A new poll shows that half of those who consider themselves part of the tea party movement also identify as part of the religious right, reflecting the complex – and sometimes contradictory – blend of bedfellows in the American conservative movement.
Hmmm. That particular blend of bedfellows looks just like the traditional Republican base, to me. How are they new and different, again?
The poll released Tuesday, by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, comes as the tea party’s composition and potential impact is still under hot debate.
Only among those who have some interest in continuing to pretend the Tea Party is different than the Republican base, but maybe we need still more polling. These polls keep coming back “Republican”.
Institute chief executive Robert Jones said the poll, which was funded by the Ford Foundation, aimed to clarify the relationship between the two groups.
“The way the data looks, if this is a marriage of convenience, it’s one that would be against the law. The relatives are too close,” said Jones, a self-described progressive.
Pretty much.
Sly
Tea Party is to Republican Party as Altria is to Phillip Morris.
Joseph Nobles
So what’s the rebranding going to be in 2012? The New Coke Party?
Mike in NC
What else to expect from the Washington Post?
El Cid
Re:
They’ve replaced public invocations of Old Testament vengeance with a Founding Father Fundamentalism which relies upon seeing the Constitution as an instrument directly inspired by God and put in place by Founding Fathers who were all anti-government right wing religious fundamentalists, a Constitution betrayed by [foreign fifth column Communist] non-believer pro-government Baal worshipers.
Also, more tri-cornered hats and tea-bags.
Cat Lady
Inbreeding does explain a LOT.
Villago Delenda Est
The idiots of the Village are bound and determined to reinforce every bad thought I have about their inherent stupidity.
MattF
Well, in fact there is something new on the Right– Fox News. And, in case you didn’t notice, the ‘Tea Party’ ‘movement’ (I don’t really want to put every word in quotes, but it’s unavoidable here) has an intimate relationship with Fox. And Fox’s (i.e., Murdoch’s) money.
quaint irene
I’m surprised they haven’t pushed for a bill changing the national anthem to ‘America the Beautiful’ cause it mentions God. Oh wait, the last line is ‘crown thy good with brotherhood.’ Can’t have that!
Tonybrown74
The only thing that truly baffles me is the idea that people didn’t know this already. Why go through the bullshit pretense?
Who are they (the media) trying to convince?
Kyle
Oh, heavens to betsy, what could possibly surprise me more?
People who believe in magical self-serving delusions in religion believe magical self-serving delusions in politics, who could have guessed.
Next you’ll tell me that 95% vote Republikkklan.
Villago Delenda Est
@El Cid:
That high pitched whirring sound you’re hearing? Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and others rotating at near relativistic velocities in their graves.
kay
@El Cid:
It’s complex, El Cid. We may never figure it out.
Just ignore that it looks exactly like the Bush 2004 Base, because it’s different.
In ways we have yet to determine.
geg6
So this would be why so many of them seem mentally retarded?
Adrienne
@Villago Delenda Est: Perhaps your snark-o-meter is tuned to the wrong frequency?
UncommonSense
Only half of self-identified teabaggers identify also as members of the religious right?
I expect the real percentage is much higher than that. I went to the first-ever teabagger rally they held in Baton Rouge and there were as many signs proclaiming “This is a Christian nation” as there were pleading “Don’t tread on me.”
jurassicpork
Here’s another late-breaking shocker:
Our 2000 year-long fling with literacy was nice while it lasted but everything has to end sometime: Glenn Beck just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
kay
@UncommonSense:
They’re more Christian than the Christians, actually.
Villago Delenda Est
@Adrienne:
Oh, no, I got El Cid’s snark. I applaud it. I relish it.
The problem of course is the teatards actually believe that shit.
Ash Can
LOLZ. These polls crack my shit right up. But then, in light of the fact that sometimes people have to be beaten over the head repeatedly with a fact before they start to believe it, if this makes any more people see the light about how phony this tea party bullshit is, it’s all good.
Villago Delenda Est
@jurassicpork:
Didn’t Tom Lehrer already cover this back in ’72 or so?
geg6
@UncommonSense:
Here in purple PA, currently run by godless Jew commie Ed Rendell, it’s 100% based on the Teabagger rallies they have every other weekend at our county courthouse.
My John and I have decided that they have them so often because it’s really a fat, white, old, and racist speed dating service. Our staff assistant, a four-time divorcee and fervent “Christian,” attends them all. She’s trolling now that eHarmony turned her down for being “not their kind of material.”
cleek
this is earthshattering news. revolutionary.
10/5/10 has now superseded 9/11/01 as The Day That Changed Everything.
Blue Neponset
If you want to take the word of a “self-described progressive” be my guest. I’ll believe what Fox News tells me about the Tea Party.
aimai
@El Cid:
That is really, really, a smart observation, El Cid. On some level that’s a very profound connection to make. I think Susan of Texas would argue that its some kind of substition/fetish, an invocation of an imaginary powerful authority that “proves” that one is always right. When its god its god, when that doesn’t work substitute the constitution, when you control the presidency its the presidency, when you don’t control the presidency its the people…
aimai
Brick Oven Bill
The primary difference between the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party is that the Tea Party movement conducts events which are actually fun to attend, and potentially historic.
The secondary difference between the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party is that the Tea Party Movement has more attractive female members.
geg6
@Brick Oven Bill:
DougJ, you are getting frighteningly good at channelling that asshole.
Elizabelle
a comment from the WaPost reader thread:
Gee, brilliant reporting. I don’t know how much the poll cost, but you could have figured this out with a 15 minute drive around South Carolina.
The story is beyond fatuous.
Linda Featheringill
@jurassicpork:
Glenn Beck Nobel Prize for literature.
Okay, you had me going for a couple of minutes. I even went to the link to check it out.
Hee-hee. Good one!
Uloborus
There’s a difference. They now think they can get and are entitled to representatives exactly as insane as they are, rather than being grudgingly content with power mad assholes.
But they’re the same PEOPLE, yes.
Wile E. Quixote
In other words: You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You-only-moved-the-headstones!
New Yorker
Here’s some polling that made me more optimistic about us:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/forcing-the-iran-warriors-to-talk-honestly/
Well, the percentage of Americans itching for war with Iran is about the same (actually a little less) as that wonderful 27% that voted for Alan Keyes. It’s funny how that number keeps popping up again and again.
Almost 3/4 of us aren’t willing to follow Bill Kristol off of another cliff.
Roger Moore
@quaint irene:
FTFY.
El Cid
@aimai: Most of it was obvious when they (esp. Glenn Beck) kept citing The 5,000 Year Leap by crazy Mormon Bircherite New-World-Order paranoid and Glenn Beck favorite Cleon Skousen.
If you read it (I have, it was given to me by a TeaTard advocate), you will see a mix of actual decent history on the origins of, and passing of the Constitution, along with increasing invocations of Biblical principles and religious Founding Father insights. The “28 principles” based on “natural law” as religious rightists see them.
(That book is a million times saner than anything else Skousen did, earning him a place on the US Constitution Commission in 1987.)
This religio-Constitutional view becomes clearer the more you talk to a Tea Partyist about their views of the Founding Father gods.
Recently we’ve also been seeing Harvard historian Jill Lapore delve into this Colonial fundamentalist fetishism.
More on the book from the publisher:
It’s a way to integrate Constitutional / Founding Father fetishism with Christian fundamentalist Dominionism with Bircherite anti-Communism super-paranoia.
JAHILL10
@El Cid: Nail, meet head of hammer. Thank you for saying it with such flair, it almost makes amusing my despair over the fact that this faction represents 27 percent of my country!
El Cid
Crap. Too many links in one post. Can some moderator okay my above comment?
Martin
@geg6: He left out the hairy armpits. That would have made it complete.
evinfuilt
This is simply the most shocking news ever! I would never have known that they were the same thing. Glad they spent time polling.
PeakVT
@aimai: Constitutional fundamentalism is a dumbed-down version of the original intent school of judicial … let’s call it judicial justification. Both use an appeal to authority to mask the real intentions of their proponents.
geg6
OT, but it seems we all need a laugh today. Here’s two things that made me LOL:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/10/orange_is_as_orange_does.php?ref=fpblg
Tbogg: “I welcome our Brainiac MiceMen Overlords”: http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2010/10/04/i-got-99-problems-but-a-witch-aint-one/
Ba dump bum.
geg6
@Martin:
True. But he really is getting the hang of it, isn’t he?
evinfuilt
@Brick Oven Bill:
And the tri-corner hats, you forgot the hats!
Brighton
“The truth about tea” (funny)
Comrade Dread
Yes. And I expect that upon being elected, the Tea Party Republicans will buckle down and get straight to the business of getting re-elected by:
a.) voting for increased government spending.
b.) Voting for more war spending.
c.) Voting for tax cuts to the upper class.
d.) Forgetting about that whole deficit/debt crap.
e.) Impeaching Obama and holding endless hearings about Wright-gate, Arugula-gate, and Birther-gate.
f.) Bleat loudly to the Tea Party, the neo-Randians, and the Constitutional political fundamentalists who are waiting and expecting for a roll back of Washington to the 1780’s, that they just don’t:
1.) Have the votes in Congress to do it
2.) Can’t pass anything because Obama will just veto it.
3.) To save Democracy and the Republic, please vote more of us into office in 2012 and give us the presidency. Then we super-duper-uper promise to get right on that government cutting thing.
El Cid
TeaTards attack minority voter registration in Texas as the New ACORN Black Panther vote stealers.
Mission Accomplished!
After all, if the Founding Fathers had intended darkies to vote, they would have put it in the Constitution which Moses handed them.
ppcli
The tea party is there to allow people to distance themselves from their recent past, during which they not only supported Bush but did so with a lunatic intensity, swooning when he marched across the aircraft carrier in flightsuit and accusing people of being traitors and troop haters if they disagreed with even the smallest detail of the Cheney agenda. Now that Bush is toxic, and they find it politically convenient to start slamming Obama for things that Bush did even more than Obama does, they want to pretend that they hated it all along.
Sort of like France after WWII. Suddenly, it turned out, everybody except Pétain himself was in the resistance. Nobody supported Vichy. It may have appeared that there were an awful lot of collaborators, but that was just an illusion.
Bulworth
Yes, we know so little about the makeup of this super duper non-bi-partisan group of teabaggers. It’s such a hot debate. I wonder if we’ll ever know.
Ash Can
@Comrade Dread: You left out g) Get caught red-handed accepting bribes in a sting operation. ‘Cause you just know those dumb rubes wouldn’t be able to resist free shit, and they’d happily shake down every lobbyist on the Hill for as much as they possibly could.
El Cid
@ppcli: It’s so disgusting. They all luuuuuuuurved Bush Jr. right up unto the point where his popularity began plummeting after Katrina.
How was this different than stapling teabags on your hat?
Nellcote
@Comrade Dread:
And then there’s always the preemtive war on voting.
daveNYC
Need to have a drink to wash the taste of vomit out of my mouth.
Tony J
If you want to see the various strains of Teabaggery ripping their coalition of Disappointed Republican Voters to pieces before they’ve even won anything, then I really do suggest a dip or two into the American Conservative website.
Apparently, the recent cat-fight over whether or not Holocaust Denial is a core conservative value or proof of Liberal tendencies has driven Pat Buchannan to conclude that it’s really the Democrats who are splitting apart, because a failing economy is bound to lead to turf wars between The Negro and The Hispanic over a shrinking welfare budget.
Honestly, the jaw just gapes sometimes. These only thing that unites these people is that, somehow, Liberals are to blame for everything they fuck up.
El Cid
@Nellcote: Quoted above.
Comrade Dread
@Ash Can: I don’t think they’ll have to shake them down very hard. Most corporations are quite willing to spend money to buy votes.
See example Health Care Industry: Motto: Mandates for all, but f*** the sick people.
Southern Beale
Hmmm. That particular blend of bedfellows looks just like the traditional Republican base, to me. How are they new and different, again?
DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING
Thank you for playing!
Jesus H. Christ I am so sick of the corporate media’s endless musing over “who and what is the Tea Party”? What utter bullshit.
It’s the fucking same right wingers who were Loyal Bushies for the past 10 years and the anti-Clinton brigade before that. And when Bush proved to be such a disaster they all, amazingly, became part of the “I never liked him!” crowd.
And our stoooopid media bought that lie. I mean how dumb is that?
Who in here is tired of being right about everything? How did I, a silly little Tennessee housewife, know that Saddam didn’t have WMDs when the fucking New York fucking Times did not?
How did I, a silly little Tennessee housewife, know that the “Tea Party” is the same Republican base we’ve always had since forever when fucking NBC News did not?
Gah. I’m sick of our discourse in this country. SICK. OF. IT. I may be silly but I’m not stupid.
/rant
...now I try to be amused
@El Cid:
I wonder what took them so long.
I think a major reason the US Constitution was so durable is its aura of Holy Writ. It’s downright Rovean* how they’re trying to undermine the federal government by co-opting and re-interpreting the intellectual foundation of that government.
*”Rovean” as in attacking their opponent’s strengths.
Elizabelle
Positive news on the Washington Post front.
Howard Kurtz is bailing to become the Daily Beast’s Washington bureau chief.
http://www.whorunsgov.com/politerati/uncategorized/howard-kurtz-to-leave-washington-post-for-daily-beast/?hpid=news-col-blog
Maybe the Post is freeing up the media beat for Rick Sanchez?
Anyhow, a pox on both their houses.
FlipYrWhig
@Southern Beale:
It’s the same dumbasses who told John McCain that Obama was “a Arab” and, for that matter, the same ones who complain that the new people moving into town don’t cut their grass often enough or put their garbage cans in the agreed-upon location. Old people with too much time on their hands, time they mostly use to snoop at the neighbors.
Why it’s an interesting phenomenon is a question for assignment editors to answer.
geg6
@Elizabelle:
I can’t think of a better place for Howie than the Daily Beast. Whadda piece of shit that site is. Makes HuffPo look like Shakespeare.
agrippa
Almost all of those in the TP vote Republican. There may be a small number who vote Libertarian. Of course they are the GOP base. It is impossible for them to be anything else.
Part of it is a wish/necessity to separate oneself from the GWB Presidency.
We will see what happens on Nov 2. If Democrats get out and vote, the teapot will have a very large tempest. Akin to a conniption fit.
Citizen_X
Yes, everybody with half a brain (that excludes the media) knew this meme about “the Tea Party is not really Christian(C) Righties” was bullshit about a millisecond after it was spouted.
You know who else is a Teabagger, and a seriously crazy, “Obama’s plan is to destroy America from within*” one? Moe freaking Tucker, of the Velvet Underground. Apologies to all who, like me, were charmed by her singing “After Hours” or “I’m Sticking With You.”
*Direct quote!
Butch
And in other breaking news, water is wet.
Southern Beale
Moe Tucker?
Jeebus. Well, she has an excuse. One assumes she killed many brain cells doing lots of cool drugs back in the day.
At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Southern Beale
Moe Tucker?
Jeebus. Well, she has an excuse. One assumes she killed many brain cells doing lots of cool drugs back in the day.
At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Xecky Gilchrist
How are they new and different, again?
By being older and more uniform.
Citizen_X
@geg6:
Hmm. Let me guess: fervently opposed to gay marriage?
daryljfontaine
Song here for meter:
There’s more to the song but that’s as far as I got in the name of parody.
D
maskling
i did not even have to click the link. i knew it could only be the washington post. only the WP would pretend this was a mystery. only the neo-con boostering, supply side supporting, republican whore WP could print shit like that with a straight face
Omnes Omnibus
@Citizen_X: Moe? That’s just fucking depressing, but then drummers are weird.
Dennis SGMM
I for one am convinced that there are plenty of non-Republican, non-fundamentalist, under-the-age-of-68 people in the Tea Party. They’re just shy about responding to polls.
Binzinerator
@Sly:
Shit dude you won the thread in the first comment.
Next time wait a bit, even if it’s just to build the tension.
El Cid
@Dennis SGMM: Just like there were huge numbers of free blacks fighting for the Confederacy, just, nobody’s found evidence — yet.
Binzinerator
@El Cid:
Pretty much parallels what these assholes did with replacing Creationism with Intelligent Design.
geg6
@Citizen_X:
Opposed to gay marriage, whorish single (never-married) women who have boyfriends (in other words, me), birth control (except for her own), abortion, taking prayer out of schools, the fact that America is NOT a Christian nation as she wishes, blacks, Mexicans, Middle Easterners, anyone who doesn’t look like her, alcohol (except when she wants a drink), recreational drugs (though she says she loved her debauched pot smoking days), single mothers (though she was one), Section 8 housing (though she once lived in it), welfare (though she once got it), unemployment insurance, Catholics and atheists equally, and Barack and Michelle Obama.
Otherwise, she follows Jesus’ teachings to a T.
Elizabelle
@geg6:
Sort of agree.
Beast is a lot of infotainment, although it’s still got a cleaner interface than the Huffington Post, which looks too much like one of those coupon mailers dumped out on your desktop.
HuffPost is ADD inducing.
4jkb4ia
I agree with this post taking into consideration that Kay has said these are not the elements of the Republican base that knock on doors and make phone calls.
Krill
I think with all the left right action these days they just keep our eyes off the ball and the real trouble. The Fed! The guys spending us into BK who’s left or right won’t even matter in a decade if we keep spending at this rate.