The more I read about the Tea Party, the more it becomes vividly clear that this is nothing more than a Great Tea Purge of Republican moderates and independent thinkers.
It is a brilliant coup by Big Business to co-opt the American government, by using dim-witted fundamentalists and under-educated, under-employed rural folks to carry their water.
Look at the issues:
1) Climate Change: Irresponsible members of Big Business do not want to pay to stop the damage corporations have done to our planet. They want to continue polluting and exploiting our natural resources. The best way to do this is to trick people, by flooding the Internet with fake science, into believing climate change is not man made. The next step is to turn the government into a bogeyman, so “the people” will reduce its power to regulate corporate excess and corruption.
2) Taxes: One of the most irresponsible parts of this “movement” is that Americans should not have to pay their fair share of taxes. This whole idea that you can get something for nothing is a mirage and the poor families who scream and act the fool at Tea Bag protests are the ones who will be left without basic services if this radical agenda becomes enacted.
Of course, when “the people” become angry over the situation, these titans will spend millions of dollars on propaganda to blame the deterioration of America on liberal morals and government incompetence – even as they starve the government of the resources it needs to effectively do its job.
3) Health Care: The CEO’s have used this gullible Tea Bag crowd to convince a majority of people that the government is inefficient and should stay out of health-care. I guess these “real Americans” are content having potential treatments for their children rejected by faceless insurance company bureaucrats sitting in sterile cubicles with the job of protecting a corporation’s bottom line.
Do these tools realize how they have been tricked by hucksters like former Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX) – who now runs FreedomWorks, an umbrella for Tea Party groups? Armey is a corporate shill who is robbing your family of its future. However, too many people think he is on their side because he wears cowboy boots and uses quaint, folksy sayings.
4) Illegal Immigration & Gays: The corporate titans realize that if they ran on a platform of, “We manipulate the system to steal your money and you go broke”, they would not do so well in elections. So, they have developed the cat-with-a-laser technique.
When I want to distract Critter, my cat, I shine a laser on the wall and he runs to attack it. He never actually catches the gosh-darn-red-light, but he always feels like he’s getting close. More importantly, he expends a lot of energy – and then takes a multi-hour slumber.
Tea Baggers – you are the cat and the issues of immigration and gay rights are the laser. You are being distracted, busied on a circular obstacle course and ultimately being put to sleep – even as you feel you are accomplishing something.
I have news for you.
You are never going to stop people from crossing the border, as long as there are better economic opportunities in America. You are never going to stop gay people from dating and mating. No matter how high you build that wall, or how many Constitutional Amendments banning gay marriage you spend millions of dollars to enact. You are essentially wasting your time and money.
They want you focusing on us, so you won’t notice that you can’t afford to send your children to college or that your job has been shipped overseas. Then, when you finally get a job making half as much as you used to bring home, they will praise you for you work ethic and pretend you are the “backbone” of America.
“If you just scrub that toilet a little bit harder, you’ll be an entrepreneur in the opportunity-based society and one day smoke cigars on the country club golf course with Rush Limbaugh,” I can hear the hired PR guns say.
5) Guns & Prayer: Most of the CEO’s don’t really care about these social issues. However, they realize that guns and fundamentalist prayer helps newly disempowered people cope with feelings of low self-esteem and helplessness. You see, if the misery is God’s Plan, and not the result of selfish and destructive economic plans by greedy CEO’s and politicians, the pain is easier to swallow.
The Tea Party crowd must realize that it is being used and exploited by large financial interests. It is time “the people” wake up and grow up, before they permanently drive this country into a destitution ditch.
Wayne Besen is a columnist and author of the book “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth.”
