Monday, April 13, 2009

TeaTantrums...

Paul Krugman, over at the NY times says,

"One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.
But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?

Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh."

I thought Tom Delay' claiming that evolution being taught in schools was responsible for the Columbine shooting was the craziest Republicans could get; I was wrong.

4 comments:

Steve said...

It looks like those on the left are planning counterprotests.

http://startelegram.typepad.com/politex/2009/04/tea-party-update-more-gop-speakers-dems-planning-counterprotest.html

Question: If those on the left really believe these are as pointless an exercise as they claim, why would they be doing this?

There's also talk of Obama's ACORN thugs attending these and raising a ruckus. You know, libs already seem to stage a protest about something or another every day of the week and twice on Saturday. Can they not give the other side 1 day?

And Cody, after all the wackiness we witnessed from the protests of the loony left over the past 8 years, I can't believe what I'm hearning. If you can honestly say that this is the craziest you've ever seen Republicans get, you've obviously never been to an 1/8 mile dirt track on a Saturday night. We'll have to change that soon! ;-)

The Minute Men said...

LOL!!! I look forward to that!! This post was about Republicans. In fairness I will post crazy things liberals have done..

Marisa Phillips said...

The link Steve provides supports my statement that the Republican demonstrators were actually using the term "tea bagging", unwittingly setting themselves up for ridicule by those of us not ashamed to make a dirty joke:

"And nationally, critics are questioning the movement's origins while also mocking the way so many activists are talking about "tea bags" while unaware of its other connotations (sorry, I'm not going to provide a link to that. I enjoy my paycheck)."

To me, this makes it even funnier. If the protesters weren't talking about "tea bags," and the pundits were riffing on the "tea parties" themselves, it would just be another in a long line of wildly inappropriate things for these highly visible "journalists" to be saying. But they're not. The republicans are out there, loud and proud, vowing to tea bag the liberals.

I say let 'em!

Steve said...

Mari, I was waiting on someone else to bring that up. I actually think the whole protest is fine, but all the talk of tea-bagging has had me cracking up all day!