I found the video below via StupidEvilBastard.com. It’s worth your ten or eleven minutes to watch it. One thing I appreciated about the video is that the interviewer avoided going after the real loons you seem to find at these rallies — the folks with the Obama=Hitler placards or signs full of racial hatred and misspelled insults. It’s easy to point out those guys, and use them as an example of what’s wrong with the tea party “movement”. This interviewer went after the saner, calmer attendees and gave them a pretty fair shake, and the result, while more subtle, still does a whole hell of a lot to underline what’s wrong with the Tea Party.

We hear a lot of the same, well, “accusations” is the word, I suppose, from these Tea Partiers. Their ranks are full of Birthers who think Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen. (I’m not going to go over that ground again. Just go read the Snopes article on Barack Obama. They cover everything pretty thoroughly, and frankly, if you can’t believe Snopes, who the hell can you believe?) They believe that it’s time for America to get back to the “Christian principles this nation was founded on”, and that Sarah Palin is a fantastic politician who stands up for average Americans and is a brilliant woman just chock full of folksy common sense. Tea Partiers are “mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore!” The thing is, they don’t seem to know or understand what exactly they’re mad about.

Most of the major Tea Party groups are astroturf campaigns. IE, they’re groups funded by corporations and PACs, but run so as to seem like grassroots organizations. They’re funded by various conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, Dick Armey, Freedomworks, and the Koch family. What these groups have done is to tap into a very real and fairly broad-based disillusionment with government, added it to a solid base of frothing kooks of the Birther and/or bigoted variety, whipped the whole thing up into a frenzy, and unleashed them upon the majority.

And it’s important to remember that — Tea Partiers and their ilk are an extremely vocal minority of the population.

So, let’s look at some of their claims. They oppose the stimulus package, claiming that it was wasteful spending that didn’t work, and that it was irresponsible of the government to further increase the national debt in an attempt to save the failing economy. They seem to think there was some other, better alternative to the stimulus package. Well, thus far, the biggest complaint most reputable economists (see Paul Krugman for an example) have about the stimulus is that it wasn’t big enough. It’s been over a year now, and we’ve seen the effects of the stimulus act. It did help — possibly not as much as a bigger bill would have, but it did help. And now we’re finally starting to see the economy rebound, if only a bit. So, basically, curse the stimulus package if you will, but curse it for the right reason: it didn’t do enough.

How about this “Christian nation” thing that the Tea Partiers love to go about? Well, not so much, really. It’s like these people didn’t read their history. America was actually discovered for and founded on making money. The companies that financed expeditions and set up colonies did so merely to get in on the financial action. America was rich in resources — grossly rich, in fact, and everyone wanted a piece of that pie. The people who came over on those expeditions, and stayed to settle those colonies were here for a lot of reasons. Like, oh, they were criminals and/or debtors hoping to avoid punishment or get ahead of the game, finally. Many of them were being gently exiled from their home countries for various scandals and crimes, people who were too well off or well connected to be prosecuted, but were still an embarrassment to have around. Many were businessmen of various ilks, hoping to carve out a place for themselves in a land with less competition for their services. And sure, plenty were idealists hoping for adventure and new starts. A few were even looking for religious freedom. But this “Christian nation” thing? Not so much.

In fact, while the people got all whipped up over “taxation without representation” and threw themselves a tea party, the real reason for the American revolution was that an awful lot of powerful, land-owning white men realized they had a pretty sweet deal going, and could sweeten it up a whole lot more if they weren’t beholden to the British Empire. So, they revolted. Patriotic twaddle aside, it really was all about the money. When we finally did win the war (or, more realistically, when the British Empire realized it was costing them more money to fight us than they’d spend just buying resources from us), we were lucky enough to have a fairly decent set of Founding Fathers, who put a lot of effort into setting things up in a fair fashion. We got a nice, checked and balanced government out of the deal, and they made sure every white guy with some land was entitled to a vote. They allowed for religious freedom, and made sure that the church wouldn’t be meddling in government business and the government wouldn’t be meddling in church business. They insisted that the people remained armed, that they had the right to say what they wanted, when they wanted, and a lot of other really good ideas. What they didn’t do was make America a “Christian nation”. In fact, our Founding Fathers were, at best, Deists and agnostics, if not outright atheists, in the case of a few.

This “Christian nation” thing? Total bullshit.

Tea Partiers also oppose a government health care system, and you can thank their near-riots at town hall meetings for the reason we aren’t getting at least a public option. I’d understand opposing a public option if they had any sort of a real reason for it, but the Tea Partiers were raising hell based on lies told to them by their lobbyist funders. Death panels, killing grandma, losing their own insurance — a lot of lies were passed around about the government health care plans, and the Tea Partiers believed them all and threw screaming fits. In public. On TV. And the sad part is, no matter how many times various lies were debunked, still, even now, Tea Partiers swear Obama wants to kill senior citizens. And you want to know why? Because Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck told them so. And continue to tell them so. So now, thanks to Tea Partiers, the Republicans who used them for the tools they are, and the vast quantities of cold, hard cash thrown around by terrified insurance companies, the health care reform we’re going to end up with will be at best, a joke, and quite probably a mess of gawd-awful proportions that will end up costing you and me a whole lot of our hard earned cash.

The Tea Partiers chant that Obama’s administration is socialist, often without even a vague understanding of what socialism actually is, and certainly without realizing that America has utilized some very beneficial socialist programs for quite a long time, and it’s been working out pretty well for us. They claim Obama’s administration is communist, or even fascist, and it’s obvious that they don’t even realize what those terms mean. Stalinist Russia was communist. Nazi Germany was fascist. We are, despite some of the Bush administration’s best attempts, neither. They claim Obama is taxing us too much, when he’s lowered middle classes taxes by a fair margin.

And for all that, the absolute scariest part of the Tea Party movement is the way it’s drawn the worst of our society out into the open. By which, I do mean those people with the Obama=Hitler signs, and placards full of vehement racist insults and anti-Islamic slogans. The Tea Party gathers up everything that is worst about America and puts in on public display. And then acts proud of it. They showcase our racisms and hateful prejudices, our prideful ignorance, and our sanctimonious religious behaviors. They put all that in the limelight, and then have the audacity to claim that “these are the things that make America great”. And frankly, that’s horrifying in a far worse way than anything else they do. No, not every Tea Partier is a racist, hatemongering, fear-baiting, ignorant ass. But the ones who aren’t, who don’t speak up when their other members act that way? They’re just as bad for their silence, if not worse.

(Sources: Tea Party Movement, Tea Party Protests)