Teabaggers: Destroying the Constitution to Save It . . . Yeah - makes no sense to me either

Interesting article about the propensity of the Teabaggers to stake claim as the righteous and sole defenders of the U.S. Constitution.

This excerpt summed it all up for me quite nicely:

The Tea Partiers belong to a different tradition—a tradition of divisive fundamentalism. Like other fundamentalists, they seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents. Like other fundamentalists, they see in their good book only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don’t sweat the details, and they ignore all ambiguities. And like other fundamentalists, they make enemies or evildoers of those who disagree with their doctrine. In the 1930s, the American Liberty League opposed FDR’s New Deal by flogging its version of the Constitution with what historian Frederick Rudolph once described as “a worshipful intensity.” In the 1960s, the John Birch Society imagined a vast communist conspiracy in similar terms. In 1992 conservative activists formed what came to be known as the Constitution Party—Sharron Angle was once a member—in order to “restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” Today, Angle asserts that “separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine,” and Palin claims that “the Constitution…essentially acknowledg[es] that our unalienable rights…come from God.” The point is always the same: to suggest that the Constitution, like the Bible, decrees what’s right and wrong (rather than what’s legal and illegal), and to insist that only the fundamentalists and their ilk can access its truths. We are moral, you are not; we represent America, you do not. Theirs is the rallying cry of culture war.

If you have been following the short-lived existence of the teabagger movement as I have been, (since it's inception which was about -oh- a week after Obama was sworn in), you'll understand the thrust of this article completely. And once you see what these people are all about and who is funding them and the ideology that is being promoted by that funding, you should be very afraid for the future of democracy in this country. And if you don't speak out now, your voice will be the last I want to hear when it's too late.


----k