- Tea Party Founder Backs Occupy Wall Street

http://jcsande.blogspot.com/2011/10/rt-tea-party-founder-backs-occupy-wall.html

Gaming American Democracy:John Dean

Gaming American Democracy:How New Republican Techniques Seek to Change the Political System Itself

©iStockphoto.com/imagestock

This is the first in a series of columns by Mr. Dean, which will examine the new techniques being employed by Republicans to alter the political landscape. – Ed.

Conservative operatives with almost unlimited money (provided by wealthy supporters) have been very busy, over the past few years, changing American political processes and, thus, the way politics and government are undertaken, to favor Republicans policies and candidates. So far, they have been remarkably successful and they may even be able to change the political playing field in time for the 2012 presidential election, tilting the landscape to favor a GOP candidate.  There is only one problem with what they are doing, which is the way they are doing it.

Most Americans, unfortunately, are unaware of these activities.

Voters and the Media Are Largely Ignoring the Return of Nixonian Politics, on Steroids

While the so-called Tea Party’s antics always attract public and media attention, the heavy lifting in the effort to change our political processes is being accomplished mostly behind closed doors, through the efforts of experienced conservative GOP operatives.  These men and women have been quietly and steadily going after what they want:  control of the political processes, which they can then translate into greater political power.

To reach their goals, conservative leaders are blatantly gaming the system.  They are going where they have never ventured before, and conducting politics in a way that has never been seen before in America, by exploiting constitutional gaps, working in the crannies and crevices of our system, and proceeding both openly and privately to empower themselves in a manner that would never succeed at the ballot box if it were fully understood.

The story about these activities has been largely ignored, or at most incidentally reported, by the mainstream news media.  While some of this activity is merely hard-nosed, real-world politics at its ugliest, other undertakings are conspicuously abusive, and, indeed, reminiscent of what I saw when inside the Nixon White House.

Watergate ended most of this kind of political activity, at least for a while, but now it has returned with a vengeance.  It’s Nixonian no-holds-barred-style politics, on steroids. For this reason, in this, and periodic subsequent columns, I plan to set forth reports of the remarkable, often unseemly, and at times illegal assault that conservatives have launched to alter our political practices and procedures to favor conservative candidates, policies and programs.

With this first column, I hope to provide an overview and introduction to this subject.  Later columns will examine the details.  So stay tuned.

FYI: I have previously worked out my research and thinking for three New York Times best-selling books in my columns.  Whether this current effort will become a book, I do not know, because publishers are never sure about these types of stories—a fact that I believe encourages this type of behavior.  So I will proceed a step at a time.  Nonetheless, I enjoy writing on topics about which I have strong feelings when others are ignoring the matter, and that is the situation here.

The Reasons This Attempt to Profoundly Transform Our Political System Is Receiving Only Incidental News Coverage

This story—the story of the attempted transformation of our political system itself—has been mostly ignored for two reasons.  First, because it deals with political and governmental process.   It is conventional wisdom among news people (in both print and television journalism), as well as among many mainstream book publishers, that the American public does not care to be told about so-called “process issues.”  This is apparently true, notwithstanding the fact that the political party that controls the processes can control the policy and government.

Authors who have written about process issues tell me that not only have they had difficulty getting published, but if they do, readers are, in fact, hard to come by.  Because I know the importance of process, and its overriding influence on politics and government, I am very interested in these matters, so I do not understand the general disinterest that authors face when they seek to write about these vital topics.

There is a second reason for the disinterest, too—and an even more troubling one.  Today’s mainstream news organizations are largely controlled by major corporations, which are profit-driven like never before.  Most members of corporate management lean toward Republican views, and while top corporate executives typically give their news editors and producers great leeway, news organizations do not go out of their way to annoy their corporate bosses.  The big money that is involved in reshaping America’s political processes has been, and will continue to be, a wonderful source of revenue for these organizations.  News organizations need advertisers, and they love all the disingenuous advertisements that this political undertaking is generating.

Given these attitudes and institutional realities, the mainstream news media could care less about the impact, meaning, and means involved in changing the political processes to favor conservatives.  (Ironically, Watergate, too, was initially a non-story with the national press, and it continued on that way for almost ten months after the arrests of burglars in the Democratic National Committee—because much of the story involved process, at first, and also because news organizations did not want to annoy a mean-spirited sitting president.)

I can think of no better place to start telling the story of how America’s political processes are being co-opted and transformed, than with the Tea Party, which is the tip of the conservative iceberg that is now floating through our political waters.

The Tea Party Facade

I addressed the Tea Party movement in an earlier column, reporting that there is little that is new about the Party’s players, a collection of existing conservative groups who have long resided at the radical fringe of the Republican Party.  They are the authoritarian followers, plus a few of their leaders, who can, together, accurately be described by their personalities and political dispositions as authoritarian conservatives.  (Not all conservatives are authoritarians, but virtually all authoritarians are conservatives.)

The Tea Party is more a rebranding, than a genuinely new movement.  When you study the poll numbers, it is clear that only a small number of conservatives consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement.  These fringe groups have always been fringe groups, but they form the activist base of the GOP.  According to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans consider themselves conservatives; 36 percent, moderates; and 21 percent, liberals. Yet a contemporaneous New York Times poll shows that only 20 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Tea Party, while 40 percent have an unfavorable view.  And, more tellingly, only 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters, with only 4 percent of Americans having ever attended a Tea Party meeting or given money to the Tea Party.

In light of its small numbers, what accounts for the Tea Party’s prominence?  It is the result of the handful of always-camera-ready political figures and candidates who claim allegiance with the movement.  These include Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Rand and Ron Paul, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharon Angle—to name a few.

CNN (oddly and inexplicably) recently chose to partner with the Tea Party Express to present a CNN/Tea Party Presidential Debate, a decision that gave the Tea Party added publicity and credibility.  (I was surprised to find CNN so hard-up for a debate partner.)  Former Republican leader of the House of Representatives Dick Armey has been active with the movement through Freedom Works, which appears well funded.  But there is no Tea Party per se, only a disjointed movement that has served, and continues to serve, as a nice façade—deflecting and diverting public attention while true leaders, and the major players in the conservative movement, have plotted and executed their efforts to change the political landscape.

The real story here is not the Tea Party; rather, it is the actions of conservative Republican mayors, governors, state legislators, members of the U.S. Congress, former federal officials (from mid-level and high-level posts) now working on behalf of conservative causes, and of conservative lobbyists and lawyers, both in Washington and scattered around the country.  These people surely find the Tea Party useful as a distraction from what they are trying to do.

The New Conservative Power Game

Contemporary GOP heavies, the men, and a few women, who understand how the game can be played, appreciate that our democracy is fragile, and that it operates largely on the good will of everyone, which makes it easily susceptible to abuse.  As conservative operatives have undertaken nationwide efforts to adjust and change the political processes to their advantage, they have taken advantage of the good will of others, disregarding the regular order and the assumptions of regularity that have long prevailed in America’s politics and governance.  This approach caught opponents flatfooted, totally off-guard.

Interestingly, as best I can tell, these disruptive moves and changes are, in only a few instances, centralized and highly coordinated.  More often, these efforts are simplysua sponte—a case of like minds thinking alike, or noticing what other others are doing.  To the best of my knowledge, this is not a conspiratorial undertaking, nor the work of a closed and well-connected network.  Yet these people do appear to keep others who are interested well informed.

For me, understanding what had been going on has been like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without a picture.  So far, I have found no mastermind or master plan, but there is no question that those who are part of this loose coalition are working like beavers, and pursuing any opportunity that arises.  Some of the techniques are old, while others are very new.  What has become conspicuous from this inquiry, so far, is that conservatives are now operating with new political norms, and at levels that were once considered extreme, but are now standard operating procedure.  This does not bode well for our system.

Some Examples of How Extreme Tactics Are Being Adopted by Republicans as Merely Standard Operating Procedure

A few examples from my growing catalogue should make the point:

Conservatives are now demanding and enforcing absolute GOP party discipline, and trying to impose it at all levels of government, tolerating no exceptions. They are willing to shut down any and all government operations if that is needed to serve their interest and get their way.  They recognize no comity or courtesy in any cross-party situations that are not to their advantage.  They have made civility the exception, rather than the rule.  They will lie and mislead to accomplish what is necessary and conservative “thinkers” have abandoned intellectual honesty for the cause.  They are hell-bent on changing as many processes of government as possible to always favor Republican rule, whether they are in the minority or majority.  They are changing the rules by which we elect officials to favor the election and selection of conservative Republicans.  They are making it more difficult for anyone who is not a Republican to vote. They are blatantly engaging in extreme obstructionism to damage any non-Republican incumbent office-holder’s ability to perform in office. They operate behind closed doors whenever possible and always when in power. To accomplish their goals, they are raising and injecting literally countless billions—I repeat, billions—of dollars into manipulating local, state, and national legislative actions and elections to their advantage.  Finally, they have—almost inconspicuously—altered every branch and level of government as they have proceeded.

No one has seriously challenged these efforts, but surely others can see the activities I have noticed, and the pattern they reveal.  Democrats, it appears, have decided to look the other way, and only when public outrage has erupted—as happened in Wisconsin, when Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to change the process became conspicuous—has there been any effort to prevent them from operating outside traditional conventional constitutional boundaries.  So they continue, and in some areas, they are becoming increasingly aggressive.

As I report on such developments in this series of columns, I will share my thoughts about possible countermeasures.  But for many of these actions, there is no easy fix, because those who perpetrate them are exploiting the flaws, and working in the underbelly, of our system.

A Closing Thought:  Federalist No. 10’s Solution Is Not Applicable Here

When you delve into any radical conservative activity, you quickly become drenched in all their constitutional rhetoric, for it is endless.  The GOP’s radical fringe worships our Constitution—or what they believe our Constitution says, which has little to do with reality.  Thus, in tracking their new power plays, I found myself thinking about James Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 10, a warning that contemporary conservatives ignore.  Madison, it will be recalled, addressed what conservatives are now doing when he discussed the threat that factions pose to our constitutional system.

Madison described a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interests, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interest of the community.” Madison found factions to be incapable of self-restraint, and pointed out that, for them, “neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.”  He believed that the danger from factions was very real, since they foster “the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.”

Madison concluded that it was inevitable that factions could not be eliminated, because America could only 

do so at the expense of freedom itself.  Rather, he believed that the effects of factions would be controlled by the very nature of a representative system, where interests are delegated to representatives, and those representatives then deliberate away from local concerns.  When there are a sufficient number of representatives, who cover a large and growing country, Madison felt, these representatives would be thinking of the greater good.  And, that emphasis on the greater good—the good of the whole nation—would check factional thinking.  Madison’s thinking, however, did not contemplate the arrival of political parties, nor did he conceive of a party’s becoming so tightly controlled that it could operate to serve only a narrow self-interest, rather than the public interest.  In short, we do not have an institutional check, deriving from the Constitution or any other source, on today’s activities.

Nor do I have answers yet, but I am looking.  Actually, I am still gathering facts, and will be doing so for months to come.  If you have thoughts or information about the matters that I have broadly described here, I hope you will share them.  Please tweet me.  Based upon the thoughts and information of a few who are very concerned, we might clarify this matter for all.

John W. Dean, a Justia columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

Breitbart proposes VIOLENCE !!

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2011/09/18/andrew-breitbart-incites-violence-against-liberals-says-military-will-back-the-tea-party-up/

Andrew Breitbart Incites Violence Against Liberals, Says Military Will Back The Tea Party Up

September 18, 2011

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Tea Party favorite Andrew Breitbartz told a conservative audience in Massachusetts that conservatives outnumber liberals and have most of the guns. He also claimed that the military is ready to take action against liberals if violence ever erupted between liberals and conservatives.

“I’m under attack all the time. They call me gay, there are death threats… There are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’ Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.

Then he claimed that some senior military officials have personally assured him that they’ll join the right wing in a civil war.

“And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’

Here’s the audio:


If this isn’t proof that conservatives want a civil war, I don’t know what is. This is a call for violence, pure and simple, and an investigation should be opened immediately. If Breitbart is telling the truth about military officials backing up the Tea Party, they should be investigated and tried for treason. And Breitbart should be questioned by federal authorities as well. This is a serious threat that Breitbart is making and it should concern all liberals. The right wing wants to kill liberals. They want a civil war. Look for this kind of threat to increase as the 2012 Election nears. The Party that cheers for executions and the deaths of the uninsured are fantasizing, and probably are planning, to kill the opposition to grab absolute power.

The TRUTH about the Tea Party, Koch brothers

Future Predictions: The Billionaires Tea Party Strikes at Political Ambitions for 2012, Thanks to the Koch Brothers $100 Million

Filed under: 2012, Politics by futurepredictions — Leave a comment

April 27, 2011

Photo Credit>>>

The Truth About the Tea Party

“Who is behind the Tea Party? David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.”
Read more>>>

Covert Operations The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama

Covert Operations

The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama

by Jane Mayer

AUGUST 30, 2010

David H. Koch in 1996. He and his brother Charles are lifelong libertarians and have quietly given more than a hundred million dollars to right-wing causes.

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

• from the issue
• cartoon bank
• e-mail this

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer#ixzz1TwsELndz

 JOHN DEAN

The Tea Party:Same Old Authoritarian Conservatives With a New Label

©iStockphoto.com/Duncan1890

The debt-ceiling debate, better described as an extortion ploy by the Tea Party-controlled Republicans of the U.S House of Representatives, has raised a question:  Who, exactly, are these largely anonymous troublemakers?  When I did a little digging, I realized that I know these people all too well.  Indeed, I had actually written about them before they morphed into their current form.  They are, in fact, both old and new authoritarian conservatives.
These authoritarians are a notoriously nasty crew.  If you have not noticed, they are delighted with what is happening in Washington, the chaos they have created. Actually, they are thrilled that they have been able to turn the Nation’s Capital upside down, as they actively work to screw up federal government in the hope of literally destroying it.
If you look closely, it is obvious that most of these Tea Party people have no real idea about the potential consequences of their actions, and they do not care to inform themselves.  These are people who will pick a fight for the sake of picking a fight, refusing to compromise about anything that conflicts with their collective agenda, just because that feels to them like the right thing to do.
Who Are the Tea Party People?
They call themselves the Tea Party patriots, apparently seeing themselves in the tradition of the American colonists who resisted Parliament’s Tea Act tax in 1773 by dumping three boatloads of tea in the Boston Harbor, rather than returning it.  The Tea Party’s effort to find a historical connection, however, does not work.
There is no real Tea Party, by any definition of the term “party.”  This is merely a label, a colorful (albeit historically-distorted) rebranding of the GOP’s right wing.  The Tea Party is really a new amalgamation of radical conservative groups who have been around a long time: evangelical bible-thumpers of the religious right; extreme anti-abortion and anti-women’s-rights groups; those who want guns (if not well-stocked arsenals) in every home and office with annual tithes to the National Rife Association; the sons and daughters, as well as a few grandchildren, of the John Birch Society loonies (who knew all along that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist); people who oppose any inter-marriage of races, and, God forbid, same-sex marriages between those they see as perverts; groups who would end the separation of church and state; and people who get most of their political information from right-wing radio, the Fox News Channel, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, their prayer groups, or a few select right-wing Internet sites.  Ironically, few in this movement understand that those who provide the money that is spreading the messages that are manipulating them probably believe them to be fools for following an agenda that is not in their best interests.
The Tea Party movement is an orchestrated undertaking that is underwritten by big corporate money, with hard-right corporate conservative views.  The puppeteers here are pushing a radical agenda to remove, if possible, or significantly weaken, all government influence and regulation in the marketplace. The movement seeks to disrupt the processes, by gaming the system, in order to de-legitimatize government.  They believe that, by making government fail, they will ensure that Democrats in general, and Barack Obama in particular, will lose future elections.  And the Tea Party backers and supporters utterly despise our first African-American president.
Notwithstanding glib slogans and faux patriotism, the Tea Party thinks that government has only a few responsibilities (most, if not all, of which can be subcontracted out to the private sector), namely: keeping public order, protecting private property; defending the country against foreign enemies; permitting the marketplace to self-regulate; allowing the intelligent and shrewd to prosper while the less gifted, unlucky, or meek fail because we are not all equal; keeping all taxes to the absolute minimum while eliminating all “death taxes” so that wealth can be accumulated by the “job creators,” to be passed on to their progeny—to highlight but a few core principles of their thinking.
Tea Party Followers:  Conservatives Without Conscience
The glue that binds these people together is their political conservatism and their authoritarian personalities.  I know a lot about these people, having once traveled with them, and then studied why they are what they have become.  Unfortunately, they embrace everything that is wrong with contemporary conservatism.  They are what I have called “conservatives without conscience.”
The Tea Party movement did not exist when I wrote my book, Conservatives Without Conscience (2006), a study of the influence of authoritarian conservatism on the contemporary Republican Party.  My findings were based on over six decades of the testing of authoritarian personalities by social scientists, and on my own personal knowledge of those with such personalities. When undertaking my study, I was fortunate to find a tutor to help me understand this field: Professor Robert Altemeyer, who was then based (he has since retired) at the University of Manitoba in Canada, where he devoted much of his career to studying the authoritarian personality.  Bob, whose work has been recognized by no less than the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, not only helped me understand the studies of others, but generously shared his own work with me, as well.
In a large degree, my book was an effort to translate—for those without advanced degrees in the social science or intimate understanding of statistical studies—the remarkable findings about authoritarians, given their predominance in conservative politics.  I wanted to explain how they think and operate.  In fact, I was surprised that no one had done so before. When my book became a New York Times bestseller, Bob realized that a lot of people were interested in his information and his work, so he published, online and for the general reader, The Authoritarians (making it freely available).  Tens upon tens of thousands of people, including professional peers, have now read his online work.  While this information is disquieting to conservatives, the revelations of the underlying science cannot be wished away, and will not simply go away.  These people are who and what they are because it is their very nature.
In April 2010, Bob turned his attention to the Tea Party, and he has posted a 15-page analysis of his findings online: Comment on the Tea Party Movement.  When that Comment is read in conjunction with his book (or mine), I believe that it will explain more about the Tea Party than the Tea Party knows about itself. Having watched the unfolding debt-ceiling debate, I now believe that I should have written on this topic earlier, and sent others to Bob’s site, for this information could give those dealing with the Tea Party on the debt ceiling a better understanding of the nature of the people with whom they are dealing.
Simply stated, Tea Party followers are the very personification of conservatives without conscience, very typical authoritarians.  This is not to say that they are sociopaths or psychopaths, for they are not. Their authoritarian dispositions are neither good nor bad, but, frankly, I do not think these people are well suited for the politics of a democracy.  Authoritarians make great soldiers and sailors, police officers and prison guards; they can be good CEOs and great NFL coaches.  But they are about as adept at democratic politics as bulls are in china shops.
Understanding Undemocratic Authoritarians
Bob Altemeyer explained in his Comment on the Tea Party Movement that he was “amazed” by what he discovered in the Tea Party movement: “It seemed as if [the Tea Party followers] had read the [social science] research findings on authoritarianism and then said, ‘Let’s go out and prove all those things are true.’ Whatever else the Tea Party movement has accomplished, it has certainly made the research [by social scientists] on authoritarianism look good.”
Authoritarians can be divided into leaders and followers.  Because there are more followers than leaders, much of the research has focused on them.  Although Bob Altemeyer has done a good bit of work on authoritarian leaders, his observations on the Tea Party address the followers.  (Tea Party leaders like Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, like all authoritarian leaders, raise a host of additional issues.)
Allow me to summarize Bob Altemeyer’s core findings.  For purposes of illustration, he highlighted a dozen conspicuous authoritarian traits in the Tea Party: (1) they are more submissive than most to their leaders, and they take direction without question; (2) they are easily frightened and their leaders keep them that way; (3) they wear their self-righteousness on their sleeves, e.g., with their assertion that they are “the true Americans;” (4) they are highly aggressive, so they lash out at those with whom they do not agree; (5) critical thinking and logic escapes them, and they rely upon simplistic slogans to answer complex questions; (6) they inflate problems, and they find an endless supply of our “biggest problems”; (7) they hold conflicting and contradictory beliefs, which does not trouble them, because their thinking is compartmentalized; (8) double standards are totally acceptable to them, so they can be highly critical of others who do exactly what they do, or have done;  (9) they feel empowered when in groups, and gain strength by remaining together with like-minded others; (10) they are highly dogmatic, since they do not know why they believe what they do, and they do not question themselves; (11) they are ethnocentric and constantly judge others and events from an “us versus them” point of view; and (12) they are prejudiced, and often racist, although some do not realize it or believe it when confronted.
The Tea Party followers Bob portrayed in April 2010 have changed little since his report; rather, they have only further confirmed his findings. His comments are not his personal observations of these people, rather Bob is merely reporting what countless thousands of authoritarians have said about themselves when tested, and then noting how conspicuous the traits are with Tea Party followers.
As I mentioned above, authoritarians do not do well in a democracy. If you have any doubt, just look at how the Tea Party has handled the issue of the debt ceiling.  Rest assured that they are looking for additional opportunities to game our system, which is not designed for people who are unwilling to compromise for the greater good.  And watch their reactions when they realize that the overwhelming majority of Americans simply does not wish to proceed as they insist.  Hopefully, this rebranded radical contingent of the right-wing, the Tea Party, will not totally destroy the country before our voters realize these people do not belong in a deliberative government like America’s.

John W. Dean, a Justia columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

Thom Hartmann: How Corporations Created the Tea Party ZombiesUnit

The corporations created a monster. That monster is a group of ideologues who've wormed their way into Congress - and now have the power to take down our entire economy and condemn all of us to a second Great Depression. Make no mistake about it - we have an established Third Party in Congress today for the first time in over 100 years - the Tea Party zombies. It's a third party based in political naivete - irresponsible idealism - and corrupted morality. It's a third party that thinks compromise is a bad word - that thinks if they yell and threaten enough they can get the Democratically-controlled Senate and White House to bend to their will. It's a party that thinks it's on a mission to crash the economy - thus setting the stage to drastically remake America and trash the New Deal-economics that have created the last century's prosperity - and replace it with a libertarian free-market that has defined the last century of, for example, Somalia. It's a third party that believes in morality - that the poor - the sick - and the elderly should be condemned to death - that the socially safety net - one of the greatest accomplishments of modern man - is evil. Do you know why John Boehner had to pull his debt-limit plan off the floor? It's because the Tea Party went nuts over Pell Grants. As in-no-way-no-how will they support a bill that helps students go to college. We can no longer believe that the Tea Party is controlled by Republicans - the Tea Party is on its own now - running roughshod through Congress as we've witnessed in this debt-limit debate - even John Boehner knows this himself by now. And what Republicans and the rest of us need to be asking ourselves today is...how did this happen? How did our constitutional democracy allow a group of destructive ideologues to take power in Congress and drag our country into economic ruin? What - happened? Tune in.

#Do_it_now dossier: Comments on how to avoid another fiasco solicited

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/todays-question/archive/2011/07/todays-question-what-can-minnesotas.shtml

Got an opinion on how to prevent this again?

They say - what should LEADERS do?  Well, we saw NO LEADERSHIP.  We saw bullying by ALEC, tea partiers .. because they refused to illume the real issues. That's cowardice, not leadership.

Go and give them a good rant, folks

Today I went to a Tea Party rally to celebrate becoming a billionaire

Today I went to a Tea Party rally to celebrate becoming a billionaire

by Bjorn in MN

permalink

32 Comments

This morning when I opened my e-mail I received a pleasant surprise, I have just inherited several billion dollars from a Saudi Prince.  As soon as I found out that our wars for oil had given me vast sums of money and power over the peasants of this great nation I knew that I needed to celebrate.  When I was told that there was going to be a rally at the Minnesota State Capitol where the duped peasants would teabag billionaires without even requiring us to buy them dinner first I knew I had to be there.
I donned my top hat and Armani tux and headed towards the Capitol to take a stand for a small government.  I wanted to ensure that government is limited to doing what is essential for the prosperity of this great nation.  The only role of government should be that which is outlined in the Constitution plus handing out really big contracts to Halliburton, subsidizing the oil industry, wiretapping the phones of peasants, torturing people, shooting the greedy immigrants who cross our border, making sure gays stay locked in the closet, ensuring women have no say over their bodies, starting wars, expanding the role of faith based institutions into government, busting up unions, bailing out bankers when they lose profits, and taking on other roles which benefit us billionaires.  My vision of small government is so powerful that I want to make sure more people get to be involved, that is why I supported spreading our small government to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan.  I am hoping that soon we will be able to expand our small government to Iran as well, maybe we can even get some of those activist judges to stop paying attention to the parts of the Constitution that we don't like and allow some churches to become a part of our small government.
I arrived at the Capitol just minutes before my hero Michele Bachmann was about to take the stage.  There are very few people who have stood for the rights of billionaires to beat down dirty peasants like Michele Bachmann has, although I am proud to say that the entire Republican Party as well as many Democrats seem to be doing a great job of standing with her in her assault on the greedy workers who demand we actually pay them for their labor.
When we arrived at the Capitol I was impressed at all the support I received, my support for the billionaire agenda in plain terms seemed to be very well received.  I carried a sign which stated “Small Government, Big Wars” on one side and “Money for Halliburton Not For Schools” on the other and these were messages that seemed to resonate well with the Tea Party.  I received lots of smiles and people stopping to take my photo before I even found my billionaire friends.  

When Michele Bachmann took the stage we went and stood as close as we could get to the podium, it was roped off so we couldn't get too close, but we were able to get a good enough spot that we were visible to most of the crowd as they looked up at Saint Bachmann.
Most people seemed to realize that we were standing with them to support the billionaire agenda, but there were a few people who somehow got the absurd idea that we were lefty infiltrators who were mocking them.  A few young Republicans crossed the ropes so they could stand in front of us and block our signs, but fortunately they are in the minority of the Republican Party and the GOP officials in charge of security stood by us billionaires like they always do so well and told the young Republicans to get on the other side of the ropes and it allowed the message of the wealthy elite to continue to be heard.
Later we moved to some steps alongside the stage so we could be closer to the crowd and one peasant came to yell in our faces to tell us we didn't belong there, he thought our signs were inappropriate even though they clearly stated the Tea Party agenda.  I couldn't quite understand how he could be opposed to a message like “Money for Halliburton Not For Schools” when that is very clearly the agenda that all the Republican members of Congress who spoke from the podium have stood so firmly for these past few years.  

It was a great rally and as a billionaire I was impressed with many of the signs, but the one that had the biggest impact on me was the most commonly seen sign at the event.  It carried the simple message “No New Taxes! No New Revenue!” and in fine print on the bottom of the sign it said “Prepared and Paid For by the Republican Party of Minnesota”.  I was so proud to see the Republicans have moved beyond the simple message of “No new taxes” and have taken an even bolder stance by taking the official position of “No new revenue” as well.  That may not be a position taken by anyone who is not lying when they say they are serious about reducing the size of the government, but the beautiful thing is that many peasants don't even know they are being lied to and will cheer for this agenda that only benefits billionaires like myself.  The Republican elites know as well as I do that if we don't collect revenue the government will not be able to pay its bills and then they can declare an emergency and say we are forced to sell off public assets to billionaires like me, we can then make huge profits off the backs of the American people.  Who needs public schools when people like me need to get another yacht to show off to the peasants who will never be able to ride it?

Today I saw the greatness of an America that places corporate profits over human need...
Uh oh...
Right as I was about to wrap this post up I found out that the e-mail I received this morning was a scam.  I did not inherit billions from a Saudi Prince, it was all a lie.  I am still a peasant.  Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to cheer for the billionaire's agenda after all.