Tea Partiers: "They're full of shit"

That's Matt Taibbi's one-line take on the Tea Partiers. (If a Democrat had the cojones to say that, maybe there'd be more ... err, enthusiasm???):

I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations.

But, not only do neither Kerry nor Obama (nor Obama "surrogates") have the nads to say that, they don't fucking get it.

John Kerry, with Bill Clinton's totally lame-o "Reporting for duty" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention wasn't going to get a single vote from this crowd after being Swift Boated. Obama isn't either, even after playing Preznit Kumbaya most of his first two years in office. And, because he's black with a funny name, he's not going to tamp down either latent or outright racism out of this crowd, either.

That's because Obama doesn't get THIS, which Taibbi does:

(T)he Tea Party doesn't really care about issues — it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do.

That said, it's not just Obama who's clueless. So are the Tea Partiers.

And, Taibbi knows that, as he exposes them too.
Take a further read:

(T)here's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country.

Man, between the Obama the Doofus interview with Jann Wenner, and this most excellent screed by Taibbi, the Oct. 15 Rolling Stone is a grand slam. And, that's all quotes from just the first page of five webpages.

Here's one last one, about how Tea Partiers are dumb enough to be suckered by people like the billionaire Koch brothers:

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement.

Agreed, totally.

Of course, ultimately, TPers are full of shit about themselves, Taibbi says:

After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ... Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. ... Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.

But, Taibbi actually doesn't think the typical TPer is a racist. Rather, he thinks they're narcissists.

But, Taibbi does appear to somewhat sympathize with some of their anger, that's obvious, even while seeing through both their hypocrisy and stupidity. Read the whole article.