Great catch by Digby in the Tea Partier poll I talked about last night:
Here’s an interesting factoid that tracks with my intuition about these people: they blame George W. Bush and Wall Street far less for the economic situation than the rest of the country does. They hold Obama and congress mostly responsible. But then, if you listen to wingnut gasbags and FOX news crazies all day, that’s what you would think.
Any illusions that these people are angry at Wall Street or big business needs to be dispensed with ASAP. They don’t blame the money people at all.
88% of them think the government’s stimulus program has either had no impact on the economy or made it worse.
Of course they don’t. This is just a Republican operation, plain and simple, and you’ll watch the tea partiers go to bat for their Republican and Wall Street masters the next couple of months as we try to pass Financial reform.
For chrissakes- the tea party idea came from Rick Santelli- a broker. Anyone who thought these guys were mad at Wall Street was engaging in magical firebagger thinking, and some of us told you that from the get-go.
cleek
GOP says “Hate!” tea partiers ask “Yes sir! Hate whom, sir?”
MattF
It would be interesting to poll the details of t-party economic beliefs– I’d bet there’s a strong tendency toward, um, heterodox economics out there; as in goldbuggery, supply-side, Ron Paul idiocy. I just tune out when they start talking about this stuff, but it really and truly is just nutso, and it’s important to bear that in mind.
birthmarker
I was derided at Kos (I think) for daring to suggest that Santelli was anything except a totally spontaneous outburst.
Here is a paragraph from an email I was sent on March 23, 2009, suggesting that we all send tea bags to Washington.
Obama had been President what, two months? And was tasked with cleaning up Bush’s mess? And the whole country is suddenly mad at him and Congress? Yeah, right.
El Cid
Red state suckers (PDF):
What else is new, etc., etc., etc.
Michael
As opposed to our sucktastic “liberal” media, BBC this morning zeroed in like a laser beam on Sal Russo and his luxury RV. As opposed to broadcasting gamed polls, BBC reported in real life and discussed the vague non-goals of the movement.
I’m taking the Tea Party as what it actually is – a bunch of fascists. Their polling responses are bullshit – yes, some organizers are wealthier and better educated, but a large number consist of manipulate Scots-Irish trailer trash, rooted in loyalty to clan and creed, and are willing to lie about their education and earnings.
It makes me want to light a Confederate flag on fire and to dare them to piss on it to put it out.
Michael
Santelli needs to be waterboarded so that we can determine the genesis of his remarks.
beltane
The tea party is just another name for the asshole 27%ers who remained loyal to Bush until the end. What the rich and poor teabaggers all have in common is endless hate and endless greed. All the money in the world cannot make these people happy. As long as they know that, somewhere in the world, a poor child is getting enough to eat, they are sad.
brantl
The “magical firebagger thinking” shit? Why not start an extra argument, where one currently doesn’t exist, right? You’re better than this, JC.
Napoleon
Yesterday I was behind someone at a light that had a bumper sticker that read “W” and then under it it said “Thank You”. It takes a special form of stupid to think that, but not only do some think it they actually advertise it.
jurassicpork
One of our own, Alicia Morgan of Hooterville, is getting evicted from her home in less than 12 days along with her husband and 3 kids. Here’s the kicker: IndyMac, her lender, is doing this with the aid of the FDIC and they never even missed a mortgage payment. We’ve got to get word of this out to as many people as possible.
Of course, the Tea Baggers would say that Alicia’s at fault for getting foreclosed on, survival of the fittest, etc. but it’s not that simple.
Alex S.
I still read the WSJ (printed version!) somewhat regularly and stumbled over really optimistic economic news today. I wonder what’s going to happen to the Tea Party in a few months, because I am confident that the 2010 election season will be accompanied by steadily improving economic news. I hope that this development is going to wash all the schizophrenia of this movement to the surface (unrealistic, I know). To have Wall-Street guys complain about the Obama administration, to have willfully ignorant, egoistic people engaging in this kind of hateful behavior – it makes me sick. With the ecomony improving, the purely social origins of the Tea Party movement will become obvious. It is not about big government, it is about big government helping “those people”. It’s about lazy, scared and/or indoctrinated people who reject today’s world with their misguided instincts.
Kirk Spencer
Yes, they’re deep Republicans. But there’s something else to remember.
They’re patriots.
Every single group listed by the SPLC as a “patriot” group (extremists who see the US government as the enemy) is involved in the tea party. The involvement ranges from shared members to shared leaders at the local level.
Not all Tea Partiers are (yet) “patriots”, but pretty much all “patriots” are Tea Partiers. That said, the first half of that statement is likely to change given the constant rhetoric we hear.
Zach
Practically every conservative I know (most of whom would shudder to be associated with the Tea Party crew) is convinced that Fanny and Freddie are the primary cause of the global credit crisis. Pointing out that someone, you know, bought their mortgages doesn’t seem to have much effect.
On the plus side, the relatively sane people go one step up the ladder to blaming the GSEs instead of blaming the black folks who largely trusted bankers and realtors who told them they could buy $X of house.
Why hasn’t any Democrat in Congress introduced a bill to return the profit from selling Citi shares as a tax dividend? It’d be nearly $100 if distributed evenly. It’d remind people that the bailout was an uncomfortable but necessary/good thing. It’d increase trust in current attempts at financial regulation reform. It’d be difficult to paint as election-year bribery…
beltane
@Napoleon: A couple fo years ago, our county Republican party (and their children) marched in the Memorial Day parade carrying cardboard cutout figures of Bush with the title “The Great Liberator”. First thinking it was a joke, everyone cheered. Then, when the crowd realized the marchers were serious, you could hear a very loud mixture of boos and laughter.
The town no longer allows parade marchers to have a political theme.
dmsilev
Speaking of insane right-wingers, Media Matters found a good one yesterday. Remember the hissy fit that the press threw when Obama went to his daughter’s soccer game without them? Well, apparently some of the luminaries in the right-wing shriek-o-sphere are claiming that *there never was a soccer game* and that Obama sneaked out to do Something Nefarious.
Soon, we’ll learn that *Obama doesn’t actually have a daughter*!
dms
mai naem
They can do all the sociological studies and extrapolate all kinds of conclusions from teabagger polls – nobody’s going to be convince me that the root belief of most teabaggers cannot handle the fact that a black man is POTUS. It all goes back to race.
El Cid
@mai naem: I think it involves race and racism, but that’s certainly not the only thing these cranky righties hate and fear.
John Cole
I’m not making anything up or starting an argument, I’m making the bullshit artists who peddled this nonsense own it. You want the links to the firebagger posts claiming the tea party movement had the same goals as the rest of us? And this is why we needed to team with Grover.
Own your shit or become a Republican.
MattF
@dmsilev
Presumably the unspoken dog-whistle accusation that Limbaugh is making here is that Obama snuck off to a high-crime area for a crack cocaine deal. Disgusting.
And, um, by the way, that area is right behind a Whole Foods supermarket. The prices there are criminal, but not in the colored-people-smoking-crack sense.
kay
It depresses me that anyone fell for this. It depresses me that anyone on the Left envies or wants to mimic this tactic.
They get a lot of press, that’s true. But it’s just a fake third Party stand-in for the GOP, in an anti-incumbent atmosphere. The Republican brand was in deep trouble, so they resurrected as “the Tea party”. This way they can run establishment Republicans as “moderates” in swing districts and run lunatics in conservative districts.
The whole thing is a fraud. Why would we want to co-opt or copy that tactic? It’s based on a lie. Will they make short term gains? I don’t know. Is it going to end well? I’m almost certain it won’t. Because there’s not a dime’s worth of difference on economic policy between these people and establishment Republicans. This policy and dogma leads to the same goddamn place. Always.
dmsilev
@MattF: Limbaugh also called it “Clintonesque”, so maybe he was trying to suggest a tryst.
Hard to say. Delving into the mind of Limbaugh is a job for trained professionals equipped with the proper safety gear. I’m not going there.
dms
SGEW
@John Cole:
I wonder. I suspect that the “tea party movement” is a much more . . . complicated phenomenon than any of us are articulating. There’s a lot going on: astroturfing, militias, neo-Confederate sympathy, new media and culture impact[1], wealth divisions, globalization, immigration, straight-up racism, “post 9/11 social trauma,” the psychology of sprawl, raw unemployment numbers, you name it.
There are too many influences, there hasn’t been enough data, and not enough time has passed for anything to crystalize into a proper analysis, methinks. More importantly, I don’t think that enough self-identified “tea party” sympathizers have a clear idea (at all!) of what their “movement” stands for[2]; it is still in a very formative stage. However:
This will be an important tell.
[1] Let’s call this “mediated epistemic surturing future shock,” just to be twee.
[2] I elide the anecdotal subject of B.O.B., our very own “tea partier,” as he has no “clear ideas” about anything, ever; I consider him to be a data glitch.
kay
It has to end the same way. They want deregulation and an end to big government. We just finished finding out what fills the hole left by big government, and fills it fast. Big business. Always.
This story has the same ending as the last one. What do Republicans care how they get there?
SpotWeld
To me, the scariest part of that blog post
**shudder**
Sanka
Yes, the stimulus worked. Because going from 7% unemployment to 10% unemployment must be really great for…..DEMOCRATS!
Wow. And the mainstream media bitched about George Bush’s economic “doldrums” at 6% unemployment.
I guess the problem isn’t that every Obama voter didn’t get their unicorn yet, but rather they haven’t yet received the feed bag that turns its shite into gold pellets.
Fergus Wooster
From a teabagger commenter on Yahoo News:
LMAO.
BenA
@Sanka: You aren’t really coffee and you taste like shit. Your economic analysis is just as bad.
South of I-10
@Kirk Spencer: I just read this steaming pile of crap in my local paper. I can’t believe I wasted a second of my life reading this. It is going to be a fun day, huh?
feebog
@Sanka:
Be a good little troll and crawl back under your bridge.
PanAmerican
Rat Fucking from the party of Donald Segretti, Roger Stone and James O’Keefe?
NO WAY!
The next thing you’ll suggest COLE is that the M4rxist-Purists on lefty blogs are just right wing shit stirrers. They’re true concerned Democrat Americans and you’re better than this COLE.
valdivia
@BenA:
FTFW.
kay
What a joke. Nine states. Today.
“Another of Koch’s beneficiaries is Americans for Prosperity, which was founded by the company’s Executive Vice President, David Koch. AFP, based in Washington, has been a key organizer of many tea party events, including Tax Day Tea Party rallies in at least nine states today.
In an interview this morning, Cohlmia confirmed Koch’s role backing AFP. Asking how that squares with the statement that Koch not provide funding “specifically to support the tea parties,” Cohlmia said “the statement stands.”
She said the unsolicited statement was prompted because, “we’ve had a number of people who have indicated Koch is funding and orchestrating tea parties.”
scav
@SGEW: I’ve been hovering on the same observation myself. It’s early, its inchoate and doesn’t really have any central organized leadership (they’re working on this part). It’s frustration, made visible. Moreover, identifying with the Teaparty name got your frustration media coverage. Bingo. The recent Repubs seemed to be an odd agglomerate of evangelicals/hard-line social conservatives, glibitarian/wall streetists and militarists (plus less obvious, probably less extreme and contradictory elements). So logically those are the loose elements shed as the party lost market share. Throw in the loose elements that didn’t have a home in either party and we should have the basic matrix from which the frustrated emerge and grab the media’s attention with the label Teaparty. Small, self-identifying groups erupting because of local reasons but adopting an internally known (and presumably feared) moniker anyone? This calls for guerrilla campaigning.
Just cause it’s dark and you’re feeling something similar to a trunk and somebody near you yells they’ve got a leg, do NOT assume you’re feeling up with same critter.
EDIT. This could also explain why the stats are all over the place. Very sensitive to the pool the questioned are taken from.
scav
@scav: Lost permission to edit my own comment at about the minute mark. Just wanted to add that those funding at least portions of this mess are probably the same ol’, same ol’. They cover their bets.
OriGuy
@Fergus Wooster: Just wait until the ones who have misspelled signs are accused of being Commie Sociulist liberals in disguise by those who can spell. (There must be some at those things.) Fights break out at the Tea Party. Popcorn sales go through the roof.
Sanka
Yeah, stick it to those fat-cat bankers. Democrats really know how to keep these banksters in line, with billions in federal money to stop the foreclosure crisis:
That’s right. Time to work for the people and not the fat-cats, you betcha….
frankdawg
I ain’t gots no gud edjumacation so ken you guys help me out?
What is it that makes people fight against their own best interest? Seriously, this has driven me nuts about the Civil War Confederates. Most of the dumbfarks fighting in gray were poor farmers & merchants who gained nothing, and in the case of the farmers lost a lot, from slavery. Yet they gladly fought and died for the wealthy land baron slave owners to preserve a way of life that hurt them.
These Scheisse fur Gehirne teabaggers seem to fall into this same category. They are against the programs that will benefit them the most and for the tax breaks and anti-regulatory controls that weaken the country at large and them in particular.
Can anyone point me to how this happens?
Tommy
@frankdawg:
I have a friend from Mississippi who took me through this very same issue. Her point was that most southerners were willing to trade off all fiscal policy issues for social issues, namely one: religion. The fact that the GOP has co-opted ‘faith’, however hypocritical that stance ends up becoming, assures them of winning elections from now until eternity down south.