Tea & Crackers

Matt Taibbi is one frustrated journalist. Reporting for Rolling Stone, he went to Tea Party Country expecting to find rational explanations for the phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, he came up empty.

But like so many young journalists today, he seems to possess little sense of history. As a piece by author Rick Perlstein noted last spring in the NYT, coverage of the Tea Party Movement has indeed been overwhelmed by "historical myopia." To wit:

"As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm ... [Tea Partiers] are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government. 'When was the last time you saw such a spontaneous eruption of conservative grass-roots anger, coast to coast?' asked the professional conservative L. Brent Bozell III recently. The answer, of course, is: in 1993. And 1977. And 1961. And so on."

Still, Taibbi's wonderment and incredulity is great fun to read. Some Excerpts:

"It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. ... [She] is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh. 'We're shaking up the good ol' boys,' Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. 'Buck up,' she says, 'or stay in the truck.' Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?"

"Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. ..."

"A hall full of 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. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

The dingbat revolution is nigh, indeed. Read the full article here.