For the most part, Blankely is simply gloating over the beating we on the left are about to take at the polls next month. One sentence in this editorial stood out for me, though-- "[it is] the Tea Party middle-class Americans who are prepared to sacrifice for our grandchildren's freedom and prosperity."
Oh my mother of Christ, he actually said that.
Now these assholes are not just fucking up our country with their selfish venality and their racist bigotry, they're making sacrifices to accomplish it. They'd even appreciate a thank you, I'd wager.
I jest.
What part of the Tea Party agenda is not about ensuring that it and its people never have to sacrifice anything? It refuses to accept reductions in ITS medicare and social security benefits-- which are by far the biggest contributors to our deficit. Yet it also aims to take health care away from millions of people, to cut what it calls welfare-- mostly food stamps and housing assistance, to deny the American dream to millions of Latinos, to prevent the Park 51 project, and to end programs designed to aid the disadvantaged in our society in succeeding, to resist efforts to keep the planet from overheating and making it a less hospitable place for future generations to live.
The only sacrifices the Tea Party favors are ones forced upon people other than themselves; where its interests are concerned it has but one objective-- ensuring that it is given the maximum portion of society's resources for as little in return as it can get away with. Note how it twists the semantics such that its plan to strip the poor of their health insurance morphs into the right wing euphemism of "smaller government." Right-- smaller because someone other than itself will lose services vital to them. It aims to restore advantages to itself by stripping them from black Americans, even though it took 300 years of U.S. history for blacks to win the vote-- this it will call a "return to founding principles." Right-- as though the moral principles of people who allowed slavery are beyond question and criticism. Or perhaps it will take a stand for America's lost work ethic by telling ten homeless people a day that it will not give them any change. Even if they aren't asked, they'll tell their daily ten anyway just to ensure that-- to borrow the lyrical and classy language of The New Boston Tea Party -- "These parasitic leachs [who] live off productivity of others, they are blood suckers--" are kept well aware that some red blooded Americans have still got the will and fortitude to ensure the leeches don't get to thinking about receiving a hot meal and a kind word-- it's that kind of progressivism is threatening America with destruction. This, I guess, it will call "taking our country back." And how much do you want to bet that it follows that last line with the bit about "restoring our Christian values."
Every one of the right wing/Tea Party's objectives has but a single purpose-- to make things better for itself. It has but a single suggestion for how to pay for the things it wants-- by taking away things that improve the lives of others. The biggest drain on the nation's resources by far is Medicare and Social Security but AHHH! these are government handouts that benefit it, so these programs are worth borrowing from China to fund.
And true to form, the American right is never satisfied with simply sucking the lifeblood of the nation for its own benefit-- it must also construct a narrative that makes it a hero-- once it was how it had saved the people of Africa from barbarism and taught them Christianity; making a virtue-- and a moral virtue, at that-- of slave owning. Today it is that despite all it is claiming for itself and stripping away from others, it is no one but they themselves who are making the sacrifices for the kids and grandkids.
To me, that's a favor it can shove straight up Glenn Beck's fat ass, and if there's anything left over, it can shove that into its founding father.
I find that what the right-wingers say these days is pretty garbled, mostly because they've got billionaires' cocks jammed into their mouths. For all their ranting about the "elites," these guys just want make the filthy rich even more wealthy and powerful than they already are; they are merely apologists, boot-lickers and toadies for the supernally rich.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I think that the right wing has a different definition of "elite," one which seems to be synonymous with "liberal" and conveniently ignores anybody who is actually wealthy and powerful (remember Bush's comment about "fancy-pants elitists?").