The Mad Tea Party

by Damozel | "How do you know I'm Mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

Exactly.

Krugman wonders if it's even quite fair to pick on Republicans and their risible yet tragic teabaggings anymore. These are people who are flailing about because they are fundamentally off balance.  Is it rude to point and laugh?  Krugman writes:

Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.

Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.

I can't agree with Krugman here.  I'd feel differently if they seemed to have any inkling of how pathetic and futile and shabby their great "movement" looks from outside, particularly given what Krugman calls "the Astroturf" (as opposed to grass roots) component.  It's sad, but also hilarious, to see the usual consortium of Wall Street superclass still yanking the strings of the hapless (not to say clueless) Main Streeters to ensure the protection of their personal wealth.

But I'm not going to waste the opportunity to point and laugh just out of pity.  As Krugman also says, the GOP's mad teaparties and its grandiose plans for mass teabaggery is just more of what we've come to expect..

These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.

But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre....

Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.

Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials. But while it’s new to have a talk-radio host in that role, ferocious party discipline has been the norm since the 1990s, when Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, became known as “The Hammer” in part because of the way he took political retribution on opponents.
(New York Times)

And so it goes.  But now -- now that they can't really do anything about their chronic state of bug-eyed rage and paranoia except make maladroit gestures -- their machinations have become a spectacle that I for one am fully prepared to enjoy.  Is that wrong?

Hey.  If laughing at the teabaggers is wrong, I don't want to be right.

More here....

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