapons programs and the supremely idiotic occupation of Iraq, where private companies were getting paid thousands of dollars a minute to drive phantom truckloads of gas across the desert (what Halliburton called “delivering sailboat fuel”).

In the course of covering two presidential campaigns I never once heard any of you people talking about Bush’s spending. It was always liberals this, liberals that, gay marriage, welfare and socialism, and cheering whenever someone like Ann Coulter said something daring and witty, like how “compassionate conservative” carries the same connotations as “articulate black.”

And when people like Jeremy Scahill did a pretty excellent job proving that the Bush administration was practically setting fire to billions of taxpayer dollars in Iraq, you folks didn’t want to hear about it back then. All you wanted to do was cuddle up in your idiotic fantasies about how people like me were socialist traitors plotting to turn the state over to Hamas and single Dominican moms.

So forgive me if I feel like laughing whenever you complain about how you’re not taken seriously. If over the last eight years you’d spent a little more time reading and a little less time impugning the patriotism of honest Americas like me, I might be inclined to listen to you now. But your basic problem is that you only hear what you want to hear and don’t even consider learning about anything else, and all you want to hear about is how Those People are to blame for your problems.

Last time I was in DC, there was a teabagger rally on the mall and not one of the dozens of you people I interviewed even cared that there were House hearings on financial regulatory reform going on. You all had plenty of things to say about how Obama was going to steal the next election with an immigration amnesty, but not one of you even knew what a derivative is or what the proposed new laws governing them were.

And give me a break about how much it hurts your feelings when I use the word “teabagger.” You love it when slick overeducated northerners like me call you names, because it validates your amazingly overdeveloped sense of victimhood/political martyrdom, which you love to wallow in above all things. You think we don’t listen to Rush and Hannity and hear you calling in whining all day long about how you’re not being taken seriously?

From Taibblog

Ouch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we should talk about the teabaggers. On one hand, like all non-wealthy Americans, these are people who have gotten clobbered financially by thirty years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism, and so perhaps some sympathy is warranted. Noam Chomsky, for one, identified the tea partiers as people with “real grievances” who are getting crazy answers from the right wing media as to the cause of their problems. Chomsky says that it is incumbent upon the Left to provide better—i.e., reality-based—answers to them. That is all well and good; but it is a sad fact that no matter how coherent and truthful our answers may be, many—probably most—of the teabaggers are going to continue to believe that the biggest problems facing America today are illegal immigrants, gays, unions, community organizing groups such as ACORN (which commits the reprehensible crime of giving a voice to the voiceless poor), and government spending on “entitlements.” But as Taibbi pointed out, the only entitlement programs that they ever attack are ones that help others: Medicaid, food stamps, etc. You won’t hear too many middle-aged teabaggers decrying Medicare or Social Security for the plain fact that they fully expect to reap all the benefits of those entitlement programs. And cutting the military budget is out of the question for them because they favor a “strong national defense,” which is a euphemism for unchallenged U.S. hegemony in the international arena. Also out of the question for the teabaggers is eliminating pharmaceutical and agribusiness subsidies because most of them don’t know they exist.

Judging by the coverage of the tea party rallies, it seems to be that a good chunk of the teabaggers are baby boomers, who, despite the constant trashing of younger Americans in the media, collectively make up the most selfish generation in American history. As a result of the hard work and sacrifice of their parents who persevered through the Great Depression and World War II, the boomers had exponentially better lives than their parents. As George Carlin said of the boomers, “They had a free ride, and they took it all.” Their philosophy was, and still can be, summed up thus: “Gimme it, it’s mine! Gimme that, it’s mine!”

A generalization? Obviously. But perhaps there is more than a kernel of truth in this. I hear a lot of teabaggers bemoaning government spending and deficits, but what I’m not hearing are any offers to forgo their own entitlements. They rail against socialism, but fully expect to get their Social Security checks and Medicare when they turn sixty-five. But for the teabaggers, neither Social Security nor Medicare seems to constitute “socialism,” which they love to scream about and condemn. No, “socialism” describes entitlement programs for other people. This way, socialism can continue being a dirty word. After all, no red-blooded American could possibly be in favor of, or benefit from, socialism, so those entitlement programs don’t count. But something like Medicaid, which far fewer Americans have than Medicare, is socialism because it benefits poor people and minorities, and not teabaggers. Are you starting to see how this works?

I don’t know what will happen in the November midterm elections, but suffice it to say the Democrats are in rough shape. While there was no way they or anyone else could’ve turned the economy around by now, they haven’t exactly given the public a reason to reelect them. When Obama took office and Americans were calling for the heads of the Wall Street titans partly responsible for sending the economy into a terminal nosedive, the president sat on his hands, did nothing, and then went to Lower Manhattan last summer to politely ask that Wall Street reform itself. This sorry episode shows just how beholden even the Democratic Party—the supposed party of the working class—is to the business interests of the country, particularly the financial services sector.

Having said that, I find it incredibly disturbing that more Americans are starting to believe that the answer to what ails the country is to put the Republicans back in power. One would think that the havoc wrought by the GOP on this country in both domestic and foreign affairs during the last decade would have left an indelible impression on the American mind. Apparently not. The teabaggers and their sympathizers do not seem to remember anything that occurred before January 20th, 2009.

This just goes to show what horrible choices Americans are faced with at the ballot box. It has been said that the backlash against the Democrats is actually part of a wider anti-incumbency sentiment. And maybe there’s some truth to that. But while I find it almost impossible to make a good case for keeping the Democrats in power, I find totally impossible to make any case for bringing back the Republicans.

- Max Canning