Lies, Damned Lies, and Teabags 1
In the Sacramento Bee, Vanessa Williamson tells of her talks with teabaggers. She found them well-informed about political tactics, but, when it came to actual policy, not so much.
At times, the level of misinformation in tea party circles reached conspiratorial proportions. At a tea party meeting in Massachusetts, people discussed the possibility that the “smart grid” (an electrical infrastructure improvement approximately as controversial as road repair) was in fact a plan that would give the government control over the thermostats in people’s homes. Where are these smart, educated Americans getting such terribly inaccurate information?
Where indeed? Read the rest to find out.
June 3, 2012 at 3:16 pm
Tea Party people have no more read Saul Alinsky’s book than Ted Nugent has, who also mentions the guy. The only reason they mention that name is because they either watched Glenn Beck when he was on Fox or read The Blaze. Beck used to always rant about “Saul Alinsky” and “Rules for Radicals.” His thrust, always the same, was that Saul Alinsky developed a plan for overthrowing the United States and that’s what all Democratics, or the current administration, are in thrall to.
Here’s a current example of the Tea Party’s grasp of process and content, the election of a neo-Nazi to party committee in Luzerne County, Pennsy, as cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center:
“Steve Smith, a longtime racist activist with a history of violence and top-level ties to numerous white nationalist hate groups, has been elected to a 4-year term on the Republican Party’s county committee for Luzerne County, Penn., One People’s Project reports.
“Recruited into the neo-Nazi movement while he was stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1990s, Smith, of Pittston, Penn., has been active in an extraordinary array of white nationalist, skinhead, and neo-Nazi groups, including American Third Position, Keystone United (formerly Keystone State Skinheads), and the Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a former Aryan Nations member and former leader of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of White People …
“To advance his goals, Smith has distanced himself somewhat from his violent past and focused on political activism. As state chairman for American Third Position (A3P), a white nationalist political party that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule, he has for several years been working the crowds at local Tea Party gatherings, which he once described as “fertile grounds for our activists.”
“In October 2010, he led a delegation of A3P activists in presenting the party’s position to a Scranton Tea Party group. “We explained that the A3P was formed to represent white Americans, who have been denied representation for decades,” he said in a press release on A3P’s website. “We provided them with a true alternative to the typical dead-end conservatism with which so many of these concerned and partially awakened Americans are involved.”
And we probably have forgotten the other Tea Party candidate in 2010 whose campaign was only killed when he was discovered prancing around on weekends in Waffen SS uniforms.
Tea Party members, more bluntly, don’t know their asses from a hot rock, but they’re belligerent and dogged in their stupidity and belief in their tribal mythology.
Vanessa Williams is as diplomatic and gentle with them in the column as she can be. They really don’t deserve, Mark Potok at the SPLC knows the score and he was commenting about it in Iowa earlier this week. When more and more a group/party shows in the databases of SLPC, it’s a dangerous group, no matter how nice and into civic engagement they seem face to face when they’re on the best manners.