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October 29th / 31st
"Voting is No Tea Party"
I was taught early on that voting is a privilege to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, given the quality of candidates these days, and the tenor of
their campaigns, it is difficult to take any of it seriously.
There are two reasons. First is the growing nastiness of political
rhetoric. Both major parties are guilty of this, but Republicans are the worst
offenders. Who can forget Rep. Virginia Foxx's warning that healthcare reform
would result in the formation of death panels, where the government would
decide when elderly people should die. Foxx's statement established a new
low for political discourse, and set the tone for a new era in politics,
where TV ads, speeches, and rallies were fueled by deliberately misleading and
volatile information. But while most of the right wing extremists in
Congress are arrogantly partisan, they are not uninformed or unintelligent. And
that brings me to the second reason why it's difficult to take voting
seriously.
Today there are a growing number of candidates who seem to be unashamed of
their absolute ignorance. Most of them identify with the Tea Party
movement, which inadvertently rose from the primordial soup when Dr. John McCain
Frankenstein created the Palin monster back in 2008. Palin, the former,
short-term Alaska Governor flaunts her ignorance as if it were a badge of
honor. Once when a GOP handler tried to get her to read through some briefing
books, she refused, saying that she was too busy reading texts and emails
from her "prayer warriors". Palin's Facebook approach to politics has spawned
and/or encouraged an array of similarly small thinkers to run for office.
The most visible is Christine O'Donnell, a candidate for US Senate in
Delaware who wasn't able to identify separation of church and state in the
first amendment. She also told the Washington Post that homosexuality is "an
identity disorder". Meanwhile, Christine's argument against evolution is
that today's apes aren't turning into humans. And, during an interview with
Bill O'Reilly, O'Donnell announced that, "American scientific companies are
cross breeding humans and animals, and coming up with mice who have fully
functioning brains".
But Delaware isn't the only staging ground for ignorant Tea Party
candidates. The list includes Joe Miller of Alaska, Carl Paladino of New York,
Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Susanna Martinez in New Mexico, Rand Paul in
Kentucky, and Sharron Angle of Nevada who once called reimbursements to Gulf
fisherman following the BP oil spill, a "slush fund".
Palin's movement is popular because millions of people are either out of
work, or struggling to make ends meet. And, when people get angry, they
gravitate to candidates who fuel that anger. But make no mistake, the Tea Party
is not a populist entity, nor are its candidates true populists. That
would require an understanding of issues, and a thoughtful proposal for
reforming problems, neither of which the Palin spawns possess. Their stock in
trade is inflammatory rhetoric with no basis in fact. They will say anything to
rev up a crowd against something, but they offer no viable solutions for
anything.
Grant Lyon, writing for the Huffington Post, said that people like Palin,
O'Donnell and others "love to say America is number one, yet it is their
extremist language as a whole that is devaluing America around the world."
Lyon is right. Win or not, these mental lightweights are an embarrassment to
our nation. They love to invoke the founding fathers and our Constitution,
while lacking the attributes of the former or an understanding of the
latter.
Christine O'Donnell is convinced that mice now have fully functioning
brains. If only that were true of the Tea Party gang.
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