From Alter Net:
Tea-Bagging Is All Fun and Games, Until It Pokes Out an Eye
Are today's antitaxation demonstrations insidious or just absurd?
Like many progressives, I’ve been laughing a lot about the GOP’s tea-bagging antitaxation demonstrations planned for today. But childish jokes aside, here’s why these protests are so insidious. They will provide a staged, corporate lobbyist-sponsored moment for Republicans and Fox News personalities to amplify their specious objections to President Obama’s tax increase for the rich, while furthering their own right-wing conspiratorial claims about liberal values. By usurping and bastardizing an iconic event from the American Revolution, they offer an ersatz grassroots movement from the right–complete and utter AstroTurf–in an attempt to reclaim the national spotlight.
As Think Progress’s Faiz Shakir exclaimed on Fox Business when he ripped the network a new one:
These tea parties are a sham. The reason they’re a sham is because they’re directed by lobbyists here in D.C. … And on top of that, you’ve got this network, Fox News, which is advocacy — pushing this, promoting this with all of its heart. And it is not a grassroots movement when you have Jonathan Hoenig, Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren promoting this up the wazoo. That is not a grassroots movement.
Faiz, of course, was dead on because corporate lobbyists like Dick Armey’s Freedom Works are orchestrating today’s protests, and Fox has been relentlessly pushing them too. As for the GOP’s ludicrous cries of Obama turning our country socialist, Paul Krugman notes that while Obama will raise taxes on high-income Americans, that tax rate will still be ten percent lower than it was under Reagan.
When I was a kid in Philly, Veterans Stadium was known as a “career-killer” because the cement-like AstroTurf wrecked the knees and ankles of so many promising baseball and football players. Let’s hope tomorrow’s AstroTurf movement turns out to be a career-killer for all the lunatic Republicans and hedge fund directors and Fox shock jocks who make the wild accusations that Obama isn’t from our country, or that evolution is a lie.
Now that you've read this, you can go here to watch the video that goes with this.
8 comments:
Good Afternoon Eddie. What? A newsperson at Fake News actually had a moment of sanity? I'm sure it didn't last long.
Good Afternoon to you also Nancy.
The newsperson was not a paid employee of Fuks Nuz. He was a guest from Think Progress, a liberal news blog.
The teabaggery was the Repugs' death rattle. Got sumthin' stuck in yer throat, bitchez?
I hope you're right, Gordon, I hope you're right.
Grow up with the teabag comments already. Opportunists aside, a lot of working middle class folks went to protest government spending and the increasing loss of state's rights among other things. As if Fox News is the only slanted outlet, every outlet is slanted however I'd rather see some positive coverage of the "thousands" not "hundreds" (as reported by CNN, MSNBC, and CBS) of Americans taking off from their jobs or taking a lunch hour or whatever they had to do in order to state their cases to not only Congress but local representatives as well. What's the quote? "If a government is big enough to give you everything you want then it's also big enough to take it all away" (I'm not exact on that). Kvetch if you must. It's your right as an American. Your kvetching isn't necessarily more important than mine and vice versa and the awesome part is that we can protest peacefully and not get hauled off to jail for it. I didn't go to impress the MSM or support someone else's platform, I went for my own reasons. yes, there are conservative folks who don't need to be told how to think by msm spokesholes.
Maybe it is you who needs to grow up Red. All of you "teabaggers" were used by powerful right-wing think tanks, the Republican agenda, and Fox News.
Your turn out was a very very small percentage, roughly .001%, of the actual number of citizens in this country. This sad excuse for a protest pales in comparison to the one million plus that protested Bush's illegal war during one protest.
Besides, where were all of you when the federal government was increased by 33% under Bush during his first year in office. Or when Reagan increased the taxes on those making less than 75,000/year to cover the costs of the tax cuts for those making 250,000/year. No you all kept your fucking mouths shut then....so keep your fucking mouths shut now!
Nice ass kicking there Gramps. I wish I could share Gordon's optimism because the media will seek to divide and mind screw even more than we saw yesterday.
You've got a point there One Fly. Of course, Fuks Nuz has been working on that for quite some time now......and so have the rest of the MSM in their own little way.
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