"We are not prone to surrender, we Mississippians." --Chris McDaniel

But who would expect a teabagger to have any sense of history, or irony?

The Patron Saint of the Tea Party

As the lemmings with suicide vests are in the process of flying off the cliff in this third week of the GOP shutdown, it's important to look back at the forerunners of those who are currently waving Confederate flags in front of a black family's house in Washington DC. Specifically, we can't help thinking of March 23, 2003 every time we see the word socialist spelled "scholiast", or fields of waving yellow snake teabag flags, or a tricorner hat festooned with teabags.

On March 23, 2003, in the midst of nationwide demonstrations against the Iraq War, one unnamed flag-bandanna-bedecked Urteabagger and future meme confronted hundreds of antiwar protesters outside a Boeing missile factory and gave us the creatively-spelled sign that would launch thousands of imitators as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated.

From a Google image search on the word "Morans"

Mr. Get-A-Brain!-Morans deserves to be the Patron Saint, or at least the Unknown Soldier, of the modern Tea Party.

The Gaspin' Flag for commemorating the 2012 Total Collapse of Teaparty (#TCOT)

Just call me Betsy Ross for my alterations to the infamous yellow snake teabag flag...

The official "Gaspin' Flag", which will soon be flying over Total Collapse of
Teaparty (#TCOT) memorial service barbecues throughout the red states.

Please feel free to use and share this variation on the old Gadsden flag that the teabaggers appropriated during their headlong rush to irrelevance.

Fireworks on the Fourth

I have a question about fireworks for tomorrow's national holiday. What is the very best way to honor our nation, our independence, and the primacy of the Stars'n'Stripes, symbol of our exceptionally exceptional nation?

Traditionally we celebrate by running a gasoline-soaked Union Jack up the flagpole in our backyard and set it alight as we play God Save the Queen (Sex Pistols version) with our beat-up Stratocasters and vintage Marshall amps.

However, this year I'm debating whether or not we should shake up our stale family traditions a little bit by changing the flag at the center of our fireworks.



My grandparents changed it up when they burned German and Japanese flags in alternating years between 1941 and 1945. I'm thinking that the appropriate vexicological sacrifice at the top of our pole this year should be the Yellow Snake Teabag Flag (sometimes known as "The Gadsden").


The musical accompaniment will again come from the classic Sex Pistols songbook of course, but tomorrow we'll play Pretty Vacant.

If I were religious, I'd be thinking that my prayers for chaos were being answered.

Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, a leading Tea-Party group, sent out an email last night asking for people on their mailing list to express their preferences for candidates like Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels and Christie Christie and Jimmie de Mint if the Republican primary process were to fail to produce agreement on one of the final four and devolve into a brokered GOP Convention situation where the delegates were free to ignore the ignorant primary voters. As Matt Kibbe states in the first paragraph of the email:

As the Presidential race heats up, the GOP Establishment is trying to control the process and tell you that this race is all over with only few states and a miniscule number of delegates already decided. That is simply not true. It is still very likely that no candidate receives a majority of the delegates heading into the Republican National Convention. If this happens and you were a delegate to the convention, you would have the opportunity to support ANYONE, whether they are currently in the race or not.

If you want to add to their chaos, you can vote at http://teapartydelegate.com/. And if you are more religious than me, you can start praying now that this comes to pass in late August in Tampa (Tampa in August? Sounds like hell to me, even without Republicans smelling up the joint).

The Fine White Whine of the Day (about events under the Tuscan sun)

I couldn't help reproducing the text of this email from the Independence Hall Tea Party Association here in all its glory. I didn't do anything to the original press release but crop the white areas surrounding it and add the highlighting to the various spellings of Tuscan/Tuscon/Tucson (they finally got it right - temporarily - the third time).




This post isn't simply about the need for geography education among those who believe in home schooling. It's about the sense of victimization and entitlement among those who condemn victimization and entitlement in anyone other than themselves. It's about presenting another example of the constant Fine White Whine emanating from the political Right.

Finally, while they ask for Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down to atone for her criticism of the Tea Party, they are not above stating that "the perpetrator of the Tuscon [sic] shooting was an unstable individual with left wing sympathies, someone whose world views were more like Occupy than Tea Party."

"Whine and then blame someone else" could be the motto of these groups, but they should watch their spelling -- and study an atlas containing Italy and Arizona -- if they want to gain any credibility beyond their true believers.

Fox News network discovers the source of the #Occupy Movement

My doctor has warned me that neither my heart nor stomach would survive more than a minute of the actual Fox News Channel, but I couldn't help surfing past their website right now. And what did I find? It seems that they have exclusively discovered the source of power behind the Occupy movement. Of couse it's that omnipotent boogeyman, ACORN (I think I'll dress up as an Acorn for Halloween and go to a Republican town -- BOO!). Though it could have just as easily been George Soros. Or Jeremiah Wright. Or the Easter Bunny.
The network that helped to engineer the 'spontaneous' Tea Party demonstrations in 2009 (see this MMFA summary of Fox's involvement if you need a reminder) understandably can't understand the making of a truly leaderless movement without corporate support (they find themselves unable to type the word 'leaderless' without quotation marks). But it's just as absurd to think that a small group of community organizers could build a movement in a month that has support from 43% of the American people (or 69% in Fox's own poll of October 7).

This Boot to the Head should be seen by everyone considering a vote for a Tea Party candidate

When following a link to this video of Rand Paul supporters assaulting an anti-Paul protestor, I got the following message page from YouTube.
There's no sex or profanity (though the actions of these thugs against Lauren Valle are obscene, and should be out of place in any democratic society), so I assume that the members of the YouTube user community who have flagged the following video have done so purely for political purposes.




If you didn't receive it in your email this morning as a card-carrying member of the Michael Moore Brigade, then you might also be interested in reading "A Boot to the Head ... from Michael Moore" on his website in which he places these brownshirt street tactics in a wider perspective. We're all going to get kicked, figuratively if not literally (though literally is always a possibility), if we let the pre-election pollsters be proved right next Tuesday night.

I'M MAD AS HELL TOO, CARL!, or Go Frack Yourself

There's now less than a week left of these ugly emphatic orange and black signs along the side of New York's backroads, impeding the deer and wild turkeys in their quest to run into my car. Soon we'll be back to nothing but piles of leaves and bare trees on the roadsides. I don't seem to be mad about any of the things that Carl and Fox News want me to be mad about, but I am mad that one of Carl Paladino's first acts, if elected Governor of New York, would be to immediately allow hydrofracking here in upstate New York. Who cares if our previously pristine well water becomes poisonous ... and flammable?

Go frack yourself Carl.

The Word of the Day is "Terrorism"

I'm just seeing the news now that a disgruntled taxpayer and private pilot (not usually an economically disadvantaged group) purposely flew his plane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, killing himself and possibly others. Though he may have failed in his attempt to take out IRS agents and employees, certainly the intent is there to kill other people when flying a plane loaded with fuel into the side of an office building. Some other suicide terrorists certainly expected to kill other people when they did the same thing by flying their planes into office buildings in New York City and Arlington, Virginia in 2001.

"We do not yet know the cause of the plane crash," the Department of Homeland Security said in a release. "At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history." (FROM CNN.com)

If a 53-year-old white American male cannot be called a suicide terrorist bomber just because his name is Joseph Andrew Stack III rather than Mohamed Atta, then the language has no meaning.

The Word of the Day is "Tea-publican"

First there was the "tea party" protester. Now meet the Tea-publican.
Conservative activists who once protested the political establishment are now flooding the lowest level of the Republican Party apparatus hoping to take over the party they once scorned -- one precinct at a time.

--Kathleen Hennessey,
Los Angeles Times, 15 February 2010

I hope I'm not the only liberal who sees great promise in this attempt by the teabaggers to infiltrate the grass roots of the Grand Old Party and complete the process of rotting it from within. The potential for more Republican defeats as right-wing extremists attack more Deirdre Scozzafavas as being insignificantly orthodox on questions of God and Marriage and Abortion seems great. The GOP is in danger of becoming as marginal as it was under Goldwater in '64. To avoid this fate, the few remaining moderate Republicans might actually try to find their backbones and emphatically repudiate the Teapublican agenda (but I doubt it).

Another Quote of the Day from Another Prominent Republican

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.

--Abraham Lincoln (letter to William F. Ekins, 21 November 1864)

This quotation from the Great Emancipator seems especially appropriate in this week when the five conservative members of the Supreme Court fully removed the previous restrictions on corporate speech in political contexts andgave the corporations of America -- and the rest of the world -- "corporate personhood" that called for the protection of corporate "free speech" rights, with all the money that they can throw behind that speech. Imagine how sponsored speech will drown out real human speech when fully unleashed. The Fox-sponsored Tea Parties will seem like a tea party when there's so much corporate "grass roots" Astroturf covering the American landscape that we'll never need another lawnmower.

Though it's nothing to laugh about, it was very hard not to play with the idea of giving corporations even fuller personalities under the #CorporatePersonhood hashtag on Twitter a couple of days ago:

1. TrueBlueLiberal Is the GOP so wedded to its capitalist orthodoxy that they're happy about Hugo Chavez's Citgo having a political voice? #CorporatePersonhood 1 day ago
2. TrueBlueLiberal When Beef Products, Inc. was a little kid, he did unspeakable things to neighborhood cats. #CorporatePersonhood 1 day ago
3. TrueBlueLiberal it's no longer hog heaven at the Smithfield Corporation home since the kids have read Foer's "Eating Animals" #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
4. TrueBlueLiberal The wife of FedEx has more complaints than compliments about his single-minded obsession with speed. #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
5. TrueBlueLiberal Archer Daniels Midland was a stuck-up Waspy jock in high school & he got worse with age. #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
6. TrueBlueLiberal Young Waldo Martinsburg was an extremely unpopular nerd until he took his nom de rap of "WalMart" #CorporatePersonhood 2 days ago
7. TrueBlueLiberal Were the Baby Bells committing incest when they remarried? Don't any basic taboos apply when we're discussing #CorporatePersonhood ? 2 days ago
8. TrueBlueLiberal I hope the real census counts all the corporations too! #corporatepersonhood RT @TCDL GOP CENSUS SCAM IS AN OUTRAGE http://bit.ly/8qgA0l
9. TrueBlueLiberal Or when you first conceive of incorporating. RT @ZenobiaDTC I guess life now begins at the moment of incorporation. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
10. TrueBlueLiberal AIG's schoolmates always believed that milk-money thief Abner Ignatz Golddigger would end up in jail one day. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
11. TrueBlueLiberal Bob&Carol&Ted&Alice have nothing on Proctor&Johnson&Gamble&Johnson. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
12. TrueBlueLiberal Do corporate persons have genders? Is Coca-Cola a Girl and Pepsi a Boy? Or vice versa? #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
13. TrueBlueLiberal Kraft is accusing Cadbury of being a real bridezilla about their pending nuptials. #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
14. TrueBlueLiberal Microsoft is thinking of switching to a new - cooler - pocket protector #corporatepersonhood 2 days ago
15. TrueBlueLiberal Young ExxonMobil could never take a bath without leaving a ring around the tub. #corporatepersonhood
16. TrueBlueLiberal Wells Fargo's favorite game is still "Cowboys and Indians" #corporatepersonhood
17. TrueBlueLiberal General Motors is still worried about the stigma of being demoted to Corporal Motors. #corporatepersonhood 3 days ago

The Quote of the Day about the double standards regarding religious extremists

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I sent a letter to President Obama Friday, urging him to override the DoJ’s decision to try the Christmas Day Bomber in civilian court and designate him as an enemy combatant, so that he might still be interrogated in order to glean critical intelligence that might avert a future terrorist attack.

--Sen. John Cornyn
Texas GOP Vote blog, 24 January 2010

So if the Republican right-wing leadership and their teabagger shock troops were intellectually consistent in any way they'd want Scott Roeder waterboarded at Guantanamo to find other murderous Christianist terrorist cells, wouldn't they? I guess that, in certain world views, successfully shooting a doctor in a church is much less of a crime than unsuccessfully lighting your underpants on fire.

But there are many on the Right supporting the murderer of Dr. George Tiller during services at his Lutheran Church back in May. Just look at the comments on this Fox News article supporting Christianist extremism and murder. Even the judge is considering allowing the jury to consider a verdict of voluntary manslaughter if this admitted murderer can prove he held an "unreasonable but honest belief" that he had to use force to protect another. What if Islamist extremists were allowed to make the same argument in an open court? Imagine the volume of the squeals from Cornyn and the teabaggers.

Breaking the Eleventh Commandment, or GOP Fratricide Anyone?

"Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican."

--repeated regularly by Ronald Reagan but created by
California GOP Chairman Gaylord "Moses" Parkinson

Republicans have had no trouble breaking the other ten commandments in recent years, so it probably shouldn't come as any surprise that they have decided to ignore the eleventh too. "The Eleventh Commandment" was created to silence liberal Republican (yes, Virginia, there once was such an animal) criticism of Ronald Reagan in his run for Governor of California to avoid a repeat of the liberal Republican criticism of Barry Goldwater that had exposed him as a dangerous joke in the 1964 presidential election. The liberals, of course, shut their mouths and a grade-B moviestar and host of "Borax Death Valley Days" began his improbable rise to the chief executive offices in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

Patti & Ronald Reagan Only Two Years Before Moving from Boraxo Commercials to the Governor's Mansion.

Luckily for us though, the conservatives in the Republican Party in 2010 do not seem as anxious to shut their mouths for the sake of party unity (unless the party unifies behind their own very particular brand of wingnuttiness).
Here are a few promising signs of the coming GOP fratricide just in the last two days:

• Raw Story: "Palin’s snub of conservative conference raises many questions" tells the story of the tensions between the CPAC convention and the even nuttier Tea Party Convention (guess which one Sarah Palin has decided to appear at?)
• PoliticsUSA.com: "The Political Apocalypse is Coming As the GOP Guns for Palin" in which the coming attacks on Palin by McCain strategist Steve Schmidt are outlined.
• politicalwire.com: "Republicans Furious at Steele" in which Republican House and Senate aides are described as furious at their own party chairman Michael Steele.
• Phoenix New Times: "John McCain's Not Airing New Radio Ads on J.D. Hayworth's Radio Show -- Yet" in which McCain is being challenged from his right, so "the Maverick" is turning, predictably, righter.
• Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine: "The First Senator from the Tea Party" in which ultraconservative wunderkind Marco Rubio's challenge to the merely conservative Charlie Crist is described in great detail.
  

So, are there any Republicans still observing the Eleventh Commandment? Of course there are. You don't hear Republican moderates in Maine or elsewhere in the Northeast speaking ill of their fellow GOPpers, do you?

Taking the Joke Too Far.

I have to stop looking around the darker corners of the Twitter and the blogosphere.

When a blog has to run a sidebar disclaimer reading ...

• Legal Notice

  This blog does not promote, support, condone, encourage, advocate, nor in any way endorses [sic] any racist ideologies, nor any armed and/or violent revolutionary, seditionist,[sic] criminal, and/or terrorist activities!!! The author of this blog assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained in this blog!!! This blog is for information and entertainment purposes only!!![sick]
  

... and places that disclaimer to the right of incoherent obscenity-laced racist rants and immediately below links to white supremacist websites and a sidebar advertisement for a t-shirt bearing a parody of Shepard Fairey's iconic Barack Obama 'HOPE' poster with the President's head tilted to the side, his eyes closed, and a noose around his neck above the word 'ROPE', and takes the nom de blog et twitter of "Obama is a Monkey," has the joke gone further than a mere parody of right-wing imbecility?

Because it has to be a joke, doesn't it?

Just asking. And hoping.

The Quote of the the Day from Charles M. Blow

If you don't want to immediately read the rest of Charles M. Blow's column,"G.O.P. Grief and Grieving," in this morning's New York Times after reading this first paragraph, then you're probably reading the wrong blog here at TrueBlueLiberal dot org:

The attack on the Republican establishment by the tea party folks grabs the gaze like a really bad horror flick — some version of “Hee Haw” meets “28 Days Later.” It’s fascinating. But it also raises a serious question: Are these the desperate thrashings of a dying movement or the labor pains of a new one?

His thesis is that American conservatism is going through the clichéd stages of grief over the Democratic triumph in 2008 -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- and that the teabaggers are now in that angry stage where many of us found ourselves in the early years of the Dubya regime.
One less humorous take on the tea party movement is hinted at in a companion opinion piece in today's Times from Gail Collins prompted by the Washington Wizards' Gilbert Arenas and his recent problem with gun possession. She cites the fact that the vast majority of Americans, and even 82% of NRA members, want to be able to prevent terror suspects from buying guns at unregulated gun shows, and wonders about the minority opinion.

Let us pause for a moment to consider the 9 percent of respondents who said they thought this was a bad idea. Perhaps they live in the same compound with the 1 out of 10 dentists who did not think patients who chewed gum should go for the sugarless kind.

My guess is that all 9% of these gun nuts are also angry teabaggers. This angry minority on the right wing's fringe is much better armed than the hard-core opposition to George W. Bush was in 2002-2003.