The Biggest Tea Party Ever!

It was almost a year ago when about sixty to seventy thousand Crazy Stupid White People attended The Teabagger Taxpayer March on Washington DC.

Conservative Pundit Liars like Michelle Malkin grossly inflated the numbers of Crazy Stupid attendees anywhere from 300,000 to 2 million. A photograph supposedly of the massive turnout was instead a photo of the Promise Keepers Rally from 1997.

Imagine that … The Right Wing Lied. And then lied again to prove their first lie was really the truth. These guys are awesome. In the same way that food poisoning sometimes produces spectacular results.

A couple of months later Michele Bachmann’s anti-health care reform rally drew about 10,000 Crazy Stupid People. When Bachman was outgassing about the event with Sean Hannity on FOX, she said the attendance figures were somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 people. In the FOX tradition of lying to their audience, FOX showed 2 month old footage from The Teabagger Taxpayer March and passed it off as video from Bachmann’s rally.

That’s the kind of journalistic ethic that makes The White House Correspondents Association vote unanimously to give FOX News a front row seat in the White House briefing room.

Through the efforts of tireless and dedicated reporters we all found out about Hannity’s switcheroo on … The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Last Saturday we were visiting relatives in Canada so we missed the media coverage of Glenn Beck’s Teabagger Extravaganza. When we got home last night I immediately turned on the computer and the television to see what we missed.

Well … what we really missed was the next to the last episode of the third season of True Blood on HBO … so we watched that first. As soon as we were up to speed on what was happening with Sookie Stackhouse, I started Googling around to see how many Crazy Stupid White People showed up to restore America’s honor by trivializing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s galvanizing I Have A Dream speech. Somewhere between 78,000 and 96,000 ignorant louts attended.

I guess if you promote the crap out of a Teabagger event day after day after day on FOX, and promise insane headliners like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, you can probably get sixty … maybe almost 100,000 Crazy Stupid People to show up. And the media will deem it a “Newsworthy Event.”

It helps to have the deep pockets of the Koch brothers plowing piles of cash into the Teabagger movement to keep it going and on message. How else are they going to keep their grass roots movement green? It also helps that The Mainstream Media just loves them some Teabaggers. Their cameras roll if only a couple of hundred Crazy People show up protesting the Black Man in the White House. Now that’s news.

In 2002, four months before Bush illegally attacked Iraq, over 100,000 people marched on Washington … but you wouldn’t have known it if you followed the news. Five years ago 150,000 people protested the Iraq war in Washington and again the Mainstream Media was nowhere to be found. According to the French academic Dominique Reynié, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war. But in this country … that’s not news.

Corporate Media want us to believe the Teabagger Movement is representative of The American Will. It’s not true … but that doesn’t matter. The stage is being set for the November mid-term elections. Between now and then we’re going to see something we’ve never seen before thanks to the Roberts Court. Virtually an unlimited amount of corporate money will be spent on candidates the Corporatocracy wants elected. And an unlimited amount of corporate money is going to be spent on candidates the Corporatocracy wants defeated.

As Robert Parry wrote in Consortium News last week, “According to almost all media accounts, American voters are on the verge of rewarding the Republican Party for its determined efforts to block Democratic job-creating efforts and President Obama’s other modest reforms.

Amazingly, Wall Street leaders – after getting salvaged by government intervention themselves – are calling for more Republicans in Congress to prevent government initiatives to help other Americans get back on their feet.

There is a strange consensus emerging that, for want of a better phrase, “gridlock is good.”

So, is the United States about to take yet another flyer with “Reagan-Bush-ism,” the “government is bad” ideology that has dominated the nation’s precipitous decline over the past three decades?

Has the Right’s media power left Americans so confused that they have forgotten how the country emerged from the Great Depression and built the great American middle class, with a combination of government infrastructure-building and private enterprise? Have the painful lessons of the George W. Bush administration been forgotten already?

Philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But he surely didn’t think that the people of a modern nation would forget their own history in less than two years.”

I would like to think that we really do remember what happened to us just a few short years ago. But I also know that untold millions of dollars are going to be spent on wiping out that memory.

The media are giving these Crazy Stupid Racist Teabaggers airtime for a reason. The Koch Brothers, FOX News, Glenn Beck and the rest of the fatuous gasbags, have manufactured and inflamed discontent. The Teabaggers are the face of that discontent. Unparalleled amounts of money are going to be spent stuffing the heads of Stupid Voters with more lies and craziness.

What’s going to happen on election day?

Will the Astroturf Teabagger Movement hand control of the country back to the Republicans at the ballot box? Will millions of corporate dollars befuddle enough Americans into believing that Restoring America’s Honor means they should vote for Republican oligarchs? I would like to think that come election day the Teabagger Movement and their candidates will fail and deflate like a leaky whoopee cushion but …

What about all those no-paper-trail voting machines that have been stealing elections for Republicans over the last 10 years?

After the polls close … when all the corporate campaign money has been spent … after the latest Teabagger Media Circus has aired … and if the bogus voting machines were used … will a swarm of yahoos be swept into office? Will some highly paid haircut tell us, “The People Have Spoken” and then cut to a triumphant teary-eyed close-up of Glenn Beck?

That’s just about one of the scariest things I can think of.

The Biggest Tea Party Ever! August 31, 2010