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DRINKING FROM THE TEA FOUNTAIN.
Dave Weigel talks to Brendan Steinhauser of Freedomworks, the group chaired by former Republican Rep. Dick Armey. Steinhauser has a really high opinion of the "Tea Party" protests they've been organizing:
“We’re applying Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ here,” said Steinhauser. “We’re using methods that the Left has used, and that other movements have used, all the way back to the Civil Rights movement. First of all there has to be a real grievance, and that’s what Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King had. That’s what we have.”Yeah, I mean, Obama wants to raise taxes on Americans earning the highest income up to Clinton-era levels while giving everyone else a tax cut. How is that not exactly the same thing as being denied the right to vote, facing state-sponsored brutality and legally enforced racial segregation?
I've made this point before, but there's no end to conservatives claiming black people hold themselves back through a culture of grievance. Meanwhile conservatives complain that a small tax increase on people in the top income tax bracket is comparable to the oppression of the Jim Crow South.
-- A. Serwer
COMMENTS (5)
Why be such a grouch, sir?
If the weather is nice tomorrow, make a trip out to your nearest GOP reservation and watch the savages dance their aboriginal war dances and display their quaint ideological handicrafts.
Happy days.
Posted by: JHM | April 14, 2009 11:53 AM
Contemporary conservatives have pretty much infantilized themselves.
The tea-tantrums are the end-result of years of cultivating dishonesty and ignorance for the sake of political convenience. Stripped of maturity, self-restraint, wisdom, and a sense of responsibility, what are we left with? Kindergarten without adult supervision.
Posted by: Hobbes | April 14, 2009 12:43 PM
So, where were all these "conservatives" when the red ink started piling up oh, what was it...about eight years ago?!?
These tea parties reek of political convenience. It's as if conservatives only have a problem with big government spending when someone other than THEIR guy is doing it!
And these "conservatives" wonder why they suffer from credibility problems?
Posted by: Steve | April 14, 2009 12:56 PM
It looks to me like they're using tactics lifted from "Ubu Roi."
Posted by: Marti Perez | April 14, 2009 1:17 PM
Adam, are you even paying attention to the President's policies, or did oversight by this blog become passe when Bush was booted?
Anyway, three reasons the tea parties are about more than just tax increases on the top 1%:
1) Obama's first major act as President was to sign a cigarette tax increase, which is a middle class tax increase. Broke a promise right there, too.
2) Obama's tax cut is going to be phased out after only two years, and according to Orszag, will not likely be renewed.
3) The extreme levels of spending forecaset over the next few years will make tax increases on the middle class necessary, a point made on TAPPED several times by other writers.
Posted by: Adam Herman | April 16, 2009 2:35 AM