TL; DR — it died for ‘our’ sins. “Campaign finance lawyer” Paul H. Jossey goes to Politico to drum up some free media, get revenge on former employers/competitors, and incidentally blow the gaff on his fellow grifters:
As we watch the Republican Party tear itself to shreds over Donald Trump, perhaps it’s time to take note of another conservative political phenomenon that the GOP nominee has utterly eclipsed: the Tea Party. The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.
What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds…
Today, the Tea Party movement is dead, and Trump has co-opted the remnants. What was left of the Tea Party split for a while between Trump and, while he was still in the race, Ted Cruz, who was backed by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots group spent just 10 percent of the $14.4 million it collected actually supporting candidates, with the rest going to consultants and vendors and Martin’s hefty salary of $15,000 per month; in all, she makes an estimated $450,000 a year from her Tea Party-related ventures. Today, of course, it’s all about Trump, but Trump rallies are only Trump rallies, not Tea Party rallies that he assumed control of. There are no more Tea Party rallies.
A recent poll showed that just 17 percent of Americans support what was once known as the Tea Party—the lowest number ever. The bailout-Obamacare-driven grass-roots revolt has vanished. Various autopsies have offered a number of causes: IRS targeting, bad candidates, hostile media, and even some hazy form of moral and political victory, in that the Tea Party pushed the GOP to take tougher stances on some issues. All have at least some merit.
But any insurgent movement needs oxygen in the form of victories or other measured progress in order to sustain itself and grow. By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement…
There’s a lot more detail — much of it fairly damning, including Jossey’s only-virgin-at-the-whorehouse tales of his own PACery. Most of it is stuff us filthy Democrats / progressives / liberals have been saying about the ‘Tea Party patriots’ any time since the movement was astroturfed to distract the rubes and Media Village Idiots in 2009. When he’s not deploring the unearned success of all those other PACmasters, he’s fluffing the Koch brothers (“true believers and they don’t need your money”) and Erick “Resurgent” Erickson. But I get the distinct impression that Jossey may be an early adopter of the Next Big Conservative Idea — that Trump had nothing to do with the “real” Republican Party, which he hijacked for his own immoral purposes:
… At its best, the Tea Party sought a return to the nation’s philosophical roots of government of the people, by the people and for the people. In sad irony, the Tea Party was hijacked by those who mirrored its critique of government: bloated, inefficient and looking out only for themselves.
If there is a Tea Party 3.0 it must unshackle itself and rise again as a grass-roots movement.
And Mr. Jossey will be more than happy to offer his advice, for a fee befitting his status as a seasoned campaigner. I’m sure he’ll have plenty of company outside the smoking ruins of the GOP, come November 9th (if not sooner).
raven
Look, a thread just for me!
Karen marie
I will state the obvious. The “Tea Party” was never a grass roots movement, it was always big money boys named Koch and opportunistic grifters.
Karen marie
Lazy east coasters taking the easy way out by SLEEPING!
Major Major Major Major
Just posted this below, sharing here too.
Earlier today, redshirt idly wondered about whether Cole’s frequency of tweeting was related to the odds of him bigfooting a post. I’d been meaning to brush up on my data mining anyway, so I took a peek.
As you can see, if there are fewer than seven tweets in the hour surrounding one of his posts (
tweet_freq), it’s almost never a bigfoot. Then, if there are… there’s not much predictive value after that that I can find. My word stemmer started acting weird, Twitter is terrible for things like that. Apparently the existence of ‘hav’ means that it’s not a bigfoot, I don’t care enough to figure out what’s going wrong there.After that, the decision tree starts overfitting.
There was another model that found tweets including ‘jesus’ tended to occur around bigfoots.
So there you go, redshirt. Question answered, The More You Know.
Fair Economist
Ironically, the conservatives who got so whiny about the IRS “targeting” Tea Party Groups (when in fact they targeted more left-wing groups) would have benefitted had the IRS actually knocked out some of the grifters.
amk
@Fair Economist: That is the main reason the grifters and their political allies raised such a stink over IRS.
grassroots = racists with their stupid hanging teabags for the sole reason, da kenyan. Very glad these rubes got shafted out of their meager funds.
trollhattan
@Karen marie:
Spot on. It dropped out of “nothing” fully formulated and organized. As organic as a Monsanto blue strawberry.
jl
@trollhattan: Yeah, I remember more than half of it was corporate astroturf right from the beginning. The real grass roots component couldn’t compete and no real GOP grifter wanted to deal with ordinary people, except to squeeze them dry. I remember reading about a few grass roots Teabagger leaders complaining for a while that they were being ignored and then they disappeared. They were losers, what self-respecting big money GOPer would want to deal with them and their stinking ‘issues’ that they ‘believed in’ and crap?
Maybe what was left of the grass roots teabaggers were the marks for sleazy PACs like this guy worked for. Just poor slobs to be duped and bled tor money.
The whole GOP has been nothing but a con for the last ten years at least. It’s just an empty rotting husk falling in on itself now. Doesn’t mean that it can’t revive itself after (let us keep hoping and working) Trump loses and win some more elections and run some more cons, though. If it’s dying it will be a slow, dangerous, death with lots of throes.
Brachiator
@Karen marie:
This is true, but just the beginning of the story, which includes how the Tea Party neutralized and nearly took over the GOP.
And the greatest story is how conservative voters revolted against the money boys. The ending to this story, of course, has not yet been written.
Grass-root movements have never been all they have ever claimed to be. Bernie bots and Tea Party dopes all love to brag about how they really represent the people.
Brachiator
@jl:
Get back to me after the elections before you call a time of death on the GOP.
And although Democrats are eager to throw the GOP onto the ash heap of history, conservatives themselves have not called it.
jl
I remember early teabagger demonstrations breathlessly covered by Fox News and CNN. Most of them were highly organized: bus caravans, professionally and mass-produced rally signs. And obviously lots of PR hacks feeding BS to the media. They rounded up and got a lot of loony House GOPers booked on national TV. I remember watching some nitwit dangled two teabags by his ears and raving. Which is why I will always call them teabaggers. The teabag was their symbol, and they were gonna teabag.
And then they (and I) found out that ‘teabag’ had a naughty meaning, so they tried to forget it about their original name. But I won’t forget. Since it demonstrates that they are also liars.
Mobile craigie
But – serious question- is the GOP tearing itself apart? I’m afraid that Trump will be too big a disaster, allowing the rest of the party (and the media) to regard the whole thing as some kind of outlier that doesn’t count. Or something.
jl
@Brachiator:
How often do the woebegon lunatics on this damn blog bother to read through a whole comment and think a sec before they let their fingers fly? Not very often is seems to me. Below is what I also typed (emphasis added):
” Doesn’t mean that it can’t revive itself after (let us keep hoping and working) Trump loses “
Prescott Cactus
We didn’t kill the tea party, but came close. Only mutated strains of their e-coli exist desperately trying to re-arrange themselves with Neo Natzi DNA holders and a deep undercurrent of Klansman’s battling the 2 A crowd for one supreme design of a uniform, by Yves Saint Laurent or Tommy Hilfiger. Once the style has been determined and country of manufacturers is lined up, it all over.
Fear, Uncertainty and doubt, worse than any pending Microsoft release ! ! !
Ian
The tea party didn’t die because it never really lived. It was Republicans to ashamed to admit that the country went to hell so they blamed the wrong president. Now their views are mainstreamed amongst those who still remain in that awful party. No true liberal woke up one day in 2009 and said, “Wow! the Democratic party is so awful that I am going to vote far right!” Only the firedoglakers and Green party purists would fall for this shtick.
Prescott Cactus
@raven:
Nevermore, nevermore. .
raven
@Prescott Cactus: Solution drank, fire for effect.
Ian
From the politico article
That one either slipped past the editors or else politico is actually reporting.
ryan
@amk: That’s a little unfair. My old aunt Jean was a Tea Partier because she just what they looked for: old, afraid, semi-senile, and desperately ignorant. She would believe everything that would come into her mailbox and would send them money she didn’t have. Between that and her church , she was grifted out of most of her social security. If it wasn’t for the fact that we bought her a little house she’d probably have been homeless. She wasn’t racist, just afraid (the gov’t was coming for her SS), and the Tea Party made her feel safe. She was simply duped.
Aleta
The R party is tearing the country to shreds (not just itself), and the boldest jackels will survive. The tea party served its purpose, allowing representation of the voters in congress to be dismantled, and increasing paranoia toward the media and government organizations.
realitybites
Hope this pic of John comes through. I always have problems with links. https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipND2i8mp_3D83nfDi_r-JbWxOLsebLf4snwS-8q
:)
Patricia Kayden
@Karen marie: And it only started when a Black man got into the White House.
Someone needs to tell Jossey that T’ Baggers were never targeted unfairly by the IRS.
Amir Khalid
@realitybites:
No joy.
Steeplejack (phone)
@realitybites:
Wants me to sign in. Sorry.
Also, you will always have trouble with naked links. FYWP doesn’t like them. Instant moderation.
Calming Influence
Aside from national socialists, the only other “party” that deserves a wack on the back of the head with a shovel is the “grassroots tea party”.
Prescott Cactus
@raven:
Nothing slowing down that train.
Damn the “torpedoes” full speed ahead !
Raven
@Prescott Cactus: I just finished watching “Run Silent, Run Deep” on my iPad! I forgot that Gable died!
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Raven:
Fucking spoiler, man.
realitybites
Hope THIS pic comes through.
:)
opiejeanne
@Karen marie: I stopped reading at the point where he described it as a spontaneous grassroots movement because I was laughing too hard. What a lot of twaddle.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@realitybites:
Yeah, no. And you got the hyperlink tangled up with the Reply button. Just stop before you kill the blog.
realitybites
well fudge, I used the link at the top. Don’t know why it won’t work. Does anybody have a suggestion?
Steeplejack (tablet)
@realitybites:
I tried various things to “fix” your URL, and it always comes back “not found on this server [Google].” It’s a bad link, not an FYWP thing.
Fred
Koch Bros payed for the bus tours. FOX provided the publicity and chear leading and we were off to the races.
Ryan
HAHAHAHAHA!!!! You have to be shitting me. The right has comingled with grifters my entire life. Also, if you believe that your voters are principled philosophers before they are self-interested citizens trying to make the lives of their children better than their own, you really need to stop getting high on your own supply.
Villago Delenda Est
The Teabaggers had one reason for existing: It happened on the evening of 4 November, 2008, at 8PM Pacific Standard Time. Barack Hussein Obama was declared the victor of the Presidential election by all the major networks.
That’s when the Teabaggers got started. All this crap about taxes is just that. If they were so fucking concerned about taxes and the deficit, they would have been going after the deserting coward and his “off budget” adventure in Mesopotamia.
Kay
In some places they were rejected. We had two elected to city council. They had the city buy a failed strip mall for city/county offices. The idea was they were so frugal and good with money they would save a lot by not building anything new but instead renovating. The little mall was anchored by a grocery store with gas pumps- shutting down a gas station with underground tanks is expensive. They went wildly over-budget and didn’t have anything left for the building renovation, so the (now) city-owned mall sat there empty for 2 years while the Tea Party members stopped the council from doing anything about it. The local paper did a story where the roof was leaking, there was (now) extensive water damage and there were birds living inside the grocery store. The 2 Tea Party people were defeated in the next election, the new city council allocated the money for renovations and the offices are complete.
None of them ever got on school board, thank God.
robert thompson
@Prescott Cactus: No, the classics never go outta style. The uniforms would be better in the original German. Hugo Boss or GTFO.
Ryan
@Villago Delenda Est: I largely agree with you, although I am willing to buy the idea that there is a principled stance against government bailouts and spending. If, that is, that money is spent on “those people.” So yeah, it’s not really about government finances so much as denying help for people who don’t look like you.
Kay
Sam Brownback and Matt Bevin are Tea Party governors, right? They’re really unpopular.
Maybe, just maybe, people really don’t want public education and public services deliberately destroyed to deliver tax cuts to rich people?
Kay
I whine about this constantly, but if there’s one local election people should pay attention to it’s school board. You can take a lot of hits in a community but if they go after schools you’re screwed because that drags everything else down with it and a lot of times school parents aren’t a majority. They really need support.
robert thompson
@Kay: What a cautionary tale. Any fool in business would know or quickly surmise that tainted soil from gasoline tanks is horribly expensive to remove or replace. I am surprised the idiots didn’t regroup and switch the location to become the town’s water supply.
Bobby Thomson
Organic, my ass. AstroTurf from the git.
Kay
@robert thompson:
It’s still kind of a boondoggle because it’s too big. The Board of Elections is in there now and it’s this yawning space with acres of carpet. There are 30k people in the county. They don’t need all that office space and they will never need all that office space. The grocery store is a local chain with 4 locations. They got the better end of that deal.
IMO, what really killed the Tea Party was winning Congress. They were told the GOP Congress would stop Obamacare. They believed it. They believed Congress would defund it. They’re *technically* right- Congress can theoretically defund anything. Once they found that out they were furious and they felt they had been taken for a ride with all the bullshit “overturn Obamacare” votes. You can still read them complaining on Right wing sites- Congress never used the “power of the purse”. That’s why Kasich in Ohio was such a betrayal expanding Medicaid.
amk
@Kay: How could just two teanuts force such a stupid decision on the entire city council?
Ryan
You mean that after years of under-resourcing basic government functions like, oh I dunno, the IRS and FEC, a whole bunch of fake PACs poach the resources available to Right leaning causes? Don’t get me wrong, I feel for the marks in this story. But, feel sympathy for conservatives?
This reminds me of another story I recently read. Wingnuts, you too have an interest in norms, institutions, and governance in some form. When you break this stuff, it has consequences.
amk
Ryan @46 (you html’ed reply button too).
This despite the emmessem spouting 24×7 rethugs talking points.
Kay
@amk:
Because it’s a majority GOP area and they were afraid of them. It changed after that- the moderates got energized and beat a Tea Party candidate in a state rep primary and it returned to “status quo”. It’s just a basic misunderstanding of this area. They’re not that kind of Republicans. They run everything and they want to keep running everything. They’re lawyers and insurance salesman and on the boards of banks. They’re conservatives. Conservatives are temperamentally moderate. Trump lost big here, not because he’s an idiot or unqualified but because he’s too loud and he talks too much and he’s too flashy.
Kay
The stupid people Party. That’s what she’s relying on. Good job, GOP!
trnc
True believers in what, besides their own self-importance? They don’t need the money they got from the tea partiers or from bilking various gov’ts out of tax revenue, but it made them feel big to know they could get it.
Ryan
@amk: Oops, thanks for that. Well, the MSM is on a quest for legitimacy from everyone, as they have ads to sell. They don’t realize they’ll never get the right back, and their attempts at bothsiderism leaves them at a point where no one else looks at them and sees an honest information intermediary.
Kay
It’s so funny to read on the far Right because it’s such a disconnect. They believe Obama got everything he wanted and that Republicans didn’t oppose him enough. This is widely believed.
I can see the anger if you believed that. They had these big midterm wins and they believe they got nothing out of it.
robert thompson
@Kay: Similar thing happened in the city I live in. A town with about 80K to 90K persons built a huge sprawling city hall and offices. Many voters were against spending the sums necessary, but here its old mainline Republicans who not only sit on all the boards and city council but literally own the dirt beneath everything. So its not the T-party goofs who were pushing it or have any say whatsoever. They have built walking bridges to nowhere. Landscape gardens that cover acres and giant rabbits in groups for some unfathomable aesthetic. But the PTB wanted it and they got it.
robert thompson
@Kay: Very sad to see that in this degraded time in which we live that the GOP won’t even spring to get all of their casual voters drunk or fed BBQ. They don’t have to. They prepped that ground with years of manufactured hate and now their casual voters come pre-impaired.
evodevo
@Kay: Yes. This. Happened in my town in Ky. Teabagger mayor got elected during the anti-govt. frenzy, and proceeded to manage the town “like a business” (what she ran on). Was an unmitigated disaster. The next election she was unceremoniously booted out – her opponent’s campaign meme was “Vote for Sanity” lol.
BruceFromOhio
@Kay: This, this, this. Gaia help us, we got a union-busting whackjob who did nothing but champion wage cuts for teachers and whine about the other school board members. She rode in on one those ‘throw the bums out’ waves, and it took the entire village to send her back to whatever hole she crawled out of. If there was a plot to destroy a perfectly good public school system in a small town, it could very well have started like that.
Kay
@BruceFromOhio:
If you find Republicans who support public schools you can really get bipartisanship against wackjobs. We did a bipartisan levy campaign here. They brought me in for the GOTV of the low income voters on the east side. Ya know, I would know all of them personally :)
We used the Obama lists so we did know them. We did low income women. They will vote for schools. People with little kids are so busy. I was always talking to them as they were getting in the trashed minivan – all harried :)
I remember that so vividly, that busyness, the immediacy. You’re always putting out fires.
MFA
Look, I know I’m late to this thread, but:
“…began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement…”
AH-HAHA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAA…!
No.Just–NO.
See Driftglass’ Seuss parody, and the “Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine”.
Emily68
@Kay: The three-person Okanogan County Commission, in Washington state, was taken over by tea-partiers two years ago. They cost the county a lot of money in legal bills because they did a bunch of stupid stuff that got ’em sued. They also privitized a bunch of county services and that cost way more money than having the county do the work.This is a deeply red county, but we’re now in the process of tossing the two up for re-election out. Only the top two advance from the primary to the general election. One incumbent came in a distant third in his district, and the other won her primary, but with ~28% of the vote and the other three candidates pretty much split the other 72% pretty evenly. So next January, we’re probably back to normal people for county commissioners.
philadelphialawyer
@Major Major Major Major: @Kay: Yep.
This is what I see all the time in the comments section of conserva-sites. “We” controlled Congress, particularly the House, so why is Obamacare still the law? “Our” Reps shoulda shut down the gov, for real, and not re opened it unless and until the usurper in the White House agreed to defund his signature program and accomplishment. When pointed out that that would have been when the cows come home, they say, well, too bad (never mind what happens to their SS and medicare then) and/or that that would have demonstrated his extremism. An eleventy trillion dollar budget, and he won’t agree to one little cut! With that out in the open, the repudiation of Obama and the Dems generally would have been nationwide.
They really believe this. That McConnell and Boehnor and now Ryan and pretty much all the DC GOP except maybe Cruz and a few others are sellouts who let Obama have his way on everything. Obama refuses to compromise (ie won’t agree to repeal of Obamacare), and they just rolled over. Throw the bums out! Never mind that the bums were put in the last time they threw the bums out. Just keep doing the same thing, again and again. Primary their own already insanely reactionary Reps and Senators, with even more insanely reactionary challengers. If the latter win, they turn out to be not quite insanely reactionary enough (ie will shut the gov down, but then cave when the checks stop going out, and when Obama makes it clear that he won’t succomb to blackmail, and the public, for some reason, agrees with him), so repeat the process.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Kansas is the Koch Brothers petri dish.
The DNC should make Kansas THE example of what will happen if the GOP gets control of the country.
laura
@MFA: you didn’t add the obligatory “There. Is. No. Teaparty.” When hat tipping Driftglass.
The best summation of Republicans fleeing the Bush administration crime scene, burning their uniforms and claiming they never heard of the guy. And a sudden organic forming of citizens concerned about small government with no intention whatsoever of paying for two wars of choice or accounting for the impact of Bush tax cuts.
H.K. Anders
@Karen marie: Exactly. It was a top-down grift from start to finish.
Brachiator
@jl:
I read your entire comment. I disagree that the GOP is dead or dying.
catclub
So is there any news on the “Paul Manafort is paid secret funds from Ukrainian/Russian oligarchs” front?
Like $12.3M secret dollars?
Also, I liked Kevin Drum’s idea for a french fry emporium where you pick your fry type, oil, and topping ( but it did not include cheese curd so needs more poutine goodness in the options). The side order is a burger.
Jeffro
@Villago Delenda Est:
“like”
It’s been fun pointing out to folks for oh, seven, eight years now that the Tea Party was nothing more than the outraged rump of the GOP, too embarrassed to call themselves Republicans anymore after W, too mad at Obama’s win to deal rationally with the world.
gex
Their initial complaint was that they wanted government out of their Medicare. They started out making no goddamn sense and caring only about themselves. And we know they started out with massive corporate sponsorship because too many of the signs were spelled properly. Leave the Teabaggers on their own and it’s hard to find a sign that spells all the words correctly.
catclub
@catclub: Paul Manafort is getting caught
I guess I should link to the NYT article rather than slate. Sue me.
Dnfree
My dad was one of those Tea Party grift victims but he died two years ago at age 94. I’ll bet the age of the victims has something to do with the decline also. In is somewhat diminished mental state it was all too easy for them to convince Dad that the country was in danger and he could help save it by sending $25 to each of numerous scam groups.
NCSteve
@Brachiator: Zombies don’t get a time of death call. And that’s what the GOP is. An unthinking, rotting, shambling animated corpse with no higher cortical function motivated solely by mindless hate and a bottomless hunger for the flesh of the living.
Citizen_X
@amk: @ryan:
This is still redistribution of wealth upwards, in this case towards rich political elites.
It still harms the country. We’re all better off if poor/lower-middle-class people maintain some measure of wealth and security, even if they’re borderline racists.
Chris
1) As anal and nitpicky and stupid as this is, I have enough respect for the Boston Tea Party of back in the day that I simply refuse to call it “the Tea Party.” To me, they’re just “teabaggers” (it was their own term, after all, until they found out that it meant something naughty). “Tea Party Movement” if one absolutely has to be formal.
2) The teabaggers were always a movement of racial-anxieties-riddled assholes having a fit of hysterics about Muslims, Mexicans, and the black man in the White House. The highlights of their political life were blaming the recession on black home owners, demanding Obama’s birth certificate, demanding more voter suppression laws because of too many Mexicans crossing the border to vote for Obama, and a month-long media meltdown about a Ground Zero Mosque which was not a mosque and was not at Ground Zero but somehow proved that our Muslim neighbors were coming to kill us all in our sleep. If there’s not much of a teabagger movement anymore these days; it’s for a pretty simple reason: the teabaggers of eight years ago were the precursors to the Trump voters of today, and for the most part the movement’s simply morphed into his campaign. Eight years ago, they were brownshirts without a führer. Now they’ve got their führer.
It was never about economics, it was never about policies, and anyone who said otherwise was either duped or lying.
Chris
@Ryan:
Matt Taibbi called the teabaggers “elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment.” Still think it’s a perfectly good description.
J R in WV
So glad Paul Manafort is getting the press attention he deserves, and in the NY Times, no less!!
And the Washington Post !!!
You guys keep on going, as hard as you can. That’s the way to win this election!
dww44
@Chris: This. It was from its genesis totally raced based. “I want my country back” was so soon after Jan 20 2009 that there was no possible other motivation than racism. I remember riding down a road regularly traveled in this rural part of the state and came up on a white commercial van with this signed affixed to its back: “Where’s the Birth Certificate” Little did I realize what we were all in for.
Chris
@Kay:
I think one of the biggest problems the teabaggers have is that their core issues are things that don’t exist, so it’s pretty much impossible to address them. People like the teabaggers’ politicians are always going to have this problem once they’re elected: you can fill your voters’ minds with bullshit, but the reason they vote for you is that they think the bullshit is all real, and once you’re in office, they expect to see you doing something about it. You can hardly tell them then that it was all a con, since 1) you’re up for reelection in a couple years and 2) at this point they’d never believe you anyway. So you’re stuck trying to satisfy them by looking like you’re doing something about something that doesn’t exist – and, of course, all the while the pressure is on because their real problems, the ones the bullshit was supposed to distract them from, are still happening.
If you want to slash, slash, and slash again the amount of money and resources given to poor, disproportionately nonwhite and urban people, you can do that. And we’ve been doing exactly that in the decades since Reagan’s election. But assistance to the poor, urban, and nonwhite was never the big drain on the economy or the middle class that they claimed it was, so all the slashing in the world isn’t going to stop middle class teabaggers from increasingly feeling the pinch from stagnating wages, rising cost of living, and an ever-shittier job market. But being who they are, they can’t just stop believing that it’s all the blacks and the poor’s fault that these things are happening, so they simply assume that these people must have access to some super-secret affirmative action trust fund, and that if the politicians they elected can’t find it and slash it, it must be that they’re in on the con.
If you want to implement the most restrictive voter ID laws since Jim Crow, you can do that – and they’ve done it in plenty of states. But that’s not going to stop the fact that voter impersonation fraud was never a significant problem in the system – it barely even existed at all. So all the voter ID laws in the world aren’t enough to prevent Barack Obama from being elected twice (and very likely Hillary Clinton as well this November), because these people weren’t getting elected by cheating: they were getting elected because most voters in the country genuinely wanted them there. But that’s another thing that wingnuts can’t believe is true, so instead they simply double down on the claims of voter fraud.
It’s a good formula for quickly losing faith in the government you elected, and then looking around for someone even more unhinged.
The Lodger
@catclub: check out the Boise Fry Company. There’s one in Portland OR and I believe it’s a chain.
Madeoutofpeople
am I the only one giggling at the part where he decided that being a cardiovascular scientist wouldn’t makea big enough difference in peoples lives, so he became the in-house lawyer for a sketchy fundraiser?
sukabi
@Emily68: hey, did your town go from Mayor to city manager in the early 2000’s? Just wondering because there was a push about that time to take smaller, rural towns and “convert” them to a city manager situation…at greatly inflated cost to town for salaries…
At least in the town (Washington state) I was in at the time (campaign for the change promoted by group out of DC) it was voted down, but we ended up with a city manager AND a mayor. The additional cost of Manager and staff lead to police shop being closed and county sheriff’s office taking over, as well as.utility rates being jacked up.
Don’t know how it’s faring now as I’ve left the area…
Xecky Gilchrist
I knew the Tea Party assholes were ripe for the plucking when they came right out of the gate doing stuff like this: http://wonkette.com/415418/insane-maine-gop-conventioneers-also-search-vandalize-classroom
As many have said above, the only thing “grassroots” about the TP was the use of that as a marketing buzzword.
RaflW
@opiejeanne:
Me. Exactly. It’s complete codswallop.
Untrumped
@Brachiator: Agree the Grotty Old Party is neither dead nor dying. It is definitely Undead. What remains to be seen is who will drive the wooden stake through its heart.
fuckwit
tteabaggers!
Still my fave memory from then
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OLsKt4O4Yw8