IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT…

And I feel fine, mostly because I’m stinking drunk. That’s right it’s 11:30pm here on the east coast on election night and the Republicans have taken control of the House. My, my, well at least the good people of Delaware were able to break the spell of anti-masturbationist Christine O'Donnell but that didn’t stop the rubes in Kentucky from electing Tea Party golden boy and self certified optometrist Rand Paul to the Senate. The loss of Feingold in Wisconsin was particularly painful and the Defeat of Prop 19 in California crushed any last hope that we were moving into a new age of progressivism. The dream is dead, the whole thing’s been turned back over to the wolves and to make matters worse I’m out of bourbon. Fuck this I’m going t0 bed

It’s exactly 24 hours later and the world hasn’t exploded but my head felt like it this morning. Been watching the news today and all the talking heads want to know what it means and all my friends want to move to Canada. As appealing as all that Canadian bacon sounds, though I think they just call it bacon there, I think we all need to calm down. Sure, I felt pretty grim last night but this is just how things go, the system is doing its thing. Two years ago the country took a hard swing to the left, now we’re swinging back to the right because Obama and the Dems haven’t been able to fix things fast enough for our wily and schizophrenic electorate.

So what does it mean? It means the Republicans are going to actually have to do something besides say, “no” and Obama is going to have to take the gloves off. The biggest mistake the GOP can make is to make good on their threats to repeal healthcare. Obama still has a veto pen and the Republicans aren’t going to have the votes to override him. If they go down this road or even worse use their newly gained subpoena power, nothing is going to get done in the next two years and the independents are going to swing back to left in the next election cycle. The Government is designed to work with differing opinions and some would even argue it works better that way. But you know what? All this ranting and raving about who controls what is beside the point. It really doesn’t matter who holds the reigns in Washington, the Democrats or the Republicans, because they don’t really represent us. They represent the likes of Goldman Sachs and BP. It’s high time that this country wakes up and realizes that we’re not living in a Democracy but a Plutocracy. So don’t get too caught up in searching for the significance of this midterm. It’s very simple. It means nothing. Nothing is going to change. The rich will simply continue to rule while the rest of us live off their scraps. That is unless we can get past all the partisan bickering and I’m not talking about Washington. I’m talking about us. Me, you, your neighbors, co-workers, friends, frenemies, and family. I’m just as guilty as anyone, probably more so but it’s time to stop attacking each other and start holding our so called leaders accountable for selling the American Dream to the Corporate Oligarchy.

Tea Baggin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo

April 15 tax day and if you’re a member of the Tea Party you wait all year for this. There are rallies all over the country; it’s like D-day for the Tea Baggers. In Atlanta, the action is down at the capital. On the way over I heard on the radio that they were expecting over 5,000 people, it looks closer to 2,000 to me. The demographics are pretty much the same as they were at the meeting I attended a few weeks ago but there are more minorities and young people than I expected. Looking around at the teaming masses the first thing that catches my eye is a sign, which reads:

I’M TIRED OF PAYING FOR MY NEIGHBORS

WHO DON’T WORK!!

SPREAD MY WORK ETHIC-NOT MY WEALTH!!

(which isn’t much now)

On the bottom there’s the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ emblem and of course the ever-popular Hammer & Sickle image from the Soviet flag. The guy proudly wielding it is in his late 20’s and I gotta say it’s a beautiful sign, sure his talents are misguided but it was one of the better-made signs I saw that day. I asked him why he had the Hammer & Sickle on it and he said, “Because that’s what we’re going towards,” and that he was “just tired of paying for other people.” When I ask him to elaborate, he tells me about his neighbors whom are on section 8 but can somehow afford a new $50,000 Tahoe. This is not the first time I’ve heard this argument. Many in the Tea Party see what the Democrats are doing, with Healthcare in particular, as a form of welfare. But before I could press this young man any further something happened. Suddenly my blood runs cold and "I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced." I turn to the stage and I immediately realize where this ominous sense of cold-hearted dread is coming from. Under the lights, in front of this unholy gathering is none other than Sadie Fields giving the invocation. Sadie is the chairman of the Georgia Christian Alliance, which in 2004 spearheaded the effort to have the Georgia Marriage Amendment placed on the ballot. Now why would the Tea Baggers align themselves with a Christian Lobby? Aren’t they supposed to be ‘constitutionalists?’ The founding fathers (which the Tea Party are totally gay for) saw the wisdom in separating church and state; the Georgia Christian Alliance does not. It seems illogical for the Tea Baggers to be hooking up with these guys. But that’s not nearly as illogical as what I see next… A black guy, that’s right I said a black guy, holding a sign that says:

REPEAL

NEW

SLAVERY

First of all, the work on this sign was nowhere near as good as the first guy I spoke to. This was real shotty work. Plain red letters glued on black cardboard and I could totally see gobs of glue oozing from under the letters. This guy did not bring his A-Game. Secondly, is he really comparing the Democrat’s agenda with the Transatlantic Slave Trade? Well no, he explains to me “its enslavement of the mind.” Oh, the old enslavement of the mind trick. Those bastards! Why didn’t I see that coming? Because it’s fucking crazy, that’s why! Want to criticize Obama and the Dems? Go ahead. But criticize them with facts. Using words like ‘socialist’ and ‘slavery’ are nothing more than simplistic scare tactics. Don’t like the fact that your taxes may be raised. Fine I get that, I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I get it. We have to get rid of the deficit and you can’t realistically talk about doing that without considering raising taxes to help pay for it. Just spending cuts are not going to cut it. We are all going to have to pay for it one way or another. At least with the Dems, the most fortunate among us will pay the lion’s share. Don’t like that? Okay, but we tried it your way for 8 years and look where it got us. Let someone else run with the ball for a while.

All right enough preaching. Back to the rally; sure ‘Repeal New Slavery’ guy’s sign was messy but he was a bit of a novelty. I mean a black Tea Bagger! That’s unique in and of it self and besides at least he could spell. The next sign I see reads:

OBAMA-STOP!

YOU PROMISED US

DR. HOUSE

YOU FORCE FED US

DR. KEVORIAN

Yes, you read that right, Kevorian, not Kevorkian. Jeez, these people are killing me.

Things didn’t get much better when Denny Schaffer took the stage. Schaffer is a local talk radio host and to listen to him talk about him self on his web page, you’d think he was a really mellow spiritual guy, kinda preachy, in the literal since but mellow. To hear him speak in front of a frothing mass like the one here today you would think you were listening to a ranting, raving lunatic. Calling the ACLU “Satan’s law firm” and saying that this once great country is no more because the national philosophy has gone from ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ to “what can I do for myself without lifting a finger?” Again we get into the welfare argument. Denny talks a lot about Jesus on his webpage, a lot of the Tea Baggers do, and Jesus talked a lot about giving and compassion. That’s not something I’ve heard a lot about today.

The next speaker, Ginni Thomas, wasn’t nearly as hateful as Schaffer but did a good job of getting the crowd whipped up. Ginni is the wife of Clarence Thomas; yes that Clarence Thomas, and she is also the founder of libertycentral.org, which chief among its many noble duties is securing “the blessings of liberty.” To Thomas this is a fight about whether we as a country want to be “self-governed or ruled” by the “elitist” in DC, whom, by the way, are “scared to death” of the Tea Party. According to Ginni, and she’s been working in DC for over 30 years, the Tea Party movement is “the biggest thing that has ever happened.” Wow really? Bigger than women’s suffrage or the civil rights movement? I must really have my head up my ass because I had no idea! Thomas goes on to tell the crowd that this is our generations’ time to stand up to tyranny! By the end of her tirade she has the whole crowd chanting, “Remember in November! Remember in November! Remember in November!”

Now that the crowd is worked up nice and proper, we slow things down with a performance from country music star John Berry. Berry is a bit of a folk hero to the Tea Baggers. You see a year ago on this day John was sitting at home watching all the Tea Party events taking place across the country and he thought to himself “what can I do?” Well, “I write songs and sing,” he continues. “So I went in my office and I penned this one.” The song is called ‘Give me back my America’ and it is a Grade-A piece of Ameri-Porn. Just check out these choice lyrics:

I want to work with my hands down at the mill

Plowin' a field or forgin' the steel

With out interference from Capital Hill

Give Me Back My America

If that doesn’t give you a patriotic boner then you may want to check your pulse! After Berry was done jerking off the crowd with the American flag I notice the guy beside me is crying like a 14-year-old girl at a Jonas Brothers concert. As I’m watching this guy weep I realize two things. 1) Most of these people have a genuine love for their country and 2) They really and truly believe they are losing their country and that scares the hell out of them.

On the way out I some how managed to lose my car even though I only parked about a block away. After walking around for an hour I had a lot of time to think about all the craziness of the past few hours. And the more I thought about it, I just felt sorry for the Tea Party because some of their points are valid. The Government is going to have to reign in spending for instance and that’s one of their core beliefs. But even that most basic of concepts gets drowned out by all the “Obama is a Socialist,” fervor which scares off the sane people. Then there are the groups like Americans for Prosperity who exploit these poor bastards for their own gain. The Tea Baggers would be a lot more respectable if they would drop their association with lobbies and lay off the socialism scare tactics. The former contradicts their claim of being a grass roots organization and the latter is just flat out sensationalism.

Think they don’t matter though? You may want to re-think that. Just look at Arizona, that’s a product of Tea Party Governance. A state that cut taxes so much that they’ve been forced to sell their capital building to raise revenue only to rent it back from the buyer! Yeah, that’s prudent spending. And there’s a Tea Party caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives now. Clearly the right people are paying attention. Unfortunately the right people aren’t always the best people.

Tea Baggin': My Secret Life with the Tea Party

My first exposure to the Georgia Tea Party was at a volunteer meeting held at the Cobb County public library. I expected maybe a handful of people and I wasn’t sure who or what to look for. When I pulled in the parking lot the first thing I saw was a young preppy guy (about 25 or 30) getting out of a car completely wrapped in decals from FairTax.org. This was a professional job; the car was like a moving billboard for not wanting to pay taxes. So I locked on Mr. FairTax, if anyone knows where this thing is, I thought, it’s him. And as I walked into the library I couldn’t help but sense irony in the fact that a bunch of people who don’t want to pay taxes are meeting at the PUBLIC library, you know the one that’s funded by tax dollars! Oh well, that surely won’t be the craziest thing to come out of tonight.

I was stunned! This place was packed; besides me and preppy guy there were at least 60 people in the room! There were five or six under 30 years of age but the rest were mostly mid 50’s or early 60’s. I counted two minorities, both female. One was Asian (about 60) and the other Black (about 40). So demographic wise we basically had a bunch of old white people. Or to put it more accurately, a bunch of pissed off old white people. This was about a week after Obama signed the new Health Care Bill into law and I kept hearing whispers from the crowd about “Socialism” and the “Mafia in the Whitehouse.” I was getting nervous, if these people figure out that I’m a godless liberal, they’ll tar and feather me or they might even tea bag me! So I was relieved when a kid in his mid 20’s, Michael, complete with a polo shirt and name tag adorned with the Tea Party logo, called the meeting to order. Mike gave a brief intro and railed on Healthcare for a minute to get the crowd fired up. And fired up they got, I heard cries such as, “They’re destroying our country!” and stop “Obama’s Tyranny!” Then something happened that surprised me. It was a voice of reason that came from a little old lady in the back of the room. In the past week there have been bricks thrown through windows and even death threats to Democratic lawmakers. This sweet little old lady was calling on people to be civil and she was no sooner shouted down by a hateful old bat that accused her of being a Democrat, which she wasn’t. This venomous old bitch, we’ll call her Jan, claimed the recent threats of violence against Democrats was a “set up” to make the Republicans look bad. Jan was a nuisance throughout the entire meeting. If she wasn’t interrupting then she was fawning over the few young people there and bringing the entire meeting to a halt. You have to understand that the Tea Baggers are desperate for youth in their movement. A few teenagers trickled in towards the end of the night and you would have thought Glenn Beck himself had walked in the room. Jan forced these precious little patriots into telling their stories to the crowd and I couldn’t help but think, Good god! What are you poor bastards doing wasting the golden years of your youth at a Tea Party Meeting? You should be out chasing girls or at the very least hurling bricks through the windows of your local Democratic lawmaker! Ah to be young. But I’ve gotten grossly off track here. Where was I? Oh right, Jan was in the middle of her tirade with one of the few sensible people there that night. Thankfully Mike was able to get her to shut up for five minutes and then we had the obligatory opening prayer, which was led by a volunteer from the crowd, we’ll call him Jimmy. A quick fun fact about Jimmy, he’s unemployed and someone like him has the potential to benefit the most from our new healthcare system but that’s not the fun part. The fun part is his former employer: AIG! How weird is that? But back to the meeting, now that everything has been consecrated Mike turns the meeting over to Virginia Galloway from Americans For Prosperity.

The AFP is a conservative advocacy group, which is a polite way of saying that it’s a lobby and Virginia is a lobbyist. Here’s a fun fact about Virginia: her babysitter was Newt Gingrich! So what chance did she have but to become a blood-sucking lobbyist for what she calls the “non-partisan” Americans For Prosperity. Ms. Galloway would basically run the rest of the meeting. In fact Michael, who I thought was leading the meeting, left and I didn’t see him for the rest of the night. The AFP is into all the stuff you would expect; free-market ideology, cutting taxes, limited government, and so on. I guess it’s a natural fit for the Tea Party mentality but I came there to listen to the Tea Baggers not some vampire lobbyist who doesn’t give a shit about these people but only her corporate benefactors; not least of which is the Koch Family Foundation. Koch (arguably the nations largest privately held energy company) and Americans For Prosperity were behind the infamous Hot Air Tour that warned us against the dangers of global warming alarmism: lost jobs, higher taxes, and less freedom. Galloway was here tonight to shore up support for a big effort being taken up by Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue and the Republicans in the State Assembly to sue the federal government over the mandate that all citizens buy healthcare insurance. Oh yeah I almost forgot, Virginia was also there to pimp the Next Step Training seminar where you too can learn to promote the AFP agenda. But Ms. Galloway was really just the opening act for State Senator Judson Hill (R), whom authored the legislation to exempt Georgia from the Healthcare mandate. But the good Senator is running a little late so we have a little Q&A session while we wait. First up is a woman in her early 50’s; we’ll call her Anne. Anne would like to know why the public could not vote on healthcare rather than let those fat cats in Washington muck everything up. Virginia told her that the Democrats probably would not want the public to vote on it but she also politely reminded Anne that we live in a REPUBLIC not a Democracy. Jesus Christ, I thought, this lady is old enough to be my mother and she doesn’t know that! Next came a young, borderline dwarf of a man who we’ll call Andy. Andy was in his early 20’s and very short but also fairly muscular, he had a very strange build and he said more than one thing about guns that night. Andy just got out of the Marine Corps and before I go any further here I want to say that I fully respect and appreciate Andy and the countless others who have sacrificed so much for our country. But having said all that doesn’t mean that Andy’s not a homophobic, 2^nd Amendment nut with a Napoleonic complex; which, leads me to why he was there that night: according to Andy a lot of the higher ranking officers are really fed up with all of the “shenanigans” that are going on with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In fact they are so fed up with the “commies” in D.C., that many of them would like to resign their post over the matter. But if they were to do that, they would forfeit their pension, benefits, and all the other things that come with serving your country honorably. What’s Andy advocating? Allowing members of the military who choose to resign if “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is repealed, full access to their benefits. Now I’m not sure why Andy thought this would be a good forum to bring up this matter and even Virginia did not seem to want to go near this issue, but no one in the crowd seemed to object to what he was saying. So here’s what I say to people like Andy; first of all, do you honestly believe that gays are joining the military to pick up guys? You realize that gay members of the military are fully aware that they will be going to somewhere like Afghanistan not Spring Break on Fire Island? Secondly, you don’t think it sets a dangerous precedent to allow members of the military to resign every time they disagree with a policy? Further more when you make a commitment, whether it is the military or a business contract; you fulfill your part of the bargain or you don’t get paid; it’s that simple. But what I’ve come to learn about people like Andy, whether they are homophobes, gun nuts, or other extremists, is that they don’t really represent the Tea Party. People like Andy just tend to graft on to the Tea Party because they’re the only conservative movement that’s gaining any traction right now. Fuck, I said to myself, will someone save me from this ignorant rube? Wait whose this silvery haired gentleman entering the room? He’s impeccably dressed and adorned with a “Don’t Tread on Me” lapel pin. Could it be? Yes! It’s Senator Hill, here to save me from this madness!

Hill made the conversation sound a little more sophisticated than my friends Andy and Anne but he basically continued upon what Galloway was preaching. And speaking of preaching, he was telling it to the choir. The Tea Baggers ate up everything he said. Along with spearheading the effort to exempt Georgia from the healthcare mandate, Judson also wants to give the citizens of Georgia the ability to buy insurance across state lines but that effort was killed through a bipartisan effort in the State Assembly. “What are their names?” the crowd called out as if they were ready to get a posse together and string these guys up. Hill calmed the crowd and then continued on to a pretty standard Republican diatribe of the nations new healthcare plan; “socialized medicine,” “government takeover,” you know the standard stuff but my favorite was when Hill called the IRS the “Healthcare Police!” Oh the Tea Baggers loved that. Judson did have some ideas of his own though (well maybe not his own) like, TORT reform and of course allowing consumers to purchase insurance across state lines. Both of which, seem like reasonable proposals and I don’t know why the Democrats did not include them in their plan. But Hill lost me when he started comparing Medicaid to “crack dollars.” I had been there for over 2 hours and I hadn’t learned a damn thing about these people that I didn’t already know: they’re scared and angry. So I got the hell out of there and I was pissed because what was supposed to be a Tea Party meeting turned out to be nothing more than a forum for the agenda of Americans for Prosperity and State Senator Judson Hill. But I wasn’t done with Tea Party yet…