{"id":5493,"date":"2011-07-31T00:39:07","date_gmt":"2011-07-31T07:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=5493"},"modified":"2011-07-31T00:39:07","modified_gmt":"2011-07-31T07:39:07","slug":"what-tea-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/31\/what-tea-party\/","title":{"rendered":"What Tea Party?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">In all the political theatre we have suffered in recent weeks, it\u2019s very tempting to lose track of one key fact, so much so that I have done it myself on and off.&#160; The belief that the Tea Party is in any way separate from the Republican party is erroneous.&#160; The Tea Party brown-shirts and the Republican Party leaders are merely acting out their assigned scripts, with the storm troopers providing old-line Republican politicians with a place to point fingers and escape blame for what they have done and are doing to this nation.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">The article below references a video, so first here\u2019s the video.<\/font><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\"><object classid=\"clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000\" id=\"+id+\" width=\"480\" height=\"396\" target=\"_blank\" codebase=\"http:\/\/fpdownload.macromedia.com\/get\/flashplayer\/current\/swflash.cab\"><param name=\"movie\" target=\"_blank\" value=\"http:\/\/embed.crooksandliars.com\/v\/MjEzNDUtNDg0MDU?color=006699\" \/><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\"><\/param><param name=\"quality\" value=\"high\" \/><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\" \/><param name=\"allowScriptAccess\" value=\"always\" \/><embed src=\"http:\/\/embed.crooksandliars.com\/v\/MjEzNDUtNDg0MDU?color=006699\" quality=\"high\" wmode=\"transparent\" width=\"480\" height=\"396\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" name=\"clembedMjEzNDUtNDg0MDU\" align=\"middle\" quality=\"high\" allowScriptAccess=\"always\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" target=\"_blank\" pluginspage=\"http:\/\/www.adobe.com\/go\/getflashplayer\"><\/embed><\/object><\/font><\/p>\n<p>While I do not disagree with any of the points that CNN&#8217;s Fareed Zakaria made to Anderson Cooper after seeing the turn that this debt ceiling hostage taking has taken with the extreme level of obstruction by these so-called &quot;tea party&quot; freshmen in the House of Representatives and as Zakaria pointed out, their refusal to do any negotiating at all during this debacle. But what both of them failed to point out here is that <strong>there is no &quot;tea party<\/strong>.&quot; <strong>It&#8217;s the extreme right wing of the Republican base<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"display: inline; float: left\" title=\"teabag-obscene\" alt=\"teabag-obscene\" align=\"left\" src=\"https:\/\/www.7thstep.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/teabag-obscene1.jpg\" width=\"360\" height=\"266\" \/>It&#8217;s a drummed up astroturf movement <strong>sponsored by corporate America<\/strong> that is not only one of Fox&#8217;s making, but <a href=\"http:\/\/crooksandliars.com\/clsphinx?keys=cnn%20tea%20party\" target=\"_blank\">CNN&#8217;s as well<\/a>. I don&#8217;t believe for one minute that any of these right wing Republicans actually believe that it&#8217;s not necessary to raise the debt ceiling. I also don&#8217;t believe that any of them are too naive to realize what kind of dangerous game they&#8217;re playing with our economy. I don&#8217;t believe they&#8217;re acting out of ideological purity. <strong>I think they&#8217;re willing to play bad cop to push the Overton window even further to the right so that the rest of them can jam through right wing policies that would otherwise be completely unacceptable to the electorate in the name of a fake, drummed up emergency<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s shock doctrine and the &quot;tea party&quot; is playing their part as the useful idiots.<\/strong> And our media continues to pretend that they&#8217;re some grass roots movement that is just beholden to some ideological purity and not just the extreme right of the Republican Party who is <strong>helping them to achieve their goal of destroying our social safety nets, which Republicans have hated ever since they&#8217;ve been enacted<\/strong>. And they&#8217;re doing corporate America&#8217;s bidding with helping to turn us into a third world country where we have no middle class left. That&#8217;s their goal. <strong>They&#8217;re not crazy. They&#8217;re bought and sold<\/strong>\u2026 [<em>emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Inserted from &lt;<a href=\"http:\/\/videocafe.crooksandliars.com\/heather\/cnn-still-pretending-tea-party-not-just-ex\" target=\"_blank\">Crooks and Liars<\/a>&gt;<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">The author had done an excellent job reminding us to ignore the kabuki.&#160; It\u2019s all for show.&#160; If the Tea Party were who they claim to be, they would be the first to oppose preferential treatment for millionaires, billionaires, and corporate criminals in the tax code.&#160; Yet they zealously defend their corporate masters, exposing that their true allegiance is not to the American people.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#0000ff\">That said, I recognize that many in the rank and file are merely deceived and do not share the Machiavellian intent of the leadership.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In all the political theatre we have suffered in recent weeks, it\u2019s very tempting to lose track of one key fact, so much so that I have done it myself on and off.&#160; The belief that the Tea Party is in any way separate from the Republican party is erroneous.&#160; The Tea Party brown-shirts and <a href='https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/31\/what-tea-party\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}