TEA Partiers: Ticked at Equality in America

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for over a year or so, you know about the teabaggers… excuse me, the “American Tea Party”. In a nutshell, the teabaggers are people who are angry at Democrats in Washington and President Obama. Why? Well, here are some of their reasons presented in list form:

Obama and Democrats are spending too much.

Health care reform is/was eeeeevvviiiiillll.

The people are being taxed too much

The stimulus bill was also evil

Them Big Bad Democrats and the Evil Black Man want to take away their freedoms

They hate n**gers.”WHAT-WHAT-WHAT?!”

Oh yeah, Dark Serge went there.

See, these protests started forming in early 2009, around Obama’s inauguration. These are mainly Republicans, conservatives, and… libertarians (excuse me, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit). It’s part of a more widespread feeling of anger among the right wing of America. Now, they claim to be in opposition to things like what I mentioned earlier, like taxes and spending, hence the name “Tea Party”. But wait, there’s something fishy here… what could it be…?

Could it possibly be that these people should have started protesting in… oh I don’t know… 2001?!

Seriously now, let’s look at this. Who was the president that spent billions upon billions upon billions of dollars without cutting spending in other areas or raising taxes to prevent deficits? Who was the president that actually bailed out the bankers on a blank check? Who was the president who pushed through what is probably the biggest invasion of civil liberties since the Alien and Sedition Acts in the late 1700s (a.k.a. the PATRIOT Act)?

Well, let me show you with a picture…

Yeppity-yep, yep-yep-yep-yep.

You see, President Bush was ACTUALLY doing the stuff the Tea Party is so mad about. Obama is managing spending to minimize deficits, has cut taxes for the middle class and poor, and has been working on expanding civil liberties. So why are these people so mad? We can find the answer through a look at what we’ve got in the government right now:

A female Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi)

A high-ranking gay man in the House of Representatives (Barney Frank)

A Muslim in the House of Representatives (Keith Ellison, who even… -gasp!- took the oath of office on a Qu’ran! Oh no!)

A gradual increase of black men and women in Congress, and who can miss the most obvious one…

The big, bad black man in the White House.Seriously. If these people were actually protesting spending and tax policy and all the stuff they’re wetting their pants over right now, they’d have been protesting when President Shrub was in the White House. They most certainly were not, though. They only started when Obama became the President. Why? Because either consciously or unconsciously, they want an excuse to be mad and try to get them evil old minorities out of the government. Simple as that.

Now, the right wing tinkled in their pants when Clinton was in office. The thing about Clinton, however, was that he was a liberal moderate Democrat (?). He was still a “good ol’ boy” type and that helped mitigate the reaction then. Now, of course, we have a black man in the White House along with other high office holders who are not straight white males, and this has these people wetting and messing their pants at the same time. They can’t just come blantantly out and protest on that, however, that would make them seem like… oh, I don’t know… racist, homophobic bigots? So they make up all this stuff and pin it on this current Congress and administration, and get out in the streets. Don’t be mistaken, however, it’s not just them. It’s the whole right wing. It’s also not just anger either, fear is a big factor here too–the fear of the white racists that they are losing their grip on the country (which is true, thank God).

America to them is only made of straight white people. When they say you're anti-American, they really mean anti-bigot.

You have right-wing morons like Sean Hannity whining about this Obama “regime” (his actual term). You have people like Sarah Palin using this dangerous rhetoric to stir up fear (“we need to reload”, anyone?). You have the talk radio screamers, the Faux News bitchers, all this going on…

And, as I said, it all boils down to anger and fear over the straight, white, “Christian” people crapping their pants over the fact that their power is dwindling. The right wing is crazier than ever nowadays over this, and it’s just gonna keep continuing. This is not a “grassroots uprising” either, it’s a corporate sham fueled by the right-wing media, like Faux News, that’s taking advantage of the anger and fear of dimwitted rednecks to make money.

In fact, for a moment, let me make some general observations about these people. Oftentimes, you’ll hear them talking about Obama, progressives, Democrats, whatever groups/people like that, being “un-American”. Of course them haters think that, because according to them, America is only made up of straight white people. They seriously think that, too, otherwise there are no other real reasons for this kind of behavior. They also think that right-wing/extreme-right-wing views are the only “real” American views, hence them calling progressives or even moderates un-American along with the people in them movements.

Hopefully there won’t be a domestic terrorist attack from the extreme right like Tim McVeigh’s bombing, but with all this rhetoric and all the fear it’s stirring, it’s an unfortunate possibility. All these people who are stockpiling ammo, these people who are forming these “militias”, these teabaggers, and their kind, are all angry about the fact that change is coming and bigotry in its current form is on the way out. Thankfully they’re a minority in the population. (irony intended).

This is precisely part of why we need rational voices out there in the media, like progressive talk radio stations and podcasts; community radio stations and public radio. In addition to realizing what these teabaggers are all about, we need to support rational media sources that are promoting good debate and discussion, acceptance and progress. Check out the Alternative Media and My Favorite Things sections here to find some of them sources.

Who will they teabag next? The world will find out soon…