Great White Dopes
No one could have predicted this:
Tea party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, tend to be Republican, white, male, and married, and their strong opposition to the Obama administration is more rooted in political ideology than anxiety about their personal economic situation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters look like Republicans in many ways, but they hold more conservative views on a range of issues and tend to be older than Republicans generally. They are also more likely than Republicans as a whole to describe themselves as “very conservative” and President Obama as “very liberal.”
And while most Republicans say they are “dissatisfied” with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as “angry.”
I’m sure you are all as surprised as I was to learn that the tea partiers were largely rich old white men who were angry. That sure is a revelation. I mean, with Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Laurence Istook, Mike Pence and company cheering them on, this is just a real revelation. Also kind of explains why they are so enamored with Sarah Palin.
I’m starting to think if we could just get most of the Republican party laid (and I mean sans wetsuit, diapers, and methamphetamines and with members of the opposite sex), they’d be a whole lot less crazy.
April 14, 2010 8:09 pm
Posted in: hoocoodanode, Teabagger Stupidity
140 Comments
140 Responses
freelancer - April 14, 2010 | 8:13 pm · Link
You forgot to punch Reason in the neck. I’m sure Nick and Matt are sure to scoff at this and say that the TP represents libertarian ideals at its core.
zhak - April 14, 2010 | 8:14 pm · Link
The photos of Palin’s Boston-based tea party rally sure did have a lot of white guys in ‘em.
I do wish someone would actually point out to these people—not to mention the public at large—that Obama is not “very liberal” nor even “liberal” in any sense of the word.
J.D. - April 14, 2010 | 8:16 pm · Link
“Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as ‘angry.’”
You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
Joseph Nobles - April 14, 2010 | 8:19 pm · Link
Does nobody ask if they were members of their college’s Young Republicans groups?
HumboldtBlue - April 14, 2010 | 8:19 pm · Link
Teabaggers—the angry white guy of American politics.
Cat Lady - April 14, 2010 | 8:19 pm · Link
Then they’d be Democrats. Republicans = crazy.
They should at least be able to afford a spell checker for the rubes’ signs. I’m available.
Joshua Norton - April 14, 2010 | 8:20 pm · Link
Yeah. The “supporters”. The ones who wave a flag at Fox Noise from thier recliner.
The ones on TV waving their misspelled racist signs at the camera are pretty much Walmart trash, so I’m really not sure what the point is here.
Violet - April 14, 2010 | 8:21 pm · Link
Not.possible.
RD - April 14, 2010 | 8:23 pm · Link
Last I heard tea partiers consisted of more women than men. I’d search for the link, but I bet someone else could back up my memory on this.
DonkeyKong - April 14, 2010 | 8:23 pm · Link
Tea Party?
More like the “oops I crapped my pants and I’m so angry that I’ll have to get the help to clean it up and then scream at them that if they don’t speak english they should leave the country but not before cleaning up my diaper, oh and gardening my estate, lazy marxist nobama voting mesakins” party.
beltane - April 14, 2010 | 8:23 pm · Link
The tea party is nothing more than rich old white men throwing a tantrum because they lost an election. But what explains the general illiteracy among them? Could it be the meds they are on?
I am nostalgic for the days when folks like this contented themselves with golf and the occasional ogling of flight attendants and cocktail waitresses.
PaulW - April 14, 2010 | 8:24 pm · Link
Try sitting on a condo board meeting. Half of them are made up of teabaggers who b-tch from the seats but never want to hold a council seat themselves because THEY don’t want the headaches. /facepalm I swear I was gonna yell for the first time in 5 years at this one couple who JUST DIDN’T GET IT AAAAAAAUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHH.
And I don’t get paid for this sh-t.
laughingman - April 14, 2010 | 8:24 pm · Link
Some of the quotes in there are staggering in their stupidity.
From Kathy Mayhew, 67, “to tell you the truth, I think he’s secretly a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to.”
From Richard Gilbert, 72, “I believe there is a welfare class that lives for having children and receiving payment from the government for having those children.”
And my favorite, from Jodine White, 62,: “I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security,” “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”
It’s been quite some time since I’ve fallen off of my chair laughing. Bravo, Mr. Cole!
Midnight Marauder - April 14, 2010 | 8:25 pm · Link
This is great, especially since I just had the following conversation a few days ago with a “conservative” friend, who actually classifies himself as “neo-libertarian” (LOLWUT?).
schrodinger's cat - April 14, 2010 | 8:26 pm · Link
For a minute, I thought you were calling Tunch a dope. Where is his majesty btw? How is he adapting to his new abode? Time for a new dispatch of the Tunch Cam.
SIA - April 14, 2010 | 8:27 pm · Link
@Joshua Norton:
THANK you.
The rich white guys are the puppet masters. The poor white guys and gals are the obese, stupid, ignorant, and clueless puppets.
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 8:28 pm · Link
I’m starting to think if we could just get most of the Republican party laid (and I mean sans wetsuit, diapers, and methamphetamines and with members of the opposite sex), they’d be a whole lot less crazy.
Mr. Cole,
You may want to think about amending the above to read something like:
“I’m starting to think if we could just get most of the Republican party laid (and I mean sans wetsuit, diapers, and methamphetamines and with another consenting adult), they’d be a whole lot less crazy.” Or just strike the “and with members of the opposite sex” altogether.
Old and angry probably cross sexual orientation lines in equal proportions. If you’re old and gay and not getting any you’re just as angry as if you were old and straight and not getting any.
beltane - April 14, 2010 | 8:29 pm · Link
@zhak: We need some actual leftists to go on the march demanding the abolition of private property and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This might, just might, make them realize what a centrist Obama is.
The Dangerman - April 14, 2010 | 8:31 pm · Link
When Sarah’s act finally crashes and burns, she’ll have to resort to low budget porn; these fuckers will disappear at that point.
Xenos - April 14, 2010 | 8:31 pm · Link
In other words, they are Republicans posing as lumpenbourgiousie. Or they are lumpenbourgiousie posing as Republicans. Or they are a bunch of assholes, pretending to be human.
28%ers, the lot of them.
robertdsc - April 14, 2010 | 8:32 pm · Link
I don’t really care what their demographics are. I just want them to shut the fuck up.
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 8:33 pm · Link
In some ways, I have to admire the genius of Dick Armey here. In virtually every election, pundits find some way to declare that “angry white men” are the key demographic that will decide the election, and come up with a cute new name for them. I’m guessing Armey understood that if he appealed to the laziness of the press by pre-packaging “angry white men” so that they didn’t even have to make up a name, they would eat it up.
Kryptik - April 14, 2010 | 8:34 pm · Link
Shouldn’t the fact that the vast majority consider themselves “extremely conservative”, moreso than Republicans put the lie to the whole ‘bipartisan’ Tea Party they’ve been trying to peddle, too?
russell - April 14, 2010 | 8:35 pm · Link
If you’re calling for volunteers, I’m not seeing a lot of hands go up.
They’re starting to sound like the Village People.
FlipYrWhig - April 14, 2010 | 8:36 pm · Link
@beltane:
Good luck with that. They’d spend 5 hours debating whether the concept of marching was itself bourgeois before vehemently accusing each other of various betrayals to the corporatocracy for even considering the idea.
Violet - April 14, 2010 | 8:37 pm · Link
Check out the Voices of the Tea Party. I don’t think anyone who has a video there is not white. Most of them are not young either.
Mumphrey - April 14, 2010 | 8:38 pm · Link
Lord, after seeing these assholes milling around and screaming incoherently at everybody, “well educated” is not the first thing that sprang to my mind. There are some I’d be amazed to learn that they’d ever opened a book.
Cat Lady - April 14, 2010 | 8:40 pm · Link
@Mumphrey:
Supporters are different than participants. Think puppet masters v. puppets.
kay - April 14, 2010 | 8:40 pm · Link
@Redshift:
So true, and very funny.
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 8:41 pm · Link
@beltane:
The tea party is nothing more than rich old white men throwing a tantrum because they lost an election.
Or an erection.
Actually, I think losing elections gives them erections. They like being angry. And like PaulW notes, they really, really in their heart-of-hearts don’t want to be in power. Figurative and literal bomb throwing is too much fun.
It is a fantasy – they have the majority of financial, cultural and political power, but they’re something that is incredibly addicting for them to fantasize about being oppressed by THE OTHER - the Black, the Gay, the Hispanic, the Communist, the Atheist. And then fantasizing about how their plucky all-American fat white ass will swoop in save the day.
They fancy themselves the defenders of the republic, but they’re political LARPers.
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 8:42 pm · Link
@RD: Yes, there was a survey that generated a lot of discussion because it found they were majority female. This one found differently. (I think there have been others that also found them to be majority male.) I wouldn’t take either one as definitive.
Angelia - April 14, 2010 | 8:42 pm · Link
Why do you have to pay to go to a tax day rally? A neighbor offered his $75 extra ticket to the one in Norfolk, VA.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 8:42 pm · Link
Hmm, rich white men, say the types who have been riding their privilege for decades especially by exploiting the free labor of their enslaved wives and the cultural bars preventing women and blacks from achieving any real success in this country.
And old, you say, say, coming from times long before the civil rights movement, feminist movements, gay rights movements started pushing heavily on the slow march of people. Say, some people who might even be in the right age range to have been the “young faces” screaming in the crowd against integration?
The type of people who engaged in white flight and thought they ran away from “those” people once and for all and had blocked all the significant progress and now “those people” are back, suddenly in charge of things, on the television and there’s all these young multiracial crowds who seem happy about all of this and don’t seem to believe anything close to “proper behavior” like the role of a woman is as a house and sex slave and that blacks can’t be integrated?
Those people make up the teabaggers, you say?
Damn, no one could have seen that coming. No one certainly could have panned through the faces of old people with half-spelled signs screaming about “wanting their country” back and put two and two together.
Who wants to be the first to inform the national press?
stuckinred - April 14, 2010 | 8:43 pm · Link
I went to Paul Broun’s town hall on health care this summer that was held at the local white VFW (of which I am a non-participating member). I’m sure it was partly a function of the venue but there were lot’s of pissed off white vets there. The crowd was split and Broun got a raft of shit from the lefties but I was amazed to hear one vet in a wheelchair chastise the vocal folks because they hadn’t “earned” the right to speak out.
Kryptik - April 14, 2010 | 8:44 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
The press is too busy riding on the Tea Party buses and wondering if we need to add ‘Teabagger’ to the Very Serious List of Slurs alongside the n-word, f-word, and r-word.
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 8:45 pm · Link
@Kryptik: I think it was Steve Benen who pointed out how bogus that one was. Wingnuts rather curiously trumpeted that 1/3 of them are “independents or Democrats.” Of course, few of them were actually Democrats, so you could also say that 78% (I think) were “independents or Republicans.”
beltane - April 14, 2010 | 8:45 pm · Link
@Redshift: It’s not so much the genius of Dick Armey as it is the laziness and venality of the media that is the issue here. Being that the media establishment is overwhelmingly white, male, and rich, it does not take much in the way of genius to prod them into sympathizing with their fellow travelers on the right. The mark of a true genius would be to get the media to acknowledge the existence of the rest of the country. Right now, we are all non-persons in their eyes.
jwb - April 14, 2010 | 8:46 pm · Link
Here are the basic demographics:
Retired: 32 (teabagger) 18 (general population)
White: 89 (teabagger) 77 (general population)
Male: 59 (teabagger) 49 (general population)
College/Post Grad: 47 (teabagger) 25 (general population)
Income over $100K: 20 (teabagger) 14 (general population)
But income over $250K: 12 (teabagger) 11 (general population)
Finally, income under $30K: 18 (teabagger) 32 (general population)
margin of error is 3 pts for both categories.
Calouste - April 14, 2010 | 8:46 pm · Link
@Kryptik:
It also puts the increase in people identifying themselves as independent in perspective. Most of those newly independents are actually to the right of the Republican party, not somewhere between the Republicans and the Democrats.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 8:46 pm · Link
@de stijl:
It’s part of the “persecuted majority” stance you see in the fundamentalist Christians.
They like being able to pretend to be persecuted by the dastardly and vile minority while at the same time not suffering any of the disadvantages of being actually numerically smaller than their targets.
I think part of it is that stance, but I think it’s dialed up to post-11 numbers is that I think it’s starting to flash across a couple of remaining neurons that this time might be different and they might actually be a waning majority. The people they’ve been kicking just might be starting to amass critical mass numbers and the history they’ve been preventing might start swamping them again like in the 60s and 70s.
I don’t think they like that feeling and I think that’s why the temperment on the Right is less of the “hooray, we’re totally an embattled minority” and more “OMG, I shit myself on national television”.
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 8:47 pm · Link
@stuckinred:
Are there actually different VFWs for white and black vets? That’s pretty fucked up.
Elizabelle - April 14, 2010 | 8:47 pm · Link
Educated, hmmm?
Geo W Bush graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School.
Meh.
Mnemosyne - April 14, 2010 | 8:48 pm · Link
@Redshift:
I’m guessing it’s pretty close to 50/50. Though I hate to admit it of my gender, we are not actually more likely to be free of racism than a man is. Look at some of the photos from the civil rights days (and the Boston busing days)—women were not shy about showing up and screaming things.
Les - April 14, 2010 | 8:48 pm · Link
The one Tea Partier I know is an on-line friend who shares my addiction to Firefly. She’s in her 30s, from Georgia, is extremely intelligent, witty and good-hearted, and somehow manages to be a devout Evangelical Christian and a Randian Objectivist at the same time. I just don’t know how one can follow the teachings of Jesus AND Rand’s “philosophy” at the same time without some major mental dissonance and/or compartmentalization going on at the same time. It would make my brain asplode. But then, I’m just a simple-minded UU atheist. I like an uncomplicated approach to life.
Makewi - April 14, 2010 | 8:48 pm · Link
Meet the tea party
Booga booga.
stuckinred - April 14, 2010 | 8:49 pm · Link
@de stijl: It’s “defacto” or self selected and I don’t think it is just in the south.
gbear - April 14, 2010 | 8:50 pm · Link
Nah, then they’d just be angry at women too.
PurpleGirl - April 14, 2010 | 8:50 pm · Link
The reason their signs have spelling and/or grammar errors is that when they were in business or working for their corporations they HAD SECRETARIES WHO COULD SPELL AND EDIT THEIR LETTERS. Now that they’re on their own we see how dumb they really can be… and arrogant that they haven’t realized that if they used a dictionary we wouldn’t be able to make fun of them. As to the women who make errors… well, they were wives who stayed home being the corporate wifey and they didn’t need to know how to spell. (This is only partially snark.)
RareSanity - April 14, 2010 | 8:50 pm · Link
I got mine! Bitches!
How on earth do you expect old, douchebags to feel superior to…those people…if the Democrat Party doesn’t stop with this “middle class is the heart of America,” bullshit!
Joshua Norton - April 14, 2010 | 8:52 pm · Link
“extremely conservative” = polite way of saying “bigot”.
In fact, way too polite.
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 8:52 pm · Link
@stuckinred:
Which one do asian or hispanic vets go to?
Will - April 14, 2010 | 8:53 pm · Link
It’s possible to be highly educated, especially in technical fields, and still be stone-cold ignorant. University business and education schools may actually make their students stupider.
Doctors, dentists and engineers are famous for being highly educated in their fields and stunningly ignorant about anything else. Engineers, especially. It’s like you have to minor in a crazy conspiracy theory to get your engineering degree in this country.
Hart Williams - April 14, 2010 | 8:53 pm · Link
GREED-HEADS!
GREED-HEADS!
AIN’T WE CLEVER?
GREED-HEADS!
GREED-HEADS!
STICK TOGETHER!
Shut your mouths you little serfs!
OR WE’LL WHAP YOU WITH OUR ASTROTURF!
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 8:53 pm · Link
@Mnemosyne: No disagreement there. I suspect the reason the press always focuses on the angry white males (with the occasional spicing of different types of “moms”) is just because of course men are more important and significant.
Elizabelle - April 14, 2010 | 8:54 pm · Link
They are not Tea Partiers. They are not patriots.
They are Selfish Imbeciles.
Which is what we should call them. And unlike the label “fascist” and “socialist”, we would be correct.
PS: Calouste was spot on with this observation. I had been wondering about these “independents” myself.
Mnemosyne - April 14, 2010 | 8:55 pm · Link
Yes, let’s look at those Gallup numbers. The first number represents tea partiers, the second number represents the population as a whole:
Republican: 49% vs. 28%
Conservative: 70% vs. 40%
There’s a reason they used the qualifier “fairly.”
Ahasuerus - April 14, 2010 | 8:57 pm · Link
I’m just surprised at the “better-educated” part; the quotes from the article, and just the general level of bellicose lunacy and lack of historical perspective from the TP camp, belie that description. And these are older people, who supposedly learned history during the putative “golden age” of American education, and many of whom have actually lived through much of the history which now informs our historical perspective. Something does not make sense here; either the ‘baggers are lying about their level of education, or there truly is some sort of cognitive defect which makes even well-educated victims unable to raise a defense against these kinds of paranoid fantasy.
Or maybe they really are just racist xenophobes looking for a justification, however flimsy, for their bigotry. SATSQ. Sorry for rambling.
TrevorB - April 14, 2010 | 8:58 pm · Link
Those people are all democrat plants, clearly the Tea Party is composed largely of poor black muslims.
jake - April 14, 2010 | 8:58 pm · Link
Must have been families that tried to buy contraceptives from the “non-contraceptives, have them babies” drug store….
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 8:58 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
I was going more for “OMG, we’re totally an embattled minority, I shit myself on national television, and I get a boner when I scream at my congressperson at the townhall meeting about how I want my country back.”
Or maybe they just need to get laid.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 8:58 pm · Link
@Will:
There’s also the fact that it took a lot of victories by a bunch of movements to get the “liberal arts” to actually include the histories and stories of non-dead-white-men in the curriculum. So most of these people were taught about history and the world in which brown people and women and their existence was “rightfully” relegated to the unimportant dustbin of history.
In fact, this same core group of people have been a part of the movement railing against any attempt to correct this as well as to prevent this education from reaching anyone non-white or non-male. These are the people who tried to shut down Women’s Studies or Ethnic Studies programs, who complain about the “ivory tower” of modern academia, who train their kids to pitch fits whenever a non-white person or woman is on the reading syllabus, and constantly complain about how affirmative action means all of these brain-dead minority children are being let in over “deserving students”.
They were raised in a white male world and have been fighting tooth and nail for over 50 years to keep it that way.
And now, they’re looking around and panicking that all that hard work may have been in vain.
And it’s freaking them the fuck out.
stuckinred - April 14, 2010 | 8:59 pm · Link
@de stijl: Funny you would ask, my best buddy is Hawaiian and he swings by the AA VFW for a belt now and then. We do have an independent Nam Vets group here called LZ Friendly that has been around for 25 years. It’s mostly white but there are some brothers that have been a part of it from day one. Unfortunately it is largely alcohol centered so I usually swing by the annual Memorial Day gig, pay my dues and split.
RareSanity - April 14, 2010 | 8:59 pm · Link
@Will:
You know, I keep hearing this. This may explain the surprise in a lot of people’s voices when I tell them I am engineer.
I sure hope so, I’ve always suspected that it was because they assumed I wasn’t smart enough, you know, being a black man and all.
I guess I wouldn’t be considered the stereotypical engineer, because I actually have social skills, and don’t immediately assume everyone else is an idiot.
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 9:00 pm · Link
@Will: Engineers, especially. It’s like you have to minor in a crazy conspiracy theory to get your engineering degree in this country.
Sadly, the lesson a lot of people get from focusing on a field where everything is well-understood and there are well-defined rules is to have the arrogance believe that they understand everything (climate, the economy, society) and anyone who claims they don’t have clear and well-understood rules must be wrong.
The common basis of all conspiracy theories is a need for the world to be a lot simpler and make a lot more sense than it actually does.
danimal - April 14, 2010 | 9:03 pm · Link
Perhaps we can add a line item in the health care budget next year hiring a bunch of “special nurses” to take care of that special tea party problem. Might make ‘em less cranky, create some jobs and make some libertarian heads explode.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 9:03 pm · Link
@de stijl:
I know, I just think the current mood is a step beyond their usual “the minority is persecuting us” wank-fests.
Basically, it’s like how the Catholic Church a year ago was all “wah, the world is against us” and right now are flinging chaff seven ways to sundown with anachronistic rants about evil jews and Freemasons because the international press is starting to bite down hard and there’s a direct link to the pope.
Or how, the anti-gay forces have always complained about how they are all about love, but gay people are just trying to destroy religious freedoms, but now, are actually starting to bug out a little and have turned to full on conspiracy theories and increasingly anachronistic rants.
Basically, there is a different mood between the usual, “wah, the minorities are oppressing us” posturing and the sudden full on regression to shit you almost tricked yourself into thinking had gone away batshittery.
And I’m feeling that here with the teabaggers.
It used to be fun, a lark to be all paranoid with the men in the woods and now, shit just got real for them.
arguingwithsignposts - April 14, 2010 | 9:04 pm · Link
OT, but an earthquake in China – over 500 dead.
AnotherBruce - April 14, 2010 | 9:04 pm · Link
Kinda like the Brooks Brothers riot, except in casual clothes.
Of course, a lot of the casual clothes are several versions of the desecrated American flag.
stuckinred - April 14, 2010 | 9:05 pm · Link
I have to say that, as a Nam Vet and a VVAW member, there is a component of the teabagger thing that is is directly linked to the Vietnam Anti-war movement. These are people that saw what they consider a small group of vocal anti-war vets that captured the national attention and really impacted the public perception of the war. Obviously I think the difference is that we were right when we stood up against the war but I know they don’t see it that way.
fucen tarmal - April 14, 2010 | 9:06 pm · Link
i think when you poll a group of people, who are identified for being members of an anti-tax group, at least in theory, and start asking them to say how much money they make, you are asking to be lied to.
its like asking strippers at work what they think of older men.
john b - April 14, 2010 | 9:06 pm · Link
@John Cole:
so heterosexuality is somehow preferable to homosexuality now?
Litlebritdifrnt - April 14, 2010 | 9:08 pm · Link
The first thing I think of when I look at the teabaggers is that movie I think it was called “Welcome to Pleasantville” (?) where everyone was in black and white until they learned to live a little and turned colored (ie technicolored)
Second thought, I have spoken to several of these people, there are a boat load of them here in “retired marine and government workerville” I ask them when they spout their “government spending” and “taxed enough already” stuff “Okay so what should be cut? military spending?” crickets “social security?” crickets “medicaid?” crickets “tricare for life?” crickets “highway spending” crickets “VA benefits?” crickets “government pensions?” crickets it is like that on and on and on. When you actually ask these people EXACTLY what should be cut to curb government spending there isn’t a single program they don’t like, not a single program they would be willing to cut. The only one I guess would be “welfare” which accounts for about .0000005% of government spending. These people are utterly clueless, they only know that the government is spending too much money but they only want it spent on things that they like, but apart from “welfare” they have absolutely no clue what they would cut, they are angry and obnoxious but if you ask them for answers to the problem? crickets
Elizabelle - April 14, 2010 | 9:09 pm · Link
Here’s a plaintive reader comment from NY Times thread attached to “Tea Party” (Selfish Imbecile) story.
He or she is right. These guys are greedy geezers with megaphones, and you can see them polluting younger people’s opinion of their age cohort.
You already see a little evidence of that on Balloon Juice threads (some deserved, some too broadly stated).
comment 204, from ME Browning of Los Angeles to NYTimes:
LD50 - April 14, 2010 | 9:09 pm · Link
...and they’re deeply concerned about Amercia.
And Another Thing... - April 14, 2010 | 9:10 pm · Link
@FlipYrWhig: At some point in the not to distant past, there was going to be a march/demonstration in Portland, OR. The organizers assigned a start time for each of the protest groups, including the anarchists…that gave me a case of the giggles.
AnotherBruce - April 14, 2010 | 9:10 pm · Link
@Makewi:
So according to Gallup, Tea Partiers are fairly representative of Americans. Unless you actually read the statistics that Gallup uses to support its conclusions.
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 9:11 pm · Link
@RareSanity: I’m an engineer, too, and honestly, I haven’t seen much of this in people I’ve actually met. It may be an online thing—the engineers who are the most misguidedly convinced of their rightness are the most likely to talk about politics online.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 9:13 pm · Link
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Yup. They are Pleasantville, desperately molding their life on 1950s nostalgia based enitrely on what they remember of TV, which was all nice and white and male-centric and took place only in suburbs.
And the world is aligning with the real modern world and their little bubbles of fiction are starting to be colorized by the outside world and the slow march of real time.
And just like they did in the 60s, they are freaking the fuck out about it, because now they’ve run out of places to hide and they may be running out of time where they can still boss us all around.
Litlebritdifrnt - April 14, 2010 | 9:15 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
Wot you said. Twice.
Woodrowfan - April 14, 2010 | 9:16 pm · Link
getting a B in American history in college in 1970 and never learning another new thing since is NOT “well-educated.”
db - April 14, 2010 | 9:17 pm · Link
LOL! I just crapped my pants.
Too bad, this is too long for a bumper sticker.
I guess I will just have to go with, “LOL! I just crapped my pants.”
Redshift - April 14, 2010 | 9:17 pm · Link
@Elizabelle: Oh, absolutely. Just because teabaggers are mostly selfish privileged older people doesn’t mean that older people are mostly teabaggers.
El Cid - April 14, 2010 | 9:21 pm · Link
@john b: Terrible wording, but I’d assume that he would imply that no typical Republican party leader would be honest and open about homosexual or other orientations, just more lying, and deception and sneaking around, yet public condemnation.
Still, the point is on.
jwb - April 14, 2010 | 9:21 pm · Link
@Cerberus: And they’re retired and don’t have anything to do all day except let Faux News play with the emotions.
Litlebritdifrnt - April 14, 2010 | 9:22 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
And they can’t figure out why they don’t come home from work (or whatever) to a spotless house, and the wifey dressed in a house dress, pearls and a pinny and has dinner on the table. They cannot fathom that the 1950s sitcoms were just that, sitcoms, I doubt anyone was ever like that, but they cling to that dream, and they will die rather than let it go.
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 9:23 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
I think we’re in total agreement except for one point. What I hear you saying is that they’re angry, frightened, and realize that they’re a dying demographic that will never have as much power as the once wielded. And much more so than in the past – say when Clinton was President. (Funny how this pops up after a black man was elected.) I agree totally.
I think where we disagree is that I think some / many of them deep, deep down secretly get off on that, whereas you think it just makes them angrier, etc. than in the past and more likely to act out.
Thinking about it, we may be in total agreement, because now the extra-special anger and fear, etc. grants them the excuse to do an OK City 2.0 which gave them a boner the first time around.
Sorry if I’m misinterpreting you or putting words in your mouth.
Linda Featheringill - April 14, 2010 | 9:24 pm · Link
@de stijl: Yes. The point is get them laid. As long as it is with a consenting adult, other particulars are not our business.
El Cid - April 14, 2010 | 9:25 pm · Link
Does the poll ask the TeaTards about their feelings regarding the Confederacy, or whether or not the federal government was meddling too much when it ended racial segregation?
rootless-e - April 14, 2010 | 9:25 pm · Link
Resentment is apparently epidemic in America.
gbear - April 14, 2010 | 9:27 pm · Link
A local teabagger dope called up the local AFSCME office and left a bunch of messages. Talk about fucking with the wrong people:
Here’s the oh so predictable kicker:
Original Lee - April 14, 2010 | 9:29 pm · Link
@Redshift: Now we know why they are called teabaggers.
Litlebritdifrnt - April 14, 2010 | 9:29 pm · Link
@Redshift:
I don’t know about Engineers but my boss is an Attorney. He cannot even make a sandwich. He has no idea how to do laundry (“I don’t know which buttons to press”) He called me to his house once “cause there are light bulbs out” His daughter told me a story about when she was a child a bat got in the house, her, her brother and her mom were freaking out, my boss was flicking through the yellow pages looking for “bat removal” I never thought I would know people like this but I do.
mr. whipple - April 14, 2010 | 9:31 pm · Link
@rootless-e:
I’ve had a beef with you since forever.
El Cid - April 14, 2010 | 9:32 pm · Link
@gbear: That is awesome. And I bet the faux-tough TeaTard thinks he’s among “the rich” targeted by the AFSCME ad, and it’ll turn out that at best he’s some Insta-Mansion douchebag with maybe $500K gross income. That’s assuming he’s not your typical indebted small business owner who thinks that owning a small business makes him Adam Smith Giganto-Robot II.
Roger Moore - April 14, 2010 | 9:35 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
Amazingly, no. If you look at the numbers from the NYT poll, 84% of the teabaggers polled thought the views of the Tea Party were generally held by most Americans, vs. 8% who thought they weren’t and 7 percent who weren’t sure or were wishy-washy. I don’t see how they can think that way given that they got trounced in the last election, but cognitive dissonance has never been a problem with those guys.
Morbo - April 14, 2010 | 9:35 pm · Link
Shorter: Tea partiers are very much like Rick Santelli.
Citizen_X - April 14, 2010 | 9:37 pm · Link
Y’all ought to see this crazy video ad, apparently produced by Fox, wherein a bunch of actors-portraying-teabaggers (hey, times are tough) take ownership of the “teabagger” label. Beyond the sheer cringeworthiness of the ad, they’re definitely pushing the Average Americans angle, showing a group that is too young, too multiracial, and too working class (I mean, come on: a barista?) to be anything like the crowds with the scary signs.
GS - April 14, 2010 | 9:37 pm · Link
Actually I am surprised, and I seriously question the poll. there is absolutely no way this group is well-educated or wealthy.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 9:39 pm · Link
@de stijl:
Hmm, I suspect you might be right in some respects. When you think about things like the Rapture cult (which if they are “far-right” there’s a good chance they belong to that), there’s definitely this longing for some kind of “good vs evil” climactic battle where instead of them slowly going away and the world continuing on without them, they get to be “the last humans EVAR” and get one last moment of glory and triumphant song before the slow tide of history just goes away forever and nothing ever changes because everyone’s dead.
You see this also more secularly with the conservatives who are obsessed about finding an existential enemy to use nukes against.
I’m more talking about the exact tenor of their shit and the difference between their “I’m pretending to be a beleagured minority while enjoying the massive privileges of knowing that ‘my team’ is still firmly in the ascendant bully seat” and the existential terror they feel when they notice they no longer have the cultural momentum and the real beleagured minorities might be gaining some real power. This is especially felt in losing the mushy middle who see more cultural shame in casually nodding along with the bigots than in risking the ire of the bullies by agreeing with the minorities.
Of course, as we’ve seen in their “Confederate History Month” garbage, there seems very little that doesn’t get them off and it’s quite possible that it both scares the pants off them and excites them in the same way that practicing for a sporting event gets your heart rate up, but playing a game for real can make you all flush with the risk and excitement of it.
Of course, I also think that they preferred the former. If you used to get the trophy without playing a single game and now there’s an actual schedule, that’s more risk than they used to have and they hate really truly losing (see their hard-on temper-tantrums over every piece of privilege they’ve lost so far).
gbear - April 14, 2010 | 9:41 pm · Link
@El Cid:
I’m an AFSCME member in MN. There are a couple of vendors that I SO hope that guy is. I will lol. I also can’t wait to find out if he’s in Bachmann’s district.
I’d really like to go over to the capitol tomorrow with an AFSCME sign, but I can’t take the time off.
Cerberus - April 14, 2010 | 9:41 pm · Link
@Roger Moore:
Well, yeah, that’s because they’ve “gotten serious” and “put ‘them’ back in their place”. After all, just like all of their other life-long republican friends and the nice man on the TV said, the movement is filled with moderate real Americans who never cared about politics.
Just like they thought that beating ERA meant that women learned their place and feminism was dead. Hey, wait, how the hell is there a female Speaker of the House?
Linda Featheringill - April 14, 2010 | 9:41 pm · Link
@RareSanity:
In defense of Engineers:
I was married to an engineer at one point in my life and we socialized with his colleagues, who were also engineers. It was my observation that these guys [they were all men, naturally, at that time] varied a lot. There was the occasional stereotypical guy who was good with numbers but really had very few social skills. But most of them interacted with other humans fairly easily.
It is difficult to generalize about people.
I do defend one point, however: There are several people in the world who have a lot of education in one field but are really dumb about everything else in life. And they are every one of them really, really irritating!
Jay - April 14, 2010 | 9:42 pm · Link
@rootless-e:
Fixt.
fucen tarmal - April 14, 2010 | 9:43 pm · Link
@Litlebritdifrnt:
i don’t know to what degree the imagery matches the reality of the 1950s. i’m sure there were loose ways in which many could possibly relate. however, what is missing entirely is the sense of cost, or compromise necessary. what was traded for those choices, if one was lucky enough to make them.
i come from a long line of people who only sometimes choose the middle class option.
rootless-e - April 14, 2010 | 9:49 pm · Link
@Roger Moore: depends on your definition of “American”, don’t it?
Linda Featheringill - April 14, 2010 | 9:49 pm · Link
@stuckinred: Hats off to the VVAW.
One thing that happened to the VVAW was that the Right kept trying to shut them down – but most people thought these vets had certainly earned the right to speak, at least. So most people started listening to the VVAW.
And sanity slowly returned.
Damn, that was a long time ago. I was so young and beautiful and you were one sexy dude!
stuckinred - April 14, 2010 | 9:53 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill: Ha! Amazingly, some 30 years after the fact they released the film and I hit the website to see a pic of me in front of the whitehouse!
(note tricky dick’s chopper on the lawn)
Elizabelle - April 14, 2010 | 9:54 pm · Link
Another comment from the NY Times reader thread. (And I tell you, the readers’ comments are frequently more enlightening than the article itself. Goes triple if it’s David Brooks.)
Anyhoo, from Anna in California, comment 204:
... there’s something else they hate about President Obama, more than his race. More than the fact that so many of his earliest adopters (technology reference intended) were white, and young, and are still very much with him. They hate the fact that everything he does, he does WELL.
Barack Obama is a highly successful President, and these people can not abide that. It’s his competence that infuriates them. He is their worst nightmare.
And I am enjoying watching them wake to it.
Polar Bear Squares - April 14, 2010 | 9:55 pm · Link
More well-educated?
If that’s true, they must’ve outsourced the signage.
Cause they people holding those signs don’t seem like the brightest bulbs.
Elizabelle - April 14, 2010 | 9:56 pm · Link
Another comment from the NY Times reader thread. (And I tell you, the readers’ comments are frequently more enlightening than the article itself. Goes triple if it’s David Brooks.)
Anyhoo, from Anna in California, comment 204:
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 9:57 pm · Link
@Cerberus:
Think Cubs fans.
The Truffle - April 14, 2010 | 9:57 pm · Link
If these people are so well-educated, why can’t they spell?
de stijl - April 14, 2010 | 10:01 pm · Link
@stuckinred:
Which one are you? Canteen guy? BDU jacket with armband guy? Shirtless bearded guy?
JasonF - April 14, 2010 | 10:03 pm · Link
@Litlebritdifrnt:
As a lawyer, I’d just like to say that we’re not all that dumb. I, for example, know that if a bat ever got into my house, I would need to look not under “Bat removal,” but under “Removal, bat.”
Elizabelle - April 14, 2010 | 10:03 pm · Link
Thomas Jefferson couldn’t spell that well either. (Or so the legend goes.)
Of course, he didn’t have spellcheck and spelling was not as standardized in his day.
And, uh, he could think and communicate logically despite any spelling mishaps.
For this, they’re trying to excise him from schoolbooks in Texas.
MinneapolisPipe - April 14, 2010 | 10:06 pm · Link
The article mentions that most of the Tea Partiers are quite old.
Someone (perhaps Nate Silver) should create a graph cross-referencing the demographics of that poll with US life expectancy by region.
I think we all want to know when the Tea Party will literally DIE OUT.
Steaming Pile - April 14, 2010 | 10:07 pm · Link
There is a difference between “tea party supporters,” otherwise known as “people who think George W. Bush was awesome,” and “people with enough time on their hands (and a profound enough lack of self-awareness) to participate in tea party rallies.”
Of course, the New York Times isn’t making that distinction. That wouldn’t be as interesting a story, after all.
Steaming Pile - April 14, 2010 | 10:08 pm · Link
@MinneapolisPipe: Well, the last World War I veteran didn’t die until just recently.
El Cid - April 14, 2010 | 10:08 pm · Link
@stuckinred: Thank you for that. For reasons I grasp but will never understand, the entire Winter Soldier proceedings should have been seared into our national conscience as one of our most moral acts ever committed, but instead we get a bunch of jackasses parading around the 2004 Republican convention wearing purple heart bandaids on their fat-ass heads.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal) - April 14, 2010 | 10:14 pm · Link
@beltane:
I think the push to close mental hospitals back in the 70’s has led to a lot of crazy people being free to earn enough money so that they have lots of free time to torment the rest of the country for the pure pleasure of it. Now toss in the retired crazies and their Social Security benefits…
Freedom has consequences. ;)
Alice Blue - April 14, 2010 | 10:22 pm · Link
I’ve never heard the theory about engineers being right-wing crazies. My husband is a civil engineer who’s liberal and very level headed. The other engineers he works with seem to be pretty moderate.
We were driving through Peachtree City (an affluent suburb of Atlanta) earlier today and kept seeing signs for a “Tax Day Tea Party.” Those poor oppressed PC dwellers in their $500,000.00+ homes! Oh the humanity!
Honus - April 14, 2010 | 10:31 pm · Link
@JasonF: Thanks Jason. I’m a lawyer, too, and I cook dinner most nights, do most all of my own auto repairs, built the addition on my house with my teenage sons and in fact have caught and released a dozen or so bats that have gotten into our house over the years. I not only can operate a washing machine, I have taken ours apart and replaced its motor. To people like Litlebrit I say “next time you get sued, call a plumber.”
ksmiami - April 14, 2010 | 10:45 pm · Link
Damn you John Cole – you stole my overarching diagnosis of the entire Republican apparatus: The party members are completely insane and confused about anything and everything that has to do with SEX
Splitting Image - April 14, 2010 | 10:56 pm · Link
I wish.
The problem isn’t that they’re not getting any. It’s that they can’t stand the thought of anybody else getting any. Sex is the same as money to them. They’d be happy locked in chastity belts if the brown-skinned people have been castrated.
RareSanity - April 14, 2010 | 11:31 pm · Link
@Linda Featheringill:
May the FSM bless you…
Much to my dismay, engineering is still a high-tech sausage fest…I’m married, but it sure would be nice to have some pretty, extremely smart, women in the field to brighten up the workplace a bit.
I think that there is still an generational component as well. There seem to just be large differences in disposition between 40 and under and 40 and up.
I think it can be traced back to MTV…no, seriously…
Mike G - April 14, 2010 | 11:46 pm · Link
We need some protestors to march with the teabaggers demanding the actual consequences of the rhetoric they spout. You’re bitching about taxes and government? Let’s abolish Social Security. Abolish Medicare (I’d love to see the private health insurance rates for a 75-year old). And good luck staying healthy without the FDA.
I used to work with a tool who constantly bitched about “libruls” and “taxes”. I later found out he was getting disability, Medicaid, lived in state-subsidized rental housing and collected a substantial amount of money every month from a lawsuit settlement against the county, when he wasn’t working at his school district job. I imagine he’s a teabagger today.
Cain - April 15, 2010 | 12:27 am · Link
@RareSanity:
The engineer version of “get off my lawn!: engineering style is funny,
th - April 15, 2010 | 12:37 am · Link
@de stijl: you got that right
James in WA - April 15, 2010 | 12:57 am · Link
@Redshift:
No offense, Redshift, but that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve read here in a long time, and that’s saying a lot. Putting aside your statement about a field where “everything is well understood” (HAHAHAHA! I really got a good laugh out of that one, lemme tell ya), engineering undergraduate colleges aren’t temples into which the meek and unassuming enter, and out of which a lot of them emerge as masters of the world, arrogantly proclaiming preeminence.
You’ve put the cart before the horse. In reality, smart people go into the sciences and engineering, and smart people are generally pretty arrogant. When you’re 18 years old and you just scored 35’s on your ACT’s while your peers averaged 17, then yeah, you can claim that you’re twice as smart as them.
The engineering profession attracts the smart (read: arrogant), it doesn’t create them. Oh, sure, they can get worse with time, but the seed in their personalities starts long before then.
These arrogant teabagger doctors and engineers—well, their training didn’t do it to them. They started out as assholes, and just pretty much stayed that way.
Terry Ott - April 15, 2010 | 1:01 am · Link
@Les: Hey Les, I too am UU and a social liberal. But I am also sympathetic to the Tea Party’s stance on the expansionist role of the Federal Govt, fiscal malpractice, believe that big government is not the answer to many of our societal problems, and decry the wastefulness and ineffectuality of the public sector, and the deplorable state of Congress.
I had great hopes for Obama to rise above the worn out politics of special interests, class warfare, and action by legislation. I hoped he wouild be post-partisan, but friends said I was quixotic in that belief. I’m afraid they were right (errrr… correct, and “right”, in a political sense). I am not impressed to date, and find myself more and more aligned with the Tea Party though I am not of a mind to go out on rallies and demonstrations.
Personally, I think the rabble rousers in the Tea Party movement are the tip of an iceberg of “populism”, with the majority of so-called supporters being responsible and concerned citizens whose philosophy is diametrically opposed to liberal politics (because they have concluded it doesn’t tend to work very well) and my impression is they are being underestimated by those who see them as a “fringe” group. I think the elections will show they will change the composition of the political landscape.
The one thing that surprises me is: they do not advocate a third party. I don’t either, I suppose, but I do advocate for the end of the party system as it has come to be. I think most Tea Party supporters are “fallen away” Republicans. Like Unitarian Universalists, they are not prone to buying into some organized doctrine, except for their conviction that it is folly to believe that one group or another has some corner on “truth” and “superior wisdom”.
Zuzu's Petals - April 15, 2010 | 1:41 am · Link
I just found out the husband of an acquaintance is on his way to take part in the nutball gun demonstration in Virginia (or has it already happened?), and then will be among the 2nd Amendmenters at the Teabag protest in DC tomorrow.
A totally nice guy, middle aged family man, dentist, but not white – Asian American. But a wingnut. And a gun nut. As in flying from California to DC to take part in a gun nut protest.
His wife is sane, but I don’t know how she puts up with him.
phantomist - April 15, 2010 | 2:15 am · Link
@Terry Ott: responsible and concerned citizens whose philosophy is diametrically opposed to liberal politics (because they have concluded it doesn’t tend to work very well)
Wow, how do they feel about time travel?
Death Panel Truck - April 15, 2010 | 3:14 am · Link
It is in my bedroom, but hey, your mileage may vary.
stuckinred - April 15, 2010 | 6:07 am · Link
@de stijl: the last one
brantl - April 15, 2010 | 8:28 am · Link
This analysis misses all of the poor tea partiers that are on disability or unemployment. I think you’re confusing the leadership (the richer ones) with the rank-and-file (fighting the spread to other-colored disadvantaged people of the very programs that keep them hanging on).
de stijl - April 15, 2010 | 9:57 am · Link
I say this with all due respect and as a straight man, but you are one handsome and sexy dude.
Rock on!
Original Lee - April 15, 2010 | 11:54 am · Link
@de stijl: Hey! Not all Cubs fans are like that at all. For me being a Cubs fan is to make my grandma happy – I make the 4th generation in my family who has been rooting for them to win the World Series again before the Rapture. I think a more accurate representation would be “Cubs fans who think Harry Karay was terrific”.
brantl - April 15, 2010 | 2:35 pm · Link
@gbear: Perfect. Now, yank their business.
Terry Ott - April 16, 2010 | 2:00 am · Link
@phantomist: Wow, how do they feel about time travel?
I don’t really know any Tea Party people, so I can’t ask. But I can guess. I suspect they would say time travel and liberal politics have some definite similarities, such as:
Sounds and feels like a good idea, but there is a lack of evidence that it will get you where you long to go. Both are just wishful thinking.
The Truffle - April 18, 2010 | 7:56 pm · Link
@Litlebritdifrnt: Was this a real lawyer? Or a diploma-mill lawyer?