TEA and Crackers

(Below are a few excerpts from Matt Taibbi's article "Tea and Crackers" in the 10/14/10 issue of Rolling Stone. If you've never read Taibbi, you should. He's one of the best and funniest political writers working today. If you want to read the full article -- it's worth it -- just click on the article shown under Buster's Links.)

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TEA & CRACKERS. How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster. By Matt Taibbi

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally in Louisville. Scanning the hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Reagan impression -- "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" -- the person sitting next to me leans over and explains. "The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everybody in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

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Vast forests have already been sacrificied to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after a lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them.

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So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? Easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob. But they do have a few things in common:

One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years.
Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock.
Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views.

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The Tea Party is millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the banks that advertise on Fox and CNBC.

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Buried deep in the anus of the Bible Belt, in a little place called Petersburg, Ky., is one of the world's most extraordinary tourist attractions: the Creation Museum, a kind of natural history museum for people who believe the world is 6,000 years old. It's a glimpse into today's fundamentalist conservative Christian worldview. One exhibit depicts a half-naked Adam and Eve sitting in the bush, cheerfully keeping house next to dinosaurs -- a telling demonstration of this demographic's unmatched ability to believe just about anything.

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Tea Partiers aren't racist. They're just earth-shatteringly stupid and willing to believe the fantasy that white people are some sort of oppressed minority.

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This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses holding their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.