I’m so confused. What was all that nonsense about yesterday?

Atrios:

But the teabaggers… honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn’t actually about anything else.

At least Ann Coulter admitted it — the emotional tea bag core, the grand unifying theme, was always Obama hatred. The rest is just ideological gibberish. The people who claimed they were willing to strap bombs to their bodies to stop government spending look like they’re either being dishonest about their intentions or dupes being played by right wing billionaires totally lacking in self-awareness.

I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle — cultural conservatives have always been happy that they had big money backing them up, and they were willing to strike a grand bargain on the budget front even if it meant reducing their "fiscal conservative" message to hypocritical nonsense. But who’s going to balk at a few billion here, a few billion there when someone’s willing to finance the war on hippies? If Joe the Plumber truly believes he needs to protect his interests in the event he becomes Richard Mellon Scaife one day, so much the better.

A lot of right-wing rage stems from the fact that a wide acceptance of liberal values has meant that it’s not "politically correct" to say what they really mean any more. It isn’t okay to talk about lazy blacks, so it got translated into "welfare queens," and the "welfare state," which of course gets financed by "higher taxes" — something the "Democrat Party" does because they’re buying the votes in a selfish bid to "exploit" the poor and turn America into a county of "serfs." And if "pointy headed liberals" have a problem with that, it’s only because they’re ivory tower elites who don’t understand the way of the world, but they control the media so it’s not okay to say that. It’s not new, it’s just the latest version of an old story that’s been told since the New Deal. The logic breaks down at almost every connection point, so by the time you get to the end of the chain you’re talking in such deep code it makes no sense.

But as Atrios says, this is tribal — they swell with teabaggy pride at the thought that they’ve demonstrated their awesome "power" to cowering liberals. If people tuned in because they are genuinely concerned about government spending, they were most likely left scratching their heads and wondering what this was all about, because the message dangled before the public by the teabaggers was something quite different.

(h/t Kari Chisholm)


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