I was wrong about the Tea Party.

I was wrong to think it was just a coincidence that it happened onto the scene not long after America had elected its first African-American president. I was wrong to believe that Tea Partiers would eventually come to the realization that their movement was based on a false premise—that their claim of being overtaxed belies the fact that today’s average American has the lowest tax burden since the 1950s. I was wrong to believe that the people they elected to Congress would behave as adults and not stand in the corner, showing us how long they can hold their breath. And I was wrong to believe that the Tea Party would be gone by now, having run out of momentum and hot air, and having collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness.

What started out as a hybrid flash mob/wrongheaded tax protest has morphed into something quite different. It is said that when zealots form a firing squad, they assemble in a circle. Such seemed to be the impending fate of the Tea Party, which had burned brightly, but began to show signs of the crazies chasing each other into an ever-tightening death spiral. But then something funny happened—funny in a Chernobyl kind of way.

The anti-tax movement cast a wider net, and it began attracting kooks and then Kochs. Suddenly, it was awash in money, and the Koch brothers began financing workshops here, seminars there.

The Tea Party became a platform for all things right-wing. The government is too big. The president doesn’t look like the rest of us. The poor and helpless are getting a free ride. We shouldn’t spend billions of dollars chasing after Osama bin Laden. (No, wait! That was what Mitt Romney said in 2007.) Spending is out of control. We’re being taxed to death. (Unless you want to live in a country with no government spending—including on things like police, firefighters, teachers and the military—we need to have taxes. And the ones we have are, for the most part, quite reasonable.)

There are some real concerns in there that deserve a public discussion, but the overriding vibe in all things Tea Party is this creepy, visceral hatred of Barack Obama. It’s very disturbing.

Equally disturbing is the fact that this is a splinter group that is wielding a wildly inordinate amount of power. There’s a great cartoon from the July 30, 2011, edition of The Economist: It shows a little Tea Party kid with blinders on about to ride his tricycle off a cliff. But he’s pulling along, by a nose ring, an elephant representing the Republican Party, which, in turn, is dragging along Uncle Sam, who, in turn, is dragging along the world. The world is saying: “Something is definitely wrong here.”

And it looks like wrong is about to get even more wrong. The stalling tactics of the relatively small minority of Tea Party members in the House of Representatives have left that legislative body in hard-core ideological lockdown. Now, they’re trying to gain a foothold in the Senate. If they gain control of both chambers, the American economy will be in free-fall for a decade.

And that’s not all they could mess up. For example, if the Tea Party ran:

• NASA … the United States would have put a man on Jamaica. Oh, all that wasteful government spending, and for what? A science experiment? No, it would have been far better if each American could have kept in his/her pocket the few dollars per capita that it cost to reach the moon.

• The National Basketball Association … the average game score would be something like 18-14. Teams could stack their defense on one side of the court, because under Tea Party rules, players would only be able to go to their right.

• The Civil War … there wouldn’t have been a Civil War. It was strictly a states’-rights issue, a simple matter of economics. The Southern states’ economies were based on a different system, one that included that quirky notion that some people have the right to own other people. It’s just that those awful liberals had to go and inject race into the whole thing.

• The CIA … Jason Bourne would be Jason Died.

• The Rosetta Stone company … they would teach people how to say “No!” in 134 different languages.

• The National Football League … the games would only be six-on-six, because it’s ridiculous to pay 11 people. The games would be lame, because under Tea Party control, all of the running backs and wide receivers (as well as everybody else on offense and defense) would be white. Each team would have one token black guy, but, like Allen West, he’d be strictly for comic relief.

• The EPA … those initials would stand for Executioners, Please Apply. Who needs a government agency to protect our environment? Just think how much fun it would be if the Tea Party got rid of the EPA. We’d be able to go outside with a knife and carve a hunk of smog out of the atmosphere. Our drinking water would have fiber (and several kinds of protein) in it. And we’d all be able to learn about new and constantly mutating chemicals in an up-close-and-personal manner.

• The KKK … no change.

This article appears in Aug 23-29, 2012.

24 replies on “Danehy”

  2. No, Tom, the tea party and republicans are worse than you think.
    Instead of being run out of town for the anti-American swine whoring for the rich creeps they are, they are taken seriously and elected by people uncapable of logic or reason. And the democrats pander to the rich corporations too. There is no one to represent the people. Unless the people are all wanting to destroy this country to make the 1% richer in their overseas bank accounts, then the people are being represented.

    Americans have been unmasked to the world as fools voting against their own best interests. It will take more than a decade as you state to undo the damage done by the 1% taking over out country, it will never be undone. Once destroyed, our Constiution will be discarded and forgotten.
    The Supreme Court may continue appointing our president and vice president. Nothing would surprise now. I never thought it would come to this sorry state and there are no limits now. We appear to be a nation of knaves and fools.

    Be afraid.

    Jesse

  3. Thank you Tucson Weekly/Mr. Denehy. In short, like me, Mitch McConnell said:”Priorty is to not have the President be re-elected” enough said. Done. However, sad, just the same.

  4. Tom, if governments would stick to spending tax money on police, firefighters and schools, with a true safety net – that is, only help those who really need it – our taxes would be more than sufficient. Taxes are low? Hardly. When you add local, school, city, state, sales and such to the federal taxes our taxes EXCEED the percentage paid, say, in Europe. The ‘taxes are too low’ people have their numbers wrong, and Tom buys it.

  5. In January, when I was running for President in the Green Party primary as part of Tucson Weekly’s Operation White House, you printed my plan to deport all Tea Party members back to the 18th century: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archi…

    I think that is still the best solution. I am again a candidate, in next Tuesday’s Americans Elect Party primary, for Congress in Arizona’s Fourth Congressional District (a solid Tea Party district where Paul Gosar and Ron Gould are fighting for the Republican nomination, tantamount to winning in this crappy district filled with the people you’re writing about). I am again proposing to deport all Tea Party Republicans.

    Unless we rid ourselves of these people, the U.S. will continue to decline relative to the rest of the advanced post-industrial and industrial economies.

  6. Most of all, I love the hypocrisy. Like protecting Medicare, which is the purest and largest “socialistic” Federal program of all.

  8. I see that my comment about protecting Medicare wasn’t clear enough. As if I disapprove of protecting Medicare. Not at all. In fact, I see it as a model government program, and one whose benefits should be extended to all, not just to “seniors.”

    My intention was to mock the Tea Party types who oppose almost all government programs except the ones that benefit them.

    Pure hypocrisy…

  9. Just Foolishness!
    Who are you to define what I think, feel, or do?
    NO ONE SAYS GET RID OF ALL GOVERNMENT…Geeeze, get a grip already.
    The Government Debt IS killing America, and Obama ( and NO I don’t care that he is half white, the ONLY ones bringing “RACE” into the conversations are YOU LeftyDems) is for it and supports America being taken down a few notches.
    “Necessarily energy costs will skyrocket, the middle class is doing fine, You didn’t build that”=FAIL

  10. @cempiremtn, may I ask you why you posted that you don’t care that our President Obama is “half-white?”

    The fact that you posted that suggests to me that you really do care.

    Maybe a bit too much?

  12. “When you add local, school, city, state, sales and such to the federal taxes our taxes EXCEED the percentage paid, say, in Europe. The ‘taxes are too low’ people have their numbers wrong, and Tom buys it.” Citation of authority please.

  13. I had a funny feeling you’d climb down from the dust balls, mouse droppings and all the useless things that God made attics for. God, how I love to annoy you.

  14. so sorry, CW13, but I truly did not understand your most recent post.

    Could you, please, try again to clarify?

  15. If the Democrats ran:

    • NASA … scrap our own space missions and focus on Muslim outreach (already done).

    • The National Basketball Association … No team would be allowed to have more points than the other team. At the end of the championship, everyone gets a trophy. Special consideration will be given for players who are non-white and/or homosexual.

    • The Civil War … the North would have lost due to Union soldier strikes over collective bargaining rights.

    • The CIA … Special agents would find proof that George W Bush is to blame for EVERYTHING.

    • The Rosetta Stone company … learn any language except English, as long as you learn Spanish first.

    • The National Football League … football would become a no-contact sport after expensive government-funded studies find that injuries can hurt players.

    • The EPA … would declare the air you breath a toxic greenhouse gas (already done). Taxes go up to offset the cost of hiring new EPA agents to declare every aspect of life a contributing factor to global warming.

    • The KKK … no change. The Klan has always been Democrat.

  16. Cody, go to where what passes as the KKK still exists, to the South, and you will not find democrats, you will find republicans. The Solid South is solid republican ever since Pres. Lyndon Johnson, a democrat, desegrated the schools. At that time he said he was losing the South for the democrats for 50 or 100 years. He was right. I have cousins in the South and they vote straight republican and have no idea what the republicans are doing to this country and they don’t care, they only care that they are not voting for democrats who desegrated and destroyed school in the South.
    When whites in the South fled the desegrated public schools they had to then go to church schools. So now the South is filled with poorly educated, evangelical, fundamentalist religious sheep. A large majority of them can’t see what is going on. “My country, righrt of wrong,” and that means be patriotic, god-fearing, and vote republican. These religious fanatics are all for war, as long as their kids don’t fight it, and they don’t mind that US is killing innocent people. And the really ignorant ones in the lowest classes who are bred to go into the military and fight these criminal wars, are given flags, parades and medals instead of an education because if they were educated they would refuse to go risk their lives and sanity to kill innocent people in foreign lands.
    I remember a poster I saw once, “Join the Navy, see the world, meet interesting people, and kill them”
    My Southern republican kinfolks think that is good advice, not an anti-war statement. And thinking is not what they do very well because they have been brainwashed not to think much.
    Perhaps Cody (previous comment) has been brainwashed too?
    The democrats have recently failed us, and the republicans would destroy us.
    But don’t say the KKK is filled with democrats. It is not. It is filled with god-fearing, red neck, ignorant republicans.

  19. The Tea Party constituency is as varied as the Republicans and the Democrats.
    However, there’s a small component there that does live in the premise of “no compromise”, and it’s taking the country down.

    Senator Robert Byrd softened after he fathered a child with a black woman. He quit the KKK and apparently went to the child’s college graduation. I only use this as an example that it just takes the right experience to change a person’s point of view and that Robert Byrd could father a child that could graduate from college.

    Both the Republicans (fronted by the Tea Party) and the Democrats rejected the Bowles-Simpson Proposal for balancing the budget, and this will come back to haunt the country. The pain delivered by the Bowles-Simpson Proposal would have delivered our children and grandchildren from the future we’re preparing for them. Both Paul Ryan and Obama share blame for making sure this plan was rejected.

  20. Typical of Americans you all seem to be stuck on the “Blame the other guy” syndrome. Everyone Dems and Republicans allowed the ten trillion debt to build during the good times. Now when times r tough and a decent argument can be made for some gov intervention we already are holding too much debt. And all the jackasses over the last decades who spent when there was no need get off scott free!

  21. The KKK reached a membership high in the 1920s when it reached six-million members. By 1980, it reached an all-time low, just 5,000 members. But then, in 2008, it went back up to 6,000 members? Why? What happened between 1980 and 2008?

    [The advent of Fox News Channel in the mid-90s. Bingo.]

  22. I am pleased this propoganda is in media so small in popularity that fewer folk’s are brainwashed into thinking like this. I thought I saw where Cindy Sheehan was going to become a colunmist in this publication.

  24. It is interest the KY Senator Mitch McConnell is going to be running for his 6th term in the
    Senate in 2014 and has hired a big Tea Party promoter for his re election. Reading about a dozen newspapers in KY about his re-election, most comments were negative. They trashed McConnell as using his Senate seat to become a multi-millionaire and not helping the people of KY. There was some strong comments again McConnell, so I ask, How does he continue to win re election? Is there fraud voting in KY. KY being a poor state, bad education, it would be easy for him to fool the people of the state. McConnell going to be running on a strong Tea Party campaign. This guy has done NOTHING for this nation or his State.

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