Point-Teabaggers

Over the past year the Tea Party Movement has made it into the mainstream of American consciousness. This right-wing populist movement has taken an understandable anger that many people across the political spectrum felt at the unchecked corporate bailouts and turned it into a paranoid show of irrational hatred of Obama’s supposed socialist agenda.

The biggest problem with the Teabaggers is an inconsistency in what they advocate. Tea Partiers complain about the national debt, blaming it on Obama, yet fail to recognize that it doubled under Bush. George W. Bush was probably one of the most statist presidents in history, creating massive new bureaucracies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and authorizing the unconstitutional Patriot Act. Additionally, Bush spent trillions of dollars on the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During all this growth of government, the American right and their allies in the media were largely silent or actively cheered it on and chided those who expressed dissent publiclly as being “un-American.”
Unlike Anti-War demonstrations which have generally been organized organically by a wide array of independent activist groups without any outside financial support, the Tea Party movement has received funding and organization support from conservative lobbying groups such as Freedom Works, chaired by former Republican House Majority leader Dick Armey and staffed with various members of conservative lobbying groups. They have also received fawning media coverage, being hailed by Sean Hannity as “Average Great Americans.” Bill O’Rielly was quoted as saying on his show “We don’t describe the protestors as loons,” yet in 2004 that was exactly what he referred to the anti-war protestors as. It should be clear that people who take to the streets to express their first amendment rights, often risking being brutalized by police are far more the activists then those who are manipulated by demagoguery.