So I'm at work awaiting my next project, sitting at my computer while streaming the Ed Schultz Show online. (Unluckily, in the Tampa Bay area, we are without a terrestrial progressive-talk radio, so I have to kick it satellite.)
Anyhow, some caller on Ed's show started off by saying that he was a "conservative, but not a whackjob, like those at the McCain/Palin rallies." He tried to sell himself to Ed as a pretty normal guy and "mainstream"--for a conservative--until he revealed the little factoid that he was not only planning on attending a teabagging party, but actually organizing one.
He also admitted--big shocker--that the reason for his involvement, and what he thought were other conservatives' involvement, had nothing to do with taxes, bailouts, or pork-barrel spending. Rather, he said it was for conservatives to feel like they had a voice again, because now, he asserted, they felt completely voiceless.
Oh, please. Cry me a fucking river. At the jump.
Well, to give this conservative caller from Ohio credit, at least he seems to admit what John Cole has hit right on the money--that basically:
if right now, it were President John McCain and not President Obama, and nothing else had changed, these tea parties wouldn’t exist. You know it, I know it, and even the teabaggers know it. It is just such transparent bullshit that it is offensive. The most these guys ever did during the last lost eight years was put a limp Porkbusters logo on their website, but now that we have President Malcom X George McGovern Shabazz, they are freaking out like there is no tomorrow.
Ed Schultz called him on this as well, saying before, during, and after his call with said right-winger that this was about a) race and b) the Democrats now having power, and the Republicans and conservatives now feeling powerless. All of a sudden, the country that had only marginally elected the last President had unequivocally and in a landslide attested that they didn't want any more of the shit that the last eight years had wrought.
This past November's election was, as much as it was electing an exceptional leader in Barack Obama for President, also about an end to a host of ills with which the Bush/Cheney Administration had laid waste to the U.S.
An end to the corporate giveaways and runaway deregulation policies that have eviscerated our treasury and run our economy into the ground.
An end to the criminal actions of the higher-ups in our executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government--and the rewarding of those who defended or even perpetrated these acts.
An end to the assault on reason, science, sanity, and separation of church and state by a powerful minority of theocratic nationalists who wanted to impose their narrow, right-wing interpretation of an otherwise tolerant and socially-just faith on everyone in the U.S.--and by implication and future extension (Google Joel's Army), the world.
An end to horrendous foreign policies that all but ignored the plight of the starving, the besieged in Darfur and elsewhere in the world, the underaged and overworked in cruel working conditions in places like the Mariana Islands--yet that didn't waste a moment in torturing the wrong people and invading the wrong country when it was politically expedient for those in power to do so.
And finally, an end--in the near future--to the misbegotten war in Iraq that was based on a pack of lies and shoved down the throats of everyone in America with nary a protest from the willing minions on the right.
And now the caller on Ed Schultz is complaining that the conservatives are now oppressed somehow, and not given a voice by a government that has bent over backwards to be inclusive and bi-partisan, to a fault.
If anything, the teabaggers in this country--and their enablers--still have a disproportionately HUGE voice during the Obama Administration. I don't see them getting their mikes cut off on major news networks or even in the halls of Congress. I don't see free speech "zones" for tea-party protesters or teachers threatened with arrest for wearing T-shirts with innocuous sayings like, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." I didn't see an entire major-cable network, purportedly to deliver news to its audience, enabling, encouraging, and outright SPONSORING AND HOSTING our rallies of protest against the Iraq war and genuine tyranny within our government, yet I see the same "news" network doing exactly this for your protests against imagined "tyranny" today.
So please, don't preach to me about being "voiceless," because you haven't experienced what being voiceless really means. We have--for eight long years--and we went en masse in November to raise our voices at the ballot box. In any healthy democracy, election of a government by a sound and undisputable majority is the very antithesis of tyranny.
So I ask you in closing: why do you tea-party revellers loathe democracy?