E.J. Dionne, writing in today's Washington Post, explains correctly why the Tea Party is a total scam and not just a collection of elderly white assholes:
Is the Tea Party one of the most successful scams in American political history?
Before you dismiss the question, note that word "successful." Judge the Tea Party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.
But it's equally important to recognize that the Tea Party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.
Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by Tea Party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since.
The Tea Party drowns out such voices because it has money -- some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in the New Yorker -- and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact.
Just recently, Tea Party victories in the Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O'Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate.
Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in the 2008 presidential race, he received 59.9 million votes.
Earlier this year, much was made of the defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative insufficiently conservative for the Tea Party. Bennett lost not in a primary but at a Republican convention attended by all of 3,500 delegates.
Even in larger states, the Tea Party's triumphs were built on small shares of the electorate. Rand Paul received 206,986 votes in Kentucky, where there are more than 1 million registered Republicans and nearly 2.9 million registered voters. Sharron Angle won with 70,452 votes in Nevada, a state with more than 1 million registered voters.
The media have given substantial coverage to Tea Party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement?
Last April, a New York Times-CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as Tea Party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.
The Tea Party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you'd expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw far fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving "people who make revolutionary activity their profession" in organizations that "must perforce not be very extensive."
But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.
There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the Tea Party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obama -- and now has to defend candidates such as O'Donnell and Angle.
And where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The Tea Party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.
In the same Washington Post, Harold Meyerson explains the un-American, distorted thinking of people like right-wing fanatic Rep. Jeff Flake and his Tea Party cronies:
There are un-Americans among us. They don't share our values, yet they control the most powerful offices in the land. We must rid ourselves of this fifth-column menace.Like Congressman from Arizona's Sixth Congressional District.
That's pretty much the Republican and Tea Party line these days. When a right-wing talk show host interviewing Sharron Angle, now the Republican senatorial candidate in Nevada, told her last year that "we have domestic enemies" and that some of them worked within "the walls of the Senate and the Congress," Angle chirped up, "I think you're right."
The Tea Partyers aren't wrong about the growing influence of un-Americans in high places. They've just misidentified who those un-Americans are.
As the right-wingers see it, even President Obama's more conventional ideas have no place or precedent in the American experience. Ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Dinesh D'Souza reasons in his summa idiotica currently on the cover of Forbes magazine, cannot be explained within the confines of American political thought. However, he writes, "if Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income to pay even more."
I'd like to see D'Souza explain why the highest tax brackets during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower took 90 percent of people's incomes.
This ascription of all things Obama to alien ideologies and religions -- he's a Muslim, a European socialist, an anti-colonial African Marxist -- has a basis not in empirical fact, of course, but in political logic. It speaks, in powerful metaphoric terms, to that large group of white Americans who see their country slipping away. With each passing year, America grows less white, less powerful and less prosperous, at least from the perspective of all but the rich. There's no correlation between the demographic change and our economic slump, but millions of Americans believe and fear that there is. And for many of those millions, Obama has become the object of their fear and rage that their America is being lost.
In fact, a good deal of American prosperity is being lost, but if there are homegrown agents of this decline, they're not in the administration.
Consider the debate in Congress about whether to impose tariffs on Chinese imports if China continues to depress the value of its currency. Roughly 150 House members, including 45 Republicans, have authored a bill to do just that, and the Ways and Means Committee will take up the bill on Friday. Unions and some domestic manufacturers support the bill. But a large number of American businesses, in a campaign coordinated by the U.S.-China Business Council, oppose it.
Now, there's nothing un-American in opposing the legislation as such -- far from it. Support for and opposition to tariffs are both as American as apple pie. The question here is whether the 220 corporations that belong to the council -- household names such as Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Ford, GM, Wal-Mart, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan Chase, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Boeing -- are already so deeply invested in China as manufacturers, marketers or retailers that buy goods there to sell them here that their interests are more closely aligned with China's than with America's. Revaluing China's currency would be helpful to domestic U.S. manufacturers, their employees and the communities where those employees live and work, but America's largest companies have long since ceased to be domestic.
Given the explosive growth of the Chinese economy, it's a safe bet that every major U.S. corporation will devote greater resources to building, buying and selling there. But China, unlike the Obama administration, truly is guided by an ideology alien to most Americans -- Leninism -- and wields far greater control over what U.S. corporations can and can't do there than the U.S. government does over what corporations can and can't do here. Our leading companies' economic interests, and those of their Chinese hosts, whom they cross at their peril, are increasing likely to pit them against proposals that diminish China's edge, however obtained, in global competition.
As the Tea Partyers contend, there are un-Americans among us. They hold some of the most powerful offices in the land.
