Well, it’s been a week since the Tea Bagging Extravaganza of April 15th. With that bit of distance, I think it’s time to have a look at what the Tea Bagging Parties were all about. It’s time to call them what they were:
The Tea Bagging Parties were, plain and simple, nothing more than Anti-Obama Rallies.
When you consider who was attending these parties and what their stated goals were, you can draw no other conclusion than that the Tea Bagging Parties were anti-Obama rallies that were (not so) cleverly cloaked in a variety of garments. Anti-tax. Anti-Big Government. Anti-government spending. Anti-socialism. Anti-communism. Anti-fascism. The fact that there was no coherent, consistent message and that the messages generally made little-to-no-sense in light of reality, it was clear that the far Right was practicing a little of their own brand of Political Correctness.
That’s right. The conservative Right was being politically correct, the one label they loathe more than any other. They couldn’t really come out and say they were anti-Obama. How could they? They just spent the past seven years claiming you have to support the president in a time of war. That it’s unpatriotic to criticize the president. It’s not that they aren’t doing that. They are. But there’s no way in hell, with President Obama’s approval numbers at nearly 70% and world-wide acclaim for his three months in office, that they could come right out and say they were anti-Obama.
So, they had tea parties presented as anti-tax but where the rhetoric was all anti-Obama, all the time. Obama as Hitler. Obama as a fascist. Obama as a socialist. Obama as a communist. Obama as a non-American citizen. Obama as a thief stealing from your children. Obama as tax-and-spend uber-Liberal. Obama as weak. All anti-Obama, all the time.
The irony of the fact that the vast majority of the tea baggers are receiving a tax cut completely escaped them but is the clearest indication that tea parties were anti-Obama rallies staged by the bitter minority of people who didn’t get their way on November 4th, 2008. They could barely stop themselves from having anti-Obama rallies during the campaign (arguably they didn’t stop themselves – see events comma Sarah Palin) but now that he’s president, they’re really having to stretch.
They lost. They’re angry. They’re bitter. They’re frustrated. They’re anti-Obama. They’re tea baggers.
This is the face of the conservative Right in 2009.
I’m just sayin’…
