The Pied Pipers of Looney Ville have swept the Tea Partiers away on a year-plus long, one-way hay ride to the sheer cliff’s edge of Mount Crazykins. These bamboozled hay-riders’ sole hope lies in abandoning what they thought were themselves. The Pied Pipers, of course, never were in the Tea Party. They built it as political cover for themselves to wreck that middle class to which most Tea Partiers belong. The super rich versus the barely “supper sufficient” little people whom the great folk, such as the Koch bro’s, the legally embroiled Murdoch family and fat minions such as Roger Ailes and Dick Armey, may yet reduce to one meal a day. Eat your porridge, junior! Trade your dog house for a cat box. Fire your four employees and do all the work yourself, at sixteen hours a day. Have your wife take in the neighbors’ laundry and ironing at night and babysit their kids all day. Teach your wife the psychology of eliciting payment from the neighbors on time. Let them know everyone in your house keeps a shotgun or thirty-two special. Frown a lot! Serve hotdogs and beans for your holiday cookout.
The Tea Partiers have been inflated to use as car-dummies so the hard drivers can speed along on the diamond lanes, looking as if they have full Hummers and stretch-limos. When these dummies wake up, they’ll be totally deflated to learn that the real GOP has become the POG, Party of Greed, aligned with Wall Street, not Main Street, and clearly not a street anyone lives on unless it’s in a fortress-walled and gated community. I’ve said it before. It’s simple. We have a tiny number of horrendously rich people in our country compared to nearly three-hundred millions of everyone else! A tiny number out of that tiny number of rich folks are on our side and care about the whole populace.
Of the uncaring rich, I quote an AlterNet blogger [Booman Tribune, 7-13-11]: “They would like to keep the money they have and … to set the optimal conditions for them to make much more money. In this, they’re not really much different than the rest of us, but their behavior can have an outsized impact on … things, like the integrity of investments or the quality and safety of products or the healthiness of the air and water or the kind of compensation we receive as their employees. Very frequently, our interests conflict with their interests. They’re badly outnumbered, so they should expect to lose political arguments pretty much all the time. But they have money. Lots and lots of money. And they use that money to create political speech and political outcomes. But speech isn’t enough. They need votes. And the only way for them to get enough votes to have their interests reach parity with ours is to align themselves with some other large segment of the population. In our recent history, this has been religious conservatives and, [most] especially, Southerners who still retain an unhealthy contempt for the Federal government that beat them in the Civil War.” Libertarians, he adds, cheerlead for the fat cats not from real self-interest but mistaken identity. Most “were born on third base, think they hit a triple and are really pissed that they haven’t yet scored. They blame empathy. And Al Sharpton.”
When they’re in power, Republicans run up huge deficits. Believe your ideology or the facts. They loot the treasury, enriching themselves and their donors. That’s what Republicans do, the party’s entire purpose. The deficits are a byproduct of their aim to pay minimal taxes while pulling big money to their rich pals. Once out of power, Republicans act as if Democrats produced those deficits with uncontrolled taxing and spending. Then they hound Democrats to cut social programs and any expense that shorts their fat-cat backers and directs it to people who need help.
“Booman” concludes: “If you joined the Tea Party because you want to see lower taxes on millionaires and less regulation of business, then good; you’re on solid ground. But if you joined because you want smaller government and a balanced budget, you made a grave mistake. The thing about greedheads is that they have no moral qualms about ripping you off and selling you out. They’re almost sociopathic by definition. I mean, who attacks empathy?”
NEWS FLASH: Today it was Obama who gathered up his papers, allies and walked out of the debt committee meeting. Right away, Kantor was in a huff. The whole thing has been a charade to try to convince people they are unconvinced of what they insist is sacrosanct. They all know the sky will not fall, they dare not let it happen, but the POG has to dance around the campfire to impress its constituent donors. Can we really suppose the donors are as stupid as blown up dolls on the Tea Party hay ride? Maybe the POG is practicing the first principle of politics: If you don’t know the proper thing to do or can’t get it done, don’t do anything.
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