USA Today fluff piece on the Teabagger movement - here's an excerpt:
What unites Tea Party supporters is less their geography or demography than their policy views: a firm conviction that the federal government has gotten too big and too powerful, and a fear that the nation faces great peril. Nine in 10 are unhappy with the country's direction and see the federal debt as an ominous threat to its future. Almost as many say neither President Obama nor most members of Congress deserve re-election.
... They deny that bigotry or rejections of Obama because of his race are part of the movement’s appeal ...
I have to call major league bullshit on that.
From the years 2000 thru 2008:
The national debt skyrocketed under Bush/Cheney from $5.7 trillion to nearly $11 trillion. A $230 billion tax surplus left by Bill Clinton was subsequently squandered in tax cuts doled out to the super wealthy.
Under the guise of the patriotastic sounding USA Patriot Act, Bush/Cheney monitored American's telephone and e-mail communications en masse. Dissenters of the Iraq invasion were ominously warned by the Bush administration to "watch what you say, watch what you do." The USA Patriot Act, as predicted by many, was abused by Bush/Cheney for purposes other than terror prevention.
Protesters at Bush/Cheney "public" events were herded into "free speech zones" - typically a fenced in area surrounded by law enforcement, blocks away from the event and therefore out of eye and ear shot of Bush/Cheney and the mainstream media.
9/11 occurred on Bush/Cheney's watch - 9 months into their first term. One month prior to 9/11 Bush/Cheney were given a PDB (Presidential Daily Brief) titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US" but failed to act on it.
In reaction to 9/11, Bush/Cheney embroiled America in two wars on two separate battle fronts and then stated that it was all part of the never ending "war on terror". To date, those wars have cost America $1+ trillion dollars, thousands of U.S. soldiers lives, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and tarnished America's image abroad.
Under Bush/Cheney, a hands off, business can do no wrong approach to regulation led to the corruption and eventual meltdown of the financial services and banking industries - culminating in the worst economic downturn in America since the Great Depression and roiling economies around the world. The Bush/Cheney solution was the $700 billion TARP bailout - in other words - more taxpayer money given hand over fist to the riverboat gamblers who caused the crisis to begin with.
Under Bush/Cheney the world watched as a major American city, New Orleans, drowned. They have yet to recover.
Under Bush/Cheney an interrogation practice called "waterboarding" - which prior to the Bush/Cheney era had always been referred to as torture and criminal - became acceptable and routine behavior by the world's, supposedly, most respected democracy.
Now -- I drove by a local Tea Party gathering a few months ago. I saw a lot of derisive and critical signs and t-shirts - many quite colorful and inventive I admit. Funny thing though -- not a single sign or t-shirt referenced George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. They were almost exclusively anti-Obama and calling him illegitimate, questioning his birth place, calling him a muslim lover, an anti-American Kenyan, a Nazi, a communist, a socialist, etc. Many of the messages were most definitely racist in nature. Oh and, not surprisingly, I do not recall seeing any minorities amongst that crowd.
To put it bluntly - the revisionary claims by the Tea Party that their movement and/or philosophy is solely against over-reaching government power, concerned about federal debt and is not about race, flies directly in the face of the video and audio evidenced gathered to date as to what they truly appear to stand for publicly.
Therefore - as far as their laughable attempts to soft-pedal their movement philosophy goes, such as in this USA Today article, --- my pithy response quite simply is: BULL FUCKING SHIT!
----k
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