Toxic Tea

If you Google the Tea Party you will find more signs and images than you can believe. These were just two of my faves.

Up till now I have been largely ignoring them and their rhetoric. I have only marginally been listening to Sarah Palin and the crap coming out of her mouth. I also include Glen Beck in that as well.

Ron Rosenbaum, of Slate Magazine, wrote an excellent article about the Tea Party and how dangerous they are to ignore. How they flagrantly misuse words like tyranny, communist, Marxist and socialist. They are also quite guilty and misrepresentation of history, but does that surprise us?

I am a great believer in used-bookstore serendipity. Sometimes when you're thinking about how to express something, you find a perfect exemplification of it just by chance in the musty stacks of such an emporium. Here's a remarkable example. I'd been trying to find a way to write about Tea Party ideology, and in particular about the fraudulent history and distorted language it indulges in. Listen to Tea Partiers on cable news—or read the signs they hoist or their Internet comments—and you frequently encounter the flagrant abuse, the historically ignorant misuse, of words such as tyranny, communist, Marxist, fascist, and socialist. "

"You hear them say, for instance, that we live under "tyranny" because one side lost a health care vote in an elected legislative body. And that, in all seriousness, the president is a communist. For many Tea Party members, the word is not just a vile epithet; it's a realistic political description. Check out this clip in which Tea Party "celebrity" spokeswoman Victoria Jackson flatly tells a flummoxed Fox News host, "The president's a communist." When the host (the Fox host!) starts to object, she responds that Glenn Beck has taught her that progressive is a code word for communist. (Time to put that ugly hammer and sickle logo inside the "O" on your I-hate-Obama T.P. protest sign!)"

How can they play so easily on the fears of the weak minded and how can these people be so lead? I shake my head when I think about this. I am continually stunned, although I guess I should not be, that people like Glen Beck can gain suck a foot hold upon the public.

These people scare me.