The Weird Contradictions of the Tea Bag Revolution
March 19, 2009 10:33 pm

Bob Cesca

One of the official tea bagger blogs (the one that inaugurates the Coward Rick Santelli as the Chief Tea Bagger) responded to my Huffington Post column. He or she suggests:

[The Democratic Party] is making a hash of the economy big-time.

Absolutely. Squandering the budget surplus on a $1 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest one percent and a $1 trillion-plus occupation of Iraq and a doubling of the national debt was a huge mistake.

Oh wait.

[The Democratic Party] appears to be in desperate need of some new ideas.

You mean, new ideas like emulating the Boston Tea Party? From 236 years ago?

Oh tea baggers, you make it too easy.

Tell me again how populism is awesome when it's Rick Santelli, but awful and McCarthy-ish when it's Congressman Frank. Tell me again how the congressional Democrats are McCarthyites while simultaneously accusing the president and liberals of being communists, socialists and Marxists. Tell me again about how you're against helping families to keep their homes while simultaneously supporting AIG's $165 million bonuses. Tell me again how the largest middle class tax cut in American history was an atrocity, but the Bush tax cuts for the super rich should never be allowed to expire.

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Krugman Song
March 21, 2009 11:29 pm

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Matt Taibbi
March 21, 2009 11:41 pm

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

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More Matt Taibbi
March 22, 2009 5:23 pm

....Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town - and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état.....

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Geography of a Recession
March 22, 2009 6:56 pm

Interactive Map shows unemployment in each county.

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David Shuster's Hypocrisy Watch: Michelle Bachmann's Earmarks
March 22, 2009 10:34 pm

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Black Joe Lewis - Sugarfoot
March 22, 2009 10:46 pm

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