America was teabagged yesterday. And not in a good way. We were lulled into a false sense of complacency and the nutbags on the Right slipped their jewels down our throat.
What is with people? My neighbors and coworkers are railing against taxes that went down this year. They complain about the loss of jobs when stimulus money is starting to flow into the economy to boost employment. The fat cats on Wall Street are starting to feel the heat from the scrutiny of regulators for the first time in a decade. The economy sucks big time and they bitch and moan about the only means we have left to breathe life into it. They rant and rave on cue about phantom threats and shadowy government skullduggery that exist only in the raving minds of screechers like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
I watched with amazement hundreds if not thousands of my fellow Americans screaming about tearing this country apart. There was no love for America in those crowds. They expressed only love for their own greed self interests. There was no community, no neighbor helping neighbor, only me-me-me. The whole affair, the whole concept was nothing more than a Fox News-coordinated circle jerk of selfishness, greed and scapegoating. I'm sure that while these teabaggers were out at the village square protesting in the rain, the IQ's of their neighborhoods must have went up dramatically.
We are in a economic cesspool and we let it happen. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. The wizards of Wall Street found a pot of gold in the way we managed our financial system. Years after Roosevelt put the clamps on creative banking and other financial shenanigans; these Manhattan mountebanks found allies in the halls of power who could crack the lid on that Pandora' Box. Phil Gramm, Jim Leach, and the entire lobbying cabal crafted legislation that took America's pocketbook apart for no other reason than to make certain people, certain connected people, very very very rich.
This wasn't done to help this country. These new laws that opened up the financial world to speculators and diversifiers wasn't conceived to help Mom and Pop America. Gramm himself said as much recently when he called the American people a 'bunch of whiners.' He's an asshole. A greedy, anti-American, self-serving, take-it-all, Republican asshole. And he's not alone.
This whole teabagging farce is ludicrous from the start. These people, clueless to what the fuck they're railing about, are just following the rants and tantrums of a few Republican blowhards. They are lemmings rushing to the sea as their leaders stand aside screaming "There's you salvation! It's out there just beyond the horizon. The Liberals want you to stop, they don't want you to get rich. Keep going! Don't Stop! The Golden Goose is just a bit further."
I watched them protest taxes when their taxes are going down. I watched them protest Obama because he wants to take away their freedoms when they sat idly by as George Bush and Dick Cheney trashed the Constitution. They call me a fascist when they haven't a clue what it means. They compare our duly elected president to the most heinous monster that ever lived. They question his birth for no other reason than the color of his skin. This isn't America. This isn't the country I served when I donned the uniform of the US Navy. These people are selfish, greedy assholes that have no business waving the American flag.
America is better than that. Better than the Glenn Becks, the Michelle Malkins, and the Rush Limbaughs. The America I know comes to the call when shit happens. They watch out for their neighbors and keep an eye on their leaders. They raise their voices when injustice occurs or when Washington starts to go a bit deaf. They know what's up by paying attention to the world around them and speaking out when it starts to wobble. They roll up their sleeves when the tide rushes in and their communities need help. This is the America I grew up in. Are those people dead? Have they left the building with Elvis?
The people I saw on the TV Box protesting yesterday weren't speaking in a single voice like the protests I've been a part of. There was no central theme or single purpose. Each of them were crying out their own disappointment, their own bitch about how this government is keeping them down. Taxes, guns, anger at the prospect of a 'n*****' in the White House, those were the themes I witnessed yesterday.
They rail against taxes but scream bloody fucking murder if there's a pothole in front of their house or the police took too long to come when they called to complain about their liberal neighbor's dog crapping on their lawn. They expect the fire department or the ambulance to come when called, the schools to be open and the water to always come out of the faucet but they don't want to pay for any of it.
They cry and snivel about their right to bear arms when all they want to do is stockpile deadly weapons because they are so afraid and so chickenshit that they jump at every Mexican, are terrified of every Liberal, stone cold petrified that some shadowy imaginary government entity is going to show up at their door, knock it down and take all their toys away. The only purpose these firearms serve, besides a substitute for Viagra, is so they can blow off their own toe or give their kids an opportunity to put a hole in their best friend's head.
They scream and stomp in measured words and gestures about how they want the President to release his birth certificate because they can't allow themselves to believe that America voted for a black man. I use the n-word (censured) because that's the word they dance around in public but have no problem saying within their circle of racist idiots.
- No one wants to take away their guns if they are legally able to own them. Assault weapons were illegal for years before Bush and should be made illegal again without taking away those already legally purchased.
- Taxes are uncomfortable but necessary. I am proud to pay my share of the tax burden and think that as an American, each of us should feel the same. I get bent out of shape when I hear about some mega-corporation who, by opening a post office box in the Bahamas, can skirt paying their fair share of taxes. These loopholes should be closed and right fucking now. The protesters say no. They want corporations to have these tax breaks. This alone shows us how clueless these blockheads are.
- As for the racism I saw yesterday, it was disgusting. The ones who were open about it weren't the most heinous, it was the folks who danced and shuffled around the fact that they were damned angry that their reasonable friends and neighbors put a black man in charge. Not only that, what is really cramping their gut is the glaring and inescapable fact that he is damned good at the job and is far and away the most qualified person to bring about the salvation of this country. And there's more...the cherry on top of their dismay is the simple fact that most of America knows it and isn't afraid to say so. President Obama is doing a fantastic job and 68% of Americans expect him to pull us out of this mess.
This kind of right wing bullshit is the anchor that will keep us from getting to the end of this economic shitstorm. We have the tools to put our economic house in order but the agents of stagnation left over from the Bush Administration won't have it. In order for America to get free of this bullshit, we are going to have to rein in the greedy bastards that scuttled us in the first place. They spent the last 20 years sucking their wealth off our teat and won't give it up without a fight. Even now, there's reaction to just the hint of re-regulation in the markets. Some of the morons in the streets yesterday were holding signs that called for the government to back off the big money greedy bastards that crapped on us in the first place. My God, do these people even read their own protest signs? What part of a reasonable person would want to keep these greedy fuckwads pissing in our well? I guess I answered that already.
They had their time in the spotlight. Fux News creamed all over themselves promoting it and inflating their numbers, like we didn't see that coming. Hopefully, we can let this foolishness fade into the black hole of history and we can get back to work shoveling out the stables. But Fux News won't let it rest. They're going to keep harping and screeching and bloviating until they cause another nutbag to pop a gasket and shoot up a school or workplace.
It's going to happen and keep happening until Mom and Pop America realize that they need to change the channel and watch reruns of Gilligan's Island rather than Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. They need to go out to the garden and get the seeds in the ground and stop listening to that walking pusbag Rush Limbaugh. We have better things to do, more important activities to get busy with. We have a lot of hard work ahead of us that the government can't get done by itself. We are the government too. If we are to climb our asses out of this hole, we have to stop shoveling and start going up. If the Republicans refuse to cooperate, fuck 'em. Kick 'em in the nuts, jump on their backs and climb out of the goddamn hole! Let them fail. That seems to be the only thing they're really good at.
So Mote It Be,
David A.
