Teabaggers Hold Million Moron March

AP

Patients from a D.C. psychiatric ward hold signs while on a fresh-air break at Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project.

Spurred into action by the poorly educated, crew-cutted Mormon ignoramus, Glenn Beck of Faux News, a confederacy of teabagging dunces descended on the National Mall in Washington D.C. today as part of his “9/12 Project.” His stated purpose was to bring the country together by reminding everyone of how we all felt united as Americans on September 12, 2001. Beck showed how serious he was about his little cause by fake-crying in a series of despicable on-air displays in which 9/11 served as a backdrop for his teary-eyed theatrics. Not surprisingly, the rally was far less noble, and much uglier than it’s purported goal might indicate, as it attracted some of the most under-evolved humanoid cretins walking America today.

Here is a video from the Associated Press of this Million Moron March:

Did everyone catch what that white sign said on the right of the screen? It read:

OBAMA:

WE HAVE WAKEN [sic] UP TO YOUR EVIL PLANS TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY. TAKE YOUR RACIST, UN-AMERICAN ACORN GROUPS AND ARROGENT [sic] WIFE BACK TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY AND STRIP THEIR RIGHTS AWAY!

As Beck himself did earlier this year, the sign accuses Barack Obama of being racist, and then proceeds to tell him to go back to his “own country.” You’ve got to love bald-faced hypocrisy. I also find the reference to Michelle Obama as “arrogent” quite instructive. The First Lady has conducted herself in a dignified manner, and hasn’t done anything that one could call arrogant. But I guess if you’re the racist asshole holding that sign, you expect black people to act meek around whitey just as they did in the Jim Crow South. Ah, the good old days.

The worst kept secret about this whole march is that it had nothing to do with policy and everything to do with the president. These teabaggers bitch about taxes, but the federal government has not raised their taxes or even proposed doing so since the last administration. They whine about freedom but were either silent on the Patriot Act or defended it on the grounds that they had “nothing to hide.” They are 100% partisan, and don’t give two shits about spending or the federal deficit. They were nowhere to be found in the Bush years when Dick Cheney boldly declared, “Deficits don’t matter,” and showed us just how much he believed in that maxim. Did teabaggers protest the bailout of Wall Street in last year’s TARP signed into law by Bush? No. Did they protest the ARRA (stimulus bill) this year which allocated money for infrastructural projects across the nation, and was signed into law by Obama? Yes. What does this tell you about these halfwits masquerading around as fiscal conservatives? That they can’t get off the couch to protest the largest single fleecing of American taxpayers in the history of the country, but they can hop on buses and ride a thousand miles to protest a bill that might actually benefit their states and hometowns. What are they really protesting here?

The president. The black president. The black Democratic president. The funny thing is, there is reason to protest, except these idiots are protesting the wrong thing. Like Bush, Obama is in Wall Street’s pocket and will act accordingly. However, Obama still has to get reelected. He also has a legacy to shape for the history books. For Obama, health care reform is a means to both of those ends, but his proposal is hardly radical. Before the debate even began, Obama inexplicably took the prospect of a single-payer system off the table, and thus his best bargaining chip. Whereas he could have started with single-payer in the negotiations with Congress, only to meet legislators halfway and create a strong public option, he has started with the public option. As a result, he now appears to be giving up ground that he should have had no business surrendering in the first place. This all begs the question, just how much reform does Obama want? Clearly not much. And if this country does get health care reform, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be concessions to the health care industry throughout the bill.

So then, the teabaggers are protesting what? Not socialism, as many of them claim. They can’t be because in order to be protesting against socialism, there has to be socialism, which there isn’t. Socialism is when the government controls the means of production. In the United States the private sector controls the means of production and also the government, which it uses to funnel taxpayer money into the private sector when it needs capital, and also through the annual Pentagon budget. That is definitely not socialism. It’s not even capitalism. It’s just theft. Business as usual. Although I must say, the government’s response to the latest financial meltdown was an unusually overt “Fuck you,” and should have made clear to everyone who really runs this country.

It is clear to me that these teabaggers are either protesting nothing that exists in reality (socialism), or are protesting something that could provide them with a cheaper and better alternative to the health plans offered by rapacious health insurance behemoths. Either way, we’re dealing with an extremely dangerous pathology—one that emboldens the ruling elite by demonstrating a profound ignorance of its power and outrageous excesses. While Beck and the teabaggers rail against a phantom socialist menace, Wall Street is laughing all the way to the fucking (offshore) bank with our money.

Obama could be protested against for many reasons, not the least of which is his decision to reappoint Ben Bernanke to chair the Federal Reserve. Bernanke, along with Hank Paulson and then-president of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, helped Wall Street pull off that impressive $700 billion TARP heist that’s going to make our economy much worse off in the long run. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in for a Day of Reckoning in the not too distant future because the government has artificially propped up companies that should’ve failed, and more importantly, because the government didn’t have $700 billion to give in the first place.

So pardon me if I chuckle a bit or shake my head when I see these middle to lower class shit-kicking teabaggers on television screaming in horror that a government-funded health insurance option might become a reality for the millions of Americans for whom private insurance is too expensive. Instead of protesting that the reform doesn’t go far enough, that we should have a universal health care system like every other developed Western nation, that stiff regulations be put in place to curb runaway premium costs, the teabaggers unwittingly shill for an industry that’s happy to keep fucking them in the ass as long as it’s profitable to do so. Forget what’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with America?

Well, as Matt Taibbi explains, the peasant mentality lives on in America:

“…[A]ctual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs.”

Welcome to the corporatocracy.

- Max