PITY THE IRONY-CHALLENGED - Teabaggers really hate to be called teabaggers and if you're not careful, they'll insult you. Why one of them called me a liberal and progressive the other day. The bastards!
As tea parties have become the political force du jour, numerous stereotypes about them have formed. Of course, you can’t fairly profile every member of a tea party any more than you can profile all black men or every Muslim. However, you can generalize certain characteristics of these groups and still be on target (gun imagery intended) most of the time. So, if you’re a level-headed, sane member of a tea party, this post doesn’t apply to you. I’m talking to the Batshit Crazies. You’re excused to go to a Palin rally or a John Ashcroft concert or flag pin shopping or something.
Many teabaggers are irony-challenged. I’ve noticed that most of them are extremely sensitive to being called “teabaggers”, yet they object with language designed to insult anyone who used the word.
You Scum-Sucking Pootieheaded Liberal
The rant goes, “Clearly, you are full of hate,” followed by a string of invective heaved like a Molotov cocktail. The rants frequently contain a dozen or so supposedly hot button keywords like socialist, communist, or fascist (and for the last time get this straight, communism and fascism are diametrically opposed principles). Sometimes they even spew the two most dreaded epithets in the English language – fingers in your ears now if you’re squeamish – liberal and progressive.
At this point I borrow a word from the unabridged Dick Cheney International Dicktionary for an answer – “so”. I called you a teabagger, fully aware of the sexual meaning behind it. You were insulted, so it’s only fair to call me anything you want. I don’t mind. Really.
Teabaggers often ask – rhetorically I assume – if I know that everything uttered by The Messiah (I like to call him The Messiah because, you know, I insult him sometimes too) is a lie.
Yes, many things he says are untrue, just as it’s untrue to say everything he says is a lie. He shares this characteristic with every politician since the first Cro-Magnon wrote notes on her hand or stood before a teleprompter.
Again, “so”.
Bagglers often ask why I voted for Obama. For the record, I did.
Yet again, “so”.
John McCain: Critical Thinking Skills of a DonutI did it not because I expected I’d never hear him speak an untruth or because I was enamored by his policies. In fact, I’m not pleased with him now. I don’t defend him unless I think he does something right and that situation is unlikely to change. I voted for him and got pretty much what I expected TYVM.
But more importantly, I didn’t vote for McCain. His selection of the Moose Baby Momma showed me he had the critical thinking skills of a donut. Instead of just disagreeing with some of what he said, I disagreed with ALL of what he said. But the number one reason I voted against him is because he’s a cranky, vindictive, old fart whose skin is thinner than a condom and who would sell his mother if he thought it would get him elected.
Which brings us to the last irony for this post. Teabaggers swagger like Dubya. They’re tiresomely full of gun imagery, or in some cases, actual guns. They play the “bring it on” card in an attempt to scare people into submission. They boast that armageddon will come, born on the wings of angels and dropped like a commie bomb on Obamashima.
In this, they are the ideological successors to McTheusela and George Bush the Lesser. All the bluster and cowboysterism in the world doesn’t cover for the fact they’re afraid of nothing more than change.
Ironic, ain’t it?
- Q-Poll On Teabaggers: Disaffected Republicans Could Hurt GOP House Races (dailykos.com)
- The Fox News, Sarah Palin, L.L. Cool J charade (trueslant.com)
- Was This the ‘Critical Weekend’ for the Tea Partiers to Avoid the Smell of a ‘Bunch of Nuts’? (newsbusters.org)
- Running from the snarling white mobs (cbc.ca)
- Teabaggers: What is up with those freaks? (trueslant.com)
- Unreal Americans (crooksandliars.com)
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john mc cain chose sarah palin as a running mate intentionally. he knew there was no way he could be elected w/ her as a running mate. his reason? he did not want to be put in the impossible position of trying to undo eight years of bush malfeasance and incompetence; so he chose her to ensure he would not end up being the fall guy. actually a higher degree of critical thinking than you give him credit for. i wouldn’t have voted for him anyway, but i’m sure people realized she was not the one to a heartbeat away from ruining(oops), running the country
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Daniel, you do err, it seems to me. If CEOs manipulate things, that is merely an aspect of the true cost of possessing a CEO like their salaries and bonuses and stock options etc. As such, the hand of the market is yet invisible.
It is true that there is no free market since it has been warped via governmental interference but that does not mean that free markets are impossible; merely non existent.
Again, fairness is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. Markets, allowed to operate freely, are always fair in the sense that I defined fairness. Just because you don’t like the way they operate does not mean they are not fair. It is governmental interference that warps markets, not participants in said market.
I made no assumption about the failure of the U. S. S. R. and the absence of the ueberrich. I merely did not make explicit the connection. I was aware that such wealth existed in Russia. However the markets were so warped by central planning and control that not even the existence of ueberrich in the country could create plentiful and diverse goods and services. The solution to the problem Russia experienced would have been never to have assumed central planning in the first place and the United States moving toward greater central control, as they are moving now, can only move this country nearer to the same sort of economic failure Russia experienced. Russia failed because central planning can never be as efficient as impersonal market forces.
Corporations are at least subject to market forces, unlike governments, whose pockets and inefficiencies are both nearly limitless. But even if they were dictatorships, a premise I do not concede, they would still be less of a threat to freedom because they do not control the full force of the government.
In any case, a giant corporation could no more be run as a democracy than could a country the size of America, or indeed, any territory larger than a small township. Someone has got to make the decisions: whether a president-legislature-judiciary or a CEO-bd. of directors-shareholders etc.
Mr. Harmon, I think a little correction is needed here. In fact, the “invisible hand” is actually a group of CEO’s manipulating prices and wages for their own personal gain. There is no such thing as a “free” market, since the balance of power can easily (and unfairly) be tipped in the direction of one or few parties. After that, they control the market. You wrongly assume that the U.S.S.R. failed because there was no uber-rich. On the contrary, there were people who were super-rich. The Soviet Union failed because all political and economic power was concentrated in the hands of a few, in a dictatorship. Incidentally, the “free market” capitalism in the U.S. has led to a similar concentration of power and wealth. Workplaces are dictatorships much like the Soviet Union. So the problem is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, and the solution is democratic socialism.
By the way, this has got to have the Democrats sweating bullets about now. 54% want the healthcare law repealed. How much did Democrats overstretch on that one?
And it makes little difference that lefties don’t want to eliminate the market when they want to so regulate business as to amount to taking over industries. And by the way, how lefty then is Barack “lets take over car companies, financial institutions and any others we can get our grubby little hands upon” Obama if even the leftiest of lefties doesn’t want to eliminate the market?
I guess it depends upon what you mean by “fair”. The invisible hand does distribute fairly, in my opinion. It distributes income to those goods and services producing companies whose goods and services we all, as consumers, value the most and whose business model is the most successful at producing goods and services at the greatest value. Within those companies, it distributes the most to those whose labors are valued the most by those who pay wages and salaries and the least to those whose labors are value the least by them. I suppose that’s what you mean by “manipulating things”. But no one has a free hand in “manipulating things. Wages are just as much determined by market pressures as are the prices of goods and services.
CEOs, for example, are not overpaid because there are those who value their labor at exactly what they are paid. That is, those who determine what to pay CEOs pay them according to the value the CEO is expected to add to the corporation’s bottom line. Sometimes the CEO fails to perform as expected but that’s the crap shoot of running a business. It happens with goods as well as with laborers. Running a business is always perhaps a few quarters away from bankruptcy, no matter how big it is or how long it has been in business. One disastrous business decision can put a corporation into a tail-spin. If profits were a sure thing, we’d all be business owners rather than working stiffs.
And I’m not saying there shouldn’t be laws against things like insider trading — the only thing I can think you mean in your comment about Wall Street bozos. I’m saying it’s easier to get rid of a CEO who underperforms than to get rid of a corrupt incumbent politician.
If we could be sure that the impersonal hand would distribute things fairly, that’d be fine. But be it some impersonal bozo in Washington, or some impersonal bozo on Wall Street, somebody’s probably manipulating things. The question is, who do we want manipulating things and how do want them to do it. The bozo on Wall Street does it for one purpose and one goal only – Money, specifically, his money and the gathering thereof. At least the bozo in Washington, however corrupt he may be, can be gotten rid of with a mark (well, lots of marks) of the ballot.
Nobody in Washington, not even the leftiest of the Lefties, are interested in ending the Market. They are interested in making sure that the Market isnt manipulated by the powerful for their own gain. The function of government, at its heart, is to protect its people from predators, be they foriegn governments, terrorists, or our own uber-rich.
As for the ueberrich getting richer, good for them. That means that more goods and services will be developed and, eventually, be priced where almost everyone can afford them…at Wal-Mart. Without the rich, do you realize, America would be like Russia before its collapse, long lines with people waiting to buy things from stores with next to nothing on the shelves, mainly because no one could afford new technology, which means little would be developed and none of it would ever get to be affordable. I thank the ueberrich, not because I one day hope to get to be ueberrich but because I live today like bloody royalty, being able to afford all sorts of goods and services that would be impossible without the ueberrich.
Yes, I’m losing ground but there is no help for that. Economics is what it is, the study of distribution of rare resources. No central planner could hope to do near as well as the invisible hand does at enabling distribution under any circumstances. There will be times when I’m gaining ground and times when I’m losing ground. That is the nature of living in a world of rare resources. The question is, who will determine how those resources are distributed. I would much prefer impersonal price pressures determine that than some bozo in Washington. The bozo would, no doubt, distribute those goods to his good buds. I’d rather not have my economic well being be determined by whom I know/whom I can bribe. Give me the invisible hand any and every day. I may not become ueberrich but I’ll do better in a free market than I will under the economic alternatives.
I’m not a tea-partier but I find it to be supremely insulting to call them tea-baggers with full and intentional knowledge of that term’s connotation. Let’s try not to deep-six the political dialogue, shall we? Are the tea-partiers worse? Great. That’s them. Let them be what they are without descending to that level. It gets no one anywhere. Oh sure, it may feel good to be clever and to push them over the edge but since when was politics supposed to be about diving as quickly as possible to the bottom of the dung-heap?
To Liberality, two points: one, there are other interests than economic interests that might be driving them, interests like liberty and freedom; and two, they aren’t voting against their economic interests. They don’t see government as Robin Hood being in any legitimate interest. It has nothing to do with hoping against hope that they’ll one day get rich. They believe that the market system is in everyone’s economic interest. I believe they’re right.
I try really hard to understand where they are coming from but it just makes no sense. All of them are voting against their own economic self interest, always dreaming someday to strike it rich. Meanwhile the working and middle classes, of which most of them are a part of, continues to lose ground economically and the uber rich become even more so.
Obama is far from my first choice, but as you yourself acknowledge, McCain was a far worse choice.
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