[Peace-discuss] ron paul, teabaggers, and some of their best friends

[C. G. Estabrook]

It's amazing to me how the Obama administration and its supporters, while 
committing mass murder abroad and ripping off the economy at home, can get the 
chattering classes in the US to attack its critics - its critics! - for presumed 
thought-crimes.

It's been clear that Obama was a fraud from his emergence as an apparatchik of 
the fraudulent Democratic party.  Some of us in AWARE said so when he visited 
C-U in 2005. One could have discovered more from his audition piece, The 
Audacity of Hope - his advertisement to the American economic elite of how he 
could bring the populace to vote against its interests - but surely no rational 
hope remained as we watched his administration do the diametrically wrong things 
on the war, health care, and the economy.

Nevertheless the conversation is about the thought-crimes of his critics, 
typified by the Tea Partiers - a media creation on both sides, as it were.

Even I was amazed at the extent to which Obama was able to co-opt the anti-war 
movement, and I'm old enough to have seen now-forgotten Democrats like Eugene 
McCarthy and Robert Kennedy attempt unsuccessfully to do the same thing in the 
midst of another colonial war.

But what's amazing now is that those people who should be making up the anti-war 
movement will go to the polls and vote for the Democrats and Obama, because 
they're the only things standing between us and the awful Tea-partiers (and that 
Sarah Patin, who Doesn't Know Her place...).

Obama may be killing people at a great rate, but do you know what Those People 
believe about EVOLUTION...?!

Too bad we can't explain to the dead kids in AfPak that Obama's opponents are 
racists.  I'm sure they'd forgive us.


On 5/3/10 11:06 AM, Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> Wayne, I assume you are referring here to the "tea party" as the rebellion?
> I think there's an element of that, but it's dragged so far out of that orbit
> by the weight of its racism and Know-Nothingism, homophobia and fear of
> socialism, and miscellaneous rightwing conspiracy theories, that it's more
> likely to push national policy away from anything that might help working
> people than accomplish anything good and decent.
>
> Is the government run by elites and does it tax lower income people too much?
> Of course on both counts. But the fact that these particular "masses" come
> out of the woodwork to protest against health care reform, and not
> imperialist wars is very telling.
>
> The depressing fact is, there are many things wrong with the health care
> changes -- no being single-payer just for starters -- but those are not the
> reasons the tea-baggers were riled. And it's not really taxes, either.
> They're happy to pay for the largest military budget in world history, for
> more police and prisons. And most people, tea-baggers or not, are happy about
> government-funded libraries, streets, fire departments, etc.
>
> People object to taxes to pay for things they don't like, and for many of
> these folks, the things they don't like are infamous: welfare (now including
> half-assed health care reform), and integrated public schools that won't
> teach things like gods creating universes in 7 days and dinosaurs walking
> around with people and hell as a real place where Jesus will send boys who
> like boys or girls who fancy girls or even if you follow all the rules but
> you don't like it.
>
> I think your description below is pretty apt in this regard, for some of the
> angry white folks who've been amassing lately, but not for everybody. There
> happen to be many, many working people and unemployed workers in this country
> who couldn't care less who you sleep with, what color you are, or what
> religion you have if any. I've had my light turned off with some of them, and
> I've eaten meals with many of theme here in town. I attended a rally with
> thousands of them in Springfield a couple weeks ago.
>
> Do they trust the government? No more than anyone else. But they also
> understand that the government is an important part of the economy, not
> separate from it, and that certain government policies can help people who
> need help in ways they most of us can't afford to do out of our own
> individual pockets - people without health care, for example.
>
> We never get what we really want, of course. Even if we in the anti-war
> movement finally manage to get all the foreign troops out of Iraq and
> Afghanistan/Pakistan, which is a big if, you can bet there will be a downside
> to the way it's done - scorched earth, leaving cronies and puppets in power,
> taking national treasures with the departing troops, corporate control of
> resources, warlords swoop in and massacre people, etc? So, if these things
> happen will we agree with the angry white guys who come out in protest that
> the anti-war movement is caused these things?
>
> Oh, they'll find their effete peace advocates, the overeducated, etc. They
> might even blame Hillary Clinton, that old hawk. Stranger things have
> happened in our lifetimes. And some of them will be sincere. I know returning
> vets who valued the help they felt they were doing the people in Iraq. The
> class tensions in this country are real, whether between the Hillaries and
> the "masses" or between unions and John McCain with his 10 houses. In the
> French Revolution many people believed Marie Antoinette was a witch with
> three breasts. In the English Civil War some of the "masses" believed the
> Catholics were coming to make them give birth to babies with mouths in their
> stomachs and arms on their heads, and so on.
>
> Legitimate class grievances just don't make people right about other things:
>
> ...who want to teach queer-ism and candy-ass Hillary-ism in their schools.
> Again I think that Sarah comes off as being as fake as a 3 -dollar bill
> clinton but many of those people think that Sarah is like them. Hillary is
> not like them. Obama is not like them, Obama is not only black but he's a
> mulatto and an uppity one at that. These people dont generally have good
> information. They arent violent by nature but if they had the full scoop,
> then the elite bastards had sure enough better buy handguns.

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