There are twothreads on the front page of the pit right now which both seem to be saying the same thing, namely “well, there was some dispute about whether the tea party (as a whole) is really as racist and right-wing-extreme-wingnut as some narratives would have us believe. Well, here’s some incident involving some finite number of people which proves that this view is true. QED.”
That is dumb and unfair. Much as I love to mock right wing extreme idiots, and much as it’s 100% clear that a number of right wing extreme idiots are tea partiers, the “tea party movement” is (as far as I can tell) far too amorphous and widespread a movement for just about any statement to be true about it in general. And generalizing about the tea party, and thus presumably about its members, is, as our revered sage and moral leader Jon Stewart points out, just as unfair as when Fox News generalizes about liberals.
Now, I have plenty of issues with the tea party movement, to the extent that it has enough unifying principles for me to be able to have issues with them. And I have no problem with gleefully point out individual instances of extremism and stupidity among particular individuals or particular TP groups. But the accusations that are being leveled against the group as a whole, when there isn’t a group as a whole, are overbroad and overreaching.
Thanks, but no. I mean, I don’t do it myself (or I don’t think I do) but I really don’t have much of a problem when others do.
The Tea Party isn’t the Republican Party. It is a wacky, loony fringe group created out of whole cloth by an Australian owned media conglomerate and brought to an unrighteous frenzy through billiionaire businessmen with agendas hiding behind stupid monikers like Americans For Prosperity. It has no hierarchical structure and no real goals other than to shout down debate, hurl racial slurs, and throw rocks through windows. It is populated by mouth-breathing imbiciles who couldn’t spell “cat” if I spotted them the “C” and the “T” and have no more intelligence than a flash mob but actually think they’re acting to affect meaningful social change.
Oh. And they’re named the act of me placing my balls in their mouth.
The Tea Party gathering I witnessed in Houston wasn’t all that “radical.” The people mostly looked middle aged & middle class. Surrounded by a temporary fence in a “public” park, the shindig was designed to keep the curious from just walking through. Perhaps the people “up front” wore the t-shirts & carried the signs with dingbat, brain dead messages. I didnt investigate.
But the group was blindingly lily white. Houston is a diverse city, but not these guys. So I’d have no problem considering them racist, with a side order of xenophobia…
Question, Ender, is you please. Have you actually met or talked to us? Would you like to, or are you so certain of your correctness that you don’t feel the need?
In fairness, even if you prove that literally 100% of the people at that particular gathering were white, that’s hardly proof, or even evidence, of racism… particularly if you’re talking about the individual attendees.
There is no “us.” The Tea Party doesn’t stand for anything except to yell and scream when a website tells its members to. I don’t know you very well Smiling Bandit. I’m sure you’re the paragon of virtue and the very model of a modern major general. But the Tea Party as a whole is just a ridiculous fringe group and, as such, will naturally attract ridiculous fringe people. So if you truly believe you have something worthwhile and intelligent to say, why the fuck are you doing it behind this laughably racist group with the woman with tea bags dangling from her head who hasn’t read an American history textbook since 1940 to your left and the guy with an Obama-as-Joker-with-a-Hitler-moustache t-shirt on your right?
I try not to abuse my pets or step on too many ants so I consider myself a pretty good animal rights activist. And I hold a bonfire to burn all the PETA literature that comes into my mailbox because it’s the exact same thing. I consider myself intelligent enough to know that I want no association to do with an organization that batshit insane even if I may hold the same principles they do.
So how about you?
I think the root of the problem is that they don’t seem to ever speak out against those Tea Partiers who are saying racist things, carrying racist signs, or maintaining that the president is a Muslim, for instance.
That would go a long way to stopping the generalizations that they are all wingnuts. But much like the Republican party, they seem more interested in the strength of numbers. And if that means including the nutters, well, it seems to be their deal with the devil. In which case they can’t really complain that they don’t want to be painted with that brush, as it were.
This is scurrilous misrepresentation, and it cannot stand.
New Corporation is incorporated in Delaware, and its head office is in New York City. Rupert Murdoch is a United States citizen, and has not held Australian citizenship for almost 25 years. As an Australian citizen, i demand you retract your libelous comment.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. That and the fact that many of these same people remained silent as Bush ran up huge deficits, started a war on flimsy pretenses and pissed all over the Constitution.
Well, I did ask one of the group–outside The Pale–why everybody there was white. She said she was white & noted that I was, too. To her, whiteness was a very important aspect of membership. She was trembling with suppressed anger & probably wanted to argue. I’ve lived in Texas most of my life & have met enough idiot racists to recognize a Lost Cause. (Oh, the speaker at the time was braying about “they’re not welcome.”)
And I’m wondering why all these folks only got all worried about The Government after we’d elected a black president.
Hey, I’m not saying they should not be permitted to meet or anything. But if they want to convince me they’re not a bunch of racist know-nothings, they have a lot of work to do. (Are all of them racist? Lie down with a dog & you can expect fleas. And ticks.)
If the group is as nebulous as it seems to be in terms of its positive beliefs, how can it possibly be so unflinchingly certain about the vast majority of its members not being racist assholes?
The tea party has all the organizational integrity of a jellyfish, and should be dealt with using butterfly nets, rather than bullets.
I agree; the galvanized fastening device has certainly been impacted squarely on the flat end.
That’s what drove me around the bend from the get go. “We’re protesting out-of-control spending.” Which is why, of course, Tea Party rallies were so ubiquitous when we were shoveling billions of dollars into a hole in the desert in Iraq for the previous eight fucking years.
I can’t really take the tea party movement seriously at all since none of them could probably agree on what they stand for. As far as I can tell they are just a catch-all for any and all complaints about politics/government.
You could go to one of these rallys and ask a dozen of them the same question “What is the tea party and what does it stand for?” and you’d get a dozen different answers.
They appear to be so unorganized and diverse of opinions that I couldn’t even imagine them agreeing on a spokesperson/leader.
Last week I attended a Tea Party Rally because I was interested in socializing with booger-eating morons.
No, wait! I was hoping to rub elbows with rich fat cats.
Imagine my disappointment when those evil folks turned out to be mild-mannered grandparents and assorted people who mow their lawns and pay their taxes. Even some stoopid college-age folks. Misguided youth, no doubt.
Thank you for posting this. Probably not going to make you any friends among the more obnoxious of your political colleagues, but I appreciate the effort. And I’m not even a Tea Party guy. Just getting really, really sick of the constant mantra of “Conservatives r teh evul” around here.
But they’ve been around for years, doncha know? Brewing up and aging their bottles of mouth-froth in the cellar and waiting for a half-price sale on poster board and misspelling-loaded magic markers. It’s just a coincidence there was both a blowout sale at Sam Flax and that this particular batch 'o’froth ripened in late 2008.
