The Tea Party's Got Issues to Work Through - Boy, Do They

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504365_162-20002561-504365.html
Posted by Charles Cooper

Not all people who identify themselves as Tea Partiers are ethnocentric wingnuts who get their information about the world spoon-fed to them by televised talking heads. But apologists for this movement are going to have a hard time explaining away the fact that a sizable minority qualify for that very description.

The latest CBS News/New York Times poll presents a picture of an aging cohort of pessimistic white folks, rattled by economic and cultural changes which have rocked their increasingly Twitter-fied, multicultural and multi-polar world (one led by a charismatic black guy who can swoosh 3 pointers with the best of them.) And their unhappiness with the verdict of the 2008 presidential election has led them down the rabbit hole.

Judge the poll data for yourself but for me the clincher was the birther issue. An astounding thirty percent of the people who identified themselves as tea partiers still believe that President Obama was born in another country, while another 29% still don't know. Don't know? I'm not sure which is worse: being paranoid delusional or potentially paranoid delusional but too lazy to find out the facts.

Everything else flows from this bogus controversy. It so happens that I have it on good authority that the birthers were dropped off on Planet Earth from an asteroid penal colony near the farthest rung of Saturn. Prove it, you say? Au contraire; first they prove they're not from outer space and then perhaps I'll reassess my suspicion. Yes, that's how insane it is.

They're in their 80s and are hopelessly down the rabbit hole. Except they don't go to tea parties; they just yell at the TV. It's pointless to try to tell them anything. Sad that they have to be so mad--but they've done it to themselves.

These guys got more issues den da Nat'al Geographic....

"Geeks like these are a dime a dozen - I'm lookin' for da guy what's handin' out da dimes!" Fred Blassie

Bro Supernova is 58 this year. That means born in 52.

He is conservative and grew up to expect that he'd always be top of the economic heap. It's not that he thinks he needs to make scads of money, far from it. He's been a community college instructor since the late 80s. But he's very unnerved by all the new multiculturalism, the influx of a lot of new immigrants -- especially the Spanish-speaking kind, the openness to stranger (to him) forms of reliogiousity or no religiosity at all, the idea that he might not have a pension or health care to retire on.

He's looking for someone to blame. He jokingly said back a couple of months ago that he would going to go join the Tea Party. :eyes: I think it's the *pace* of change that has riled him and people like him that I know.

Although, to his credit, Bro Supernova doesn't think Hawaii is a foreign country.

And yeah, I'm the family whacko because I like to think through things and try not to blame individuals.

"And you'd better start swimming, or you'll sink like a stone, for the times, they are a ' changin..."

He's a community college instructor, and multiculturalism bothers him.
And the paradox doesn't bother him a bit, does it?

I have a cousin who has taught for a while, and she honestly believes that her dark-skinned pupils (mostly Filipino and Latino) are somehow "lesser."

Her hypocrisy? Its a Catholic school.

Again, *sigh*.