Okay, I’m going to blatantly lie (yet again) and share a few residual Tea Party leftovers with you.
First up, is Sam Seder responding to a profile of a Tax Day Tea Party protester. Joanne Wilder is a 60-year-old great-grandmother in Syracuse, NY. who said, “I’ve been a quiet little person my whole life,” but yet felt compelled to protest against the spending policies of the Obama administration and Congress because “I don’t want to see this country turn into a welfare, nanny state.”
Wilder apparently retired on disability from M&T Bank three years ago after undergoing knee replacement and back surgeries and now lives on her Social Security and disability benefits. Last year, she petitioned the bankruptcy court for protection from creditors and said she didn’t pay federal taxes because her income was too low. Gee, that reminds me of someone else…
Second, is Bob Somerby’s viciously scathing (yet unintentionally hilarious) account of Keith Olbermann’s comical performance on last night’s Countdown. Now, it has to be said that I missed most of the program, but reading Bob’s witheringly contemptuous account of it, I couldn’t help but laugh even though I know the jokes about “teabagging” are painfully belaboured — even more so when Somerby dissects them with his usual meticulous scrutiny.
OLBERMANN: In all seriousness, while the tea-baggers may have been whipped up by Fox News, maybe misinformed about tax policy, their fears are real, and we salute their turn-out today. Can we have the video of the rally in Tallahassee, in Florida? [pretending to wait]
No?
All right. Well, this is what the State House looked like there — the imposing sight that greeted slack-jawed tea-baggers there today. [photo of tall, tower-like office building]
In addition to Neil Cavuto in Sacramento, we had Hackensack, Dixon, Dickinson, thousand oaks, Brownwood, Greenwood, Friendswood, Walnut Creek, Little Rock, The Twin Cities, Twin Falls, Marble Falls, Hot Springs, Grand Rapids, Cedar Rapids, Rogue River, Grosse Point, Lansing, Bangor, Bend, South Bend, Piscataway and Peoria. Duncan, Arizona, Duncan, Oklahoma, Mansfield, Manchester, Bowling Green, Portsmouth, Mount Juliet, Mount Vernon, Tomball, Morehead City, Oak Harbor and finally Sag Harbor.
In the face of all that tea-bagging, the claim that this is not a movement is just not — you just can’t swallow it. It’s pure fallacy.
You may have noticed a pattern in the names rattled off by Olbermann, but if not, Somerby painfully walks the folks on the short bus through the multiplicity of double-entendres involved. Try as they might, right-wing bloggers (Bloggin’ Tories or whatever) will never hold a candle to vigilant critics on the left that are far more harshly cynical and unrelenting in their abject scorn of the “liberal” mainstream media than they could ever be. Rather funny, that.
Third, and (I think) finally, here’s the witless crew at Fox’s “Red Eye” program (that we’ve all come to know and wholesomely despise) waxing jovial about the disappointing media coverage of their own network’s phony, over-hyped non-event.
By the way, just as a non sequitur aside, have you ever wondered where Stephen Taylor gets his graph-happy wonkiness from? Well, check this out.
The Daily Howler piece is indeed great, if a tad unfair. If the Countdown and Maddow spots were truly the most undignified slices of trivial tripe they’ve ever seen a network offer up as “news”, they’ve clearly never watched any FOX.
I feel for the Olbermanns and the Maddows, though. Assuming they are authentic “progressives” (which is arguable), how can they be expected to treat the opera bouffe that American politics has become with any seriousness? Does the risible Tea Bag sideshow deserve much more than a string of dick jokes?
Sure, they could provide in-depth sociological and medialogical analyses of the phenomenon, but Americans hate that kind of “egghead” earnestness, and their audience (i.e. market share) would dwindle to zero.
Thus, what you end up with is a bunch of clowns laughing at other clowns–a rather appropriate pop cultural equivalent of their big-top politics where zannies compete against ideologically indistinguishable zannies.
That was pretty much my take on it as well. It really begged (or bagged) to be mocked and it seemed more than a little uncharitable of Somerby to have been so sternly school-marmish in this instance rather than just going with the flow-through teabaggy goodness of the richly deserved ridicule.
They really are in a hermetic bubble of idiocy aren’t they?
Peter Schiff called it “April Fools Day” on his radio show and he wasn’t referring to those who were paying their taxes either.
Mike