Barry Germansky
Contributor
The Tea Party movement is the most monstrously dimwitted and flaky example of political hysteria since McCarthyism.
The two main arguments to which its members subscribe are, first, government regulation is wrong and needs to give way to privatization and self-regulation; and second, that President Obama is to blame for not providing the “change” he promised when he inherited the labyrinthine wasteland of corruption perpetrated by the Bush-Cheney administration.
I disagree. Americans have been wary of “big government” since their country’s inception; at that time, they had a right to be. Over the years, however, corporations have brainwashed the masses into thinking the government is still out to get them. The once-justified fears of government no longer apply. Today’s real “Big Brother” is corporate America, which uses its vast wealth and resources to shift the blame for the country’s financial and social ills to the government – which it, in fact, corrupt- ed – in order to keep the masses from checking their own shady dealings.
Government can fix problems; corporations cannot. But these corporations fund the Tea Party movement and are responsible for the self-regulatory privatization of financial institutions that led to the problems they’re screaming about.
On to the Tea Party’s claim Obama is to blame for America’s problems. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney and republican campaign advisor Karl Rove basically used former President George W. Bush as a puppet to bring down regulation and help their own companies prosper (Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, an oil company with more skeletons in its closet than we’ll ever truly know). The Cheney-Rove administration also started two separate wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, and masterminded a way to eliminate habeas corpus. They left Obama with one hell of a mess.
Obama, to be fair, was never all that great. He was only viewed as a potential “elitist president” because he could formulate a sentence, while his predecessor George Dubya could not.
Obama’s campaign speeches amounted to chanting “I will bring you change.” Details like what change and how he planned to bring it about were never mentioned. Meanwhile, the American masses never cared enough to ask, so they elected Obama based on a shoddy promise of undisclosed reform and now, when nothing has changed, they blame him. But you can’t blame someone for failing to deliver nothing.
If Obama lacked substance, at least he was honest about it and could properly articulate the “Gospel of Superficiality.” The Tea Party candidates, on the other hand, are personified by their most visible and vocal queen bee, Sarah Palin.
Here is a politician who legitimately deserved to be called “stupid” during her ludicrous run for vice-president, but who was spared by the overwhelming extent of our “politically correct” times, which paralyzed otherwise serpentine tongues.
Much work has to be done to cure what ills America, but Sarah Palin’s tea from her party’s kettle is not the appropriate remedy. The Tea Party will work hard to bring power to the small group of mighty corporations who will continue to use their enormous influence to cater to their never-ending greed. Society and all of the people in it will be pushed to the sidelines.
The only good that will come from the Tea Party is a bounty of unintentional humour, and we still have plenty of that left over from Bush.
