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The Backlash: Beneath the Doom and Gloom Lies Money

Boo! Scared you, didn’t I? Now send me money and I’ll tell you how I can protect you from people like me.

Rating: 9 out of 10

There are many things that connect us all, no matter where we live, what color we are and which God we believe in. One of the deepest and most integral of those connections is fear. We all have it, whether it’s worrying about the spread of Communism, the shortage of scientific breakthroughs toward a cure for cancer, or maybe just late night jitters about the foul-smelling thing hiding underneath the bed. Most of it can be boiled down to a simple phrase, “fear of the other“. While some fears can be debated and argued as being justified, the underlying problem with fear is that once someone or something knows what your fear is, it can be used against you as a weapon. People throughout history have made their livelihoods based on that fact alone and it is on proud display here in the present day inside the formation of the Tea Party movement and the outlandish opposition to Barack Obama.

The Backlash by Will Bunch is a well thought out and deeply researched journey into the heart of the fear that sprung forth like snakes-in-a-can upon the inauguration of our new President. While many progressives and liberals clamor from the sideline, poking fun at the Tea Party and their growing membership, Bunch takes the honorable mission of tracing the movement to some of its more humble beginnings and the people actually at the ground level. What he discovers is real people with real fears who are being co-opted by big business and private interests in order to stop the change promised by the new administration.

One of the first things most people were introduced to when they saw the Tea Party crash onto the political scene was their fascination and fervor for protest signs and costumes. While this might have increased their news coverage, it also quickly devalued their message. From the subtle to the incredibly overt, racist slogans and imagery littered the reports of the fledgling movement giving an overall impression that everyone involved had the same color-coded mission, to purify the White House, and by extension, the country as a whole. On one side of the cable news spectrum (MSNBC, CNN, BBC, etc…) the Tea Party was characterized as rednecks that time had obviously left behind, while the other side (championed by Fox News) raised them onto the pedestal of patriots and grassroots revolution hailed as “real America”. The problem here is that neither description is true, but labels are sticky and even removed they can leave a nasty residue behind.

Another factor behind the proliferation of the “real America” illusion was those pundits and political commentators who saw the Tea Party as the lightning-in-a-bottle moment they were waiting for. Once they grabbed onto the coattails of fear inside the Tea Party, people such as radio/TV/internet phenom Glenn Beck wove those coattails around and around into each other until the fear escalated into paranoia, which in the ratings world is a wonderful thing. Beck had actually boiled it down to a simple equation, the bumper-sticker solution to all the fear in the country:

On his November 23, 2009 show, Beck went back again to the theme of a looming economic meltdown and recommended to his listeners what could just as well be a mantra of the right-wing movement in this new decade: “The 3 G system” of “God, Gold and Guns.”

Beck skyrocketed in popularity and influence, like many of the voices from the outer right-wing fringe, preying on the fears of people feeling like their country was forgetting about them. He wheeled out his chalkboard day after day, giving his viewers something familiar from their childhood, a symbol of learning which they all believed would never lie to them. Beck littered the surface of the chalkboard with various historical people and moments, drawing incredibly slippery and weak connections between them to prove any conspiracy theory he imagined that morning. Worse than that were those occasions where he blatantly misrepresented the views of historical figures to grant his own ideas more credence. Bunch illustrates that nicely in this section:

“Beck – and probably many of his listeners – would be turned off by many of the views of the real Thomas Paine. For one thing, while Beck has tried to argue that America’s true roots lie in Christianity, the real Thomas Paine was a Deist who loathed organized religion, writing in “The Age of Reason” that all churches “appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

You can be sure that particular quote from Paine never graced the esteemed surface of Beck’s chalkboard.

This is the thrust of Bunch’s message, that much of the Tea Party is being towed along by puppeteers and plagiarizers, purposely mis-informing them to wean the money from their wallets and the devotion from their hearts. The fervent devotees of the Tea Party should not be written off as a joke, especially since some of them actually won seats in our government during the last election. They should be listened to, but filtered through a lens of mis-appropriated fear. If we do not try and understand where they are actually coming from, people like Beck and his cohorts will continue to wield them like a bludgeon against the wall of this country until its inevitable collapse.

The End of the Page recommendation: The Backlash by Will Bunch is a staggeringly human look into the real fear behind the so-called grassroots revolution of the Tea Party and how it has been co-opted, controlled and ultimately, how it will be condemned.

Welcome to Pandora’s Tea Party!

Poster Board = $2.00, Two Sharpie Markers = $3, boiling down complex issues into a fictional comparison of choice = priceless.

There are two mostly unavoidable facts going into the first midterm elections for President Obama. One, the first midterm election after a new president takes power almost always sees a loss in the seats for his (or someday, her) party. This is commonly referred to as “buyer’s remorse” where the enthusiasm for the president’s party wanes after the win and they sit back on their laurels, while the losing party rallies harder and louder to try and come back from the embarrassing loss of the big seat. Two, in terms of this specific moment of economic hardship, the party in power is held to blame and again they lose more seats. It doesn’t matter where the problem started and how far back the blame can be placed. Most voters will only turn their calendars back so far before deciding that the current governing body had enough time to fix whatever ails the country. True, that sounds a bit illogical, but politics and logic are very, very long distance friends.

So as the Republican party looks to gain seats across the board during this so-called anti-incumbent rage, they are now seeing a quite different landscape over the horizon. There are still blue states where they were before, but now the red states are getting…redder. The fervor they helped whip up has bitten them much deeper and much sharper than the Democrats. Now heading into Nov. 2 the right wing of this nation has to figure out what they can do with a handful of wildly conservative, if not radically so, candidates which have to be groomed for the national stage. They opened a political Pandora’s Box and what rushed out has pushed any moderation in the Republican party completely out of the picture. Here’s just a snippet of what they are working with:

Sharron Angle (R-NV):

• she is an extreme pro-lifer, extending her anti-abortion stance even into cases of rape and incest. When asked her reasoning for those viewpoints she said “two wrongs don’t make a right” and when directly asked what she would tell a 13-year-old girl who was raped by her own father, Angle likened it to turning a “lemon situation into lemonade”
• she has repeatedly referred to unnamed members of Congress as “domestic enemies”
• after numerous attempts to help her back away from this statements, she has stood her ground on stating that if things don’t go the right way in November, the citizens have a right to fall back on their “second amendment remedies”. Yes, she means guns.

Christine O’Donnell (R-DE):

• in 1998 she made an appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and espoused how truth is always the best route to take in any situation. While this is a morally upstanding belief, she was pressed on it and further clarified by saying she would not even lie to Nazis if she had Jews hiding in her house because “You never have to practice deception. God always provides a way out.”
• she founded a group called SALT (Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth) which lobbies the government on the basis of tightly followed Christian morals. At one point in a MTV interview she was quoted saying, “It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you also have to be be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery, so you can’t masturbate without lust.”
• In a continued defense of bringing religion into every facet of society, she once said, “We took the Bible and prayer out of public schools. Now we’re having weekly shootings. We had the 60s sexual revolution, and now people are dying of AIDS.”
• In fact, since I can’t list all of the amazingly dangerous and inane stances she holds, here’s a link to an incredibly thorough list put together by Think Progress.

Joe Miller (R-AK):

• joins Angle in believing that abortion should be outlawed completely, even in cases of rape or incest (no word yet on his feeling about lemonade.)
• believes Medicare and Social Security should be phased out completely (no word yet on how he plans to help seniors pay for those benefits on their own.)

Those are only a few of the hard right wing extremists to swing out of the hurricane of anger and disappointment over the current state of affairs in this country. I’m not saying that the anger isn’t justified. The country is in rough shape, but this incoming flock of proposed candidates is talking about legislating by religion over democracy. They view the Constitution not as a document written by men, but one deemed to be written by God (the bitter irony being that many of those very men were defiantly against the idea of combining God and government.) There is a small, but loud and proud, group of people who are trying to split the country like the Red Sea, with Christian believers on one side and all others, known as “enemies”, on the other side. They say America needs to be brought back to its non-existent roots as a Christian-only nation. O’Donnell goes even as far as to say the idea of “separation of church and state” came from Hitler first (is there anything that guy can’t be connected to?)

Barbara Streisand said it best in the title to her Huffington Post piece: Stop. Think. Breathe. (You should truly take a peek.)In my own words, I would warn that if we are not careful as a country about where we let this flood of anger and fundamentalism takes us, we will find the country wiped clean, not of our sins, but of our freedoms.

A Glimpse Behind the Fog of Hope and Hate

I promise to do whatever my political party says, in right and in wrong, till death do us part

I can hear it now rumbling in the back closet, rocking back and forth with one broken foot, that same one I’ve been meaning to fix for two hundred years:

The Political Spin Machine

…and it’s going full steam.

With the election of Republican wunderkid, Scott Brown, the troops on the right are doing everything they can to convince Democrats across the nation that every progressive and liberal policy currently being proposed now has as much chance of succeeding as Conan O’Brien ever doing a show on NBC again. Yet, let’s take a good close look at what really happened yesterday and see if we can’t find a way to help each party find its way back to some type of ethical center.

By electing Scott Brown, Massachusetts brought the Democratic majority in the Senate down by exactly one. They dropped from 60 to 59 and while many will bemoan the loss of the filibuster proof majority, what they neglect to mention is the filibuster proof majority never really existed because of those Democrats in the Senate referred to as “Blue Dogs”, or more conservative-leaning voters. The squelching of the filibuster happened only once, which was to finally push the Health Care bill out of the Senate, and the reparations the liberal Democrats had to make in order to secure those Blue Dog votes over the filibuster helped to shape a bill that virtually no one is pleased with. So the idea that Scott Brown’s inclusion in the Senate will suddenly destroy the happy-go-lucky hand-holding going on in the left leaning side of the chamber just shows how little the right side actually pays attention to what is going on.

This is nothing more than a scare tactic to frighten the left and encourage the right, but I honestly believe the right has more to fear from Scott Brown than the left. Republicans think his election is a repudiation of Democratic policies and of Obama himself, but in fairness I believe he was chosen more out of frustration of continued record unemployment ratings and a growing disappointment from independents who let themselves believe the Obama hype machine during his campaign. I’m not knocking Obama, I voted for him as well, but people seemed to forget he is just one guy inside a government machine built by money, power and massive special interests. He has made many changes already, in demonstrably record time, but people on Main Street won’t feel the effects of those until much later. The change some people was hoping for was much more than he could ever achieve in such a short amount of time. Remember, his one-year anniversary as President was yesterday!

Scott Brown also comes in claiming he is ushering in a “new type of Republican”, which in other terms means “time for the old guys to move on out.” Let’s see how well that plays out in the polls come mid-term time. Anyone coming in preaching change to the “old way of politics” is a danger to anyone currently sitting, Republican or Democrat.

Now, while watching Mr. Brown gloat over his seemingly amazing win, I can’t say I’m incredibly impressed with him or how he handles himself (check this little moment of pimping out his daughters at his acceptance speech), but I wasn’t all that enchanted by his opponent, Martha Coakley, either. This is where people need to help usher in a real and tangible sense of change. We need to start looking beyond the party name and look at the actual person. As unattainable as it might sound, filled with pretty rhetoric and uplifting oratory, I agree with Obama when he stumps for the goal of bi-partisanship, but I want to take it one step farther. “Bi-partisanship” alludes to the idea of two parties getting along, but what about “tri-partisanship”? Actually, we do have one Independent senator (wave to the nice Internet folks, Mr. Barney Frank of VT). What about “quad-partisanship”? The Tea-Partier’s are about to host their own conference, so who will deny they have a chance to get their own candidate on a ticket and not be forced to list them as Republican? I’m a good distance off from supporting anything currently coming out of the tea-party caucus, but I fully encourage their right to not affiliate with either dominating party. My belief is if we breakdown the powerhouse parties the American populace would be forced to learn more about who they are voting for instead of just checking whether their was an “R” or a “D” next to their name.

An informed populace is an absolute necessity of any great democracy and it’s time that we as members of that populace bore some responsibility for that.