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Tea Party – Time to Fold Up the Circus Tent

Alex Constantine - September 19, 2010

" ... Look at the 'revolutionary' Republican agenda: borrowing another $4 trillion from China to, among other things, help provide permanent, $100,000 tax cuts for millionaires and billionaire CEOs and for 'small businesses' like hedge funds and major law firms, while deregulating the same coal, oil and gas companies that bankroll the tea party movement. ... "

BY JOY-ANN REID

Miami Herald | September 19, 2010

Niggar - Tea Party – Time to Fold Up the Circus TentSometime soon, Christine O'Donnell, the tea party candidate who defeated the Republican establishment's sure-fire Senate nominee in Delaware, will go on the ABC network's The View.

Her website will be scrubbed of any inopportune references to resisting the sexual temptations of one's own hand. Her past claims of almost beating then-Sen. Joe Biden in 2008 or taking grad school courses at Princeton will be filed under ``things that didn't happen, but which will never be spoken of, including by The Weekly Standard.''

And Karl Rove will go on Fox News and deny ever calling her ``nutty.'' The hosts will nod in agreement.

After Barack Obama's election, Republicans threw open the attic door and let Crazy Auntie out. She'd been up there since the days of Pat Buchanan's pitchfork brigades, but she never cut up her John Birch Society card and was raring to go. Now, Crazy Auntie has not only taken over the house, she's put her name on the deed. And the GOP, unable to get the poor thing under control, is down to dressing her up and giving her a perm.

Bush's bailout billIn a way, the Republican Party ceased to exist sometime around Sept. 29, 2008, when Minority Leader John Boehner wept on the floor of the House of Representatives as he begged his colleagues to vote for the now-hated TARP bank bailout. (Ninety-one House Republicans and 34 Senate Republicans voted yes, with the support of Sarah Palin.)

When President Bush signed the bailout bill, saying he'd sold out his free-market principles to save the free market, he might have added that he also consigned his political party to history.

Now, establishment Republicans are reduced to so many image consultants and sycophants, fearful of the tea party movement and yet dependent on it. They know you can't run on privatizing Medicare and making grandma retire on her own good graces, even in a year where pundits have practically said we should call off the November election and send all the Congressional Democrats home.

So they're pretending to think Florida gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott is a great guy and not the crook they first made him out to be.

They're pitching Marco Rubio as the fellow who, gosh, just really loves his family, rather than the dude who wants to hand part of Social Security over to Wall Street and deport American kids to Colombia if their parents are here illegally.

They're recasting would-be Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey as a folksy, pro-business guy, rather than the former leader of the Club for Growth, which agrees with wacky Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller that Social Security should be done away with.

Florida congressional candidate Allen West, who believes there's a worldwide Muslim plot to dominate western civilization by building basketball gyms in lower Manhattan, is doing folksy TV ads about the economy.

In really tough cases, like Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle or "what's so bad about segregated lunch counters?'' Rand Paul in Kentucky, it's best to just keep the candidates off TV.

Call it Extreme Makeover, GOP edition.

It's never wise to let a little truth get in the way of a good revolution, and the GOP has to keep the "we the people'' crowd focused on fighting President Obama, when they're actually fighting to put the "we, the country-club'' Republicans back in charge. That includes wanna-be Speaker Boehner, whose most revolutionary act to date has been handing out tobacco industry checks on the House floor.

Even the tea party movement itself is in many ways, a creature of Wall Street, born not in the streets, or even on Fox News, but on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where on Feb. 19, 2009, CNBC air personality Rick Santelli exploded over the possibility that the Obama administration might propose federal assistance, not to banks, but to underwater homeowners.

Corporate interestsEveryone from Federal Reserve conspiracy buffs to birthers to anger profiteers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are riding the tea party wave. But it's Astroturf groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, funded by insurance and oil companies and led by seasoned Republican operatives, who have most skillfully converted real economic panic into a Corporate Protection Movement unlike anything the robber barons could have dreamed of.

It is those corporate and Wall Street interests, not the freak show clamoring to get to Capitol Hill, that would be at the front of the line if Democratic voters stand down in November.

Just look at the "revolutionary'' Republican agenda: borrowing another $4 trillion from China to, among other things, help provide permanent, $100,000 tax cuts for millionaires and billionaire CEOs and for ``small businesses'' like hedge funds and major law firms, while deregulating the same coal, oil and gas companies that bankroll the tea party movement.

Now, isn't that crazy?

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/16/1827058/time-to-fold-up-the-circus-tent.html#ixzz101OEPzuY

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