Among the causes that will surely contribute to the fall of America is the rise of rabid political forces like these Tea Partiers who believe that political compromise is akin to treason. Remarkably, this belief has injected such paralyzing insanity into American politics that erstwhile principled Republicans (like Senator John McCain) are now disavowing support for policies (like the debt and deficit commission), which they were calling for when Bush was president, just because President Obama has expressed support for them.
(Why I’m so utterly dismissive of the Tea Party, The iPINIONS Journal, September 22, 2010)
When I wrote the above a month ago, I was seized with indignation at the attention reporters were giving the freak-show candidates who are running under the banner of the Tea Party.
For I could think of no reason – other than playing their parts in the theater of the absurd that American politics has become – for their excessive reporting on the puerile antics and asinine utterings of these candidates.
The most notable subjects of this cynical press attention are Christine O’Donnell, senatorial candidate from Delaware, who has distinguished herself by running a campaign ad to assure voters that she’s not a witch; Joe Miller, senatorial candidate from Alaska, who had his personal security guards arrest a local reporter last week for daring to ask him a question about his past; Sharron Angle, senatorial candidate from Nevada, who insists that she will only do interviews with reporters (like those at FOX News) who will ask the questions she wants to answer; and the Paul Revere of the bunch, Rand Paul, senatorial candidate from Kentucky, who has also erected a no-unfriendly-press firewall around his campaign, and harbors such impudent contempt for his Democratic opponent that he refused to even shake his hand after their debate a few days ago.
Incidentally, nothing demonstrates their puerile antics quite like the way all of these candidates keep challenging their Democratic opponents to “man up” – as Paul did during the above-referenced debate – while acting like pussies in their efforts to avoid serious questions from the mainstream media. You’d think these whack jobs – who go around preaching about the sanctity of the Constitution – would show far more regard for the freedom of the press enshrined in its First Amendment.
Yet the attention these wannabe senators are getting has incited such political envy that erstwhile respectable Republicans, who understand that comprise is a sine qua non for governing in a democracy, are now parroting these Tea Partiers’ uncompromising we’re-for-the-people-the-Democrats-are-not mantra. And no senator has made more of a fool of himself in this respect than John McCain – who behaved like a Manchurian candidate over the weekend when he broke with almost 220 years of Senate custom by blasting his Democratic colleague, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, as unpatriotic and someone he’s had the “unpleasant experience of having to work with.”
It’s troubling enough that Tea Partiers think that they can go to Washington and get things done without working with any Democrat, including the president. But to have someone like McCain actually fueling this fallacy is a recipe for partisan gridlock the likes of which Washington has never seen before.
More to the point, though, I’ve become even more indignant at what now appears to be an open conspiracy among reporters to turn next month’s midterm elections into little more than a freak-show contest. For only this explains the drumbeat of reports about how Tea-Party candidates are poised to take the country back from President Obama and the Democrats, which, frankly, would be even more absurd than The Situation winning Dancing With The Stars….
If one did not know better, one would think that these reporters are just as clueless as the Tea Partiers they’re reporting on. Even worse, Democrats who should be running on the historic achievements of this president and the Democrat-controlled Congress are instead running away from them. Some of them are even running campaign ads touting how often they voted with the do-nothing Republicans and pledging common cause with the Tea Partiers.
Yet, just yesterday, here’s how the Washington Post framed and enumerated some of the inconvenient truths that should have rendered all pretence of a Tea Party revolution to overthrow Obama and the Democrats simply laughable:
The public panned it. Republicans obstructed it. Many Democrats fled from it. Even so, the session of Congress now drawing to a close was the most productive in nearly half a century.
Not since the explosive years of the civil rights movement and the hard-fought debut of government-supported health care for the elderly and poor have so many big things – love them or hate them – been done so quickly.
Gridlock? It may feel that way. But that’s not the story of the 111th Congress – not the story history will remember…
Congress passed an $814 billion economic stimulus package soon after President Barack Obama took office, tapping a staggering sum of money to avoid a full-blown depression. Democrats have trumpeted the gains from that effort, but know it’s not enough for restive voters. ‘Americans still see themselves in a ditch,’ said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
The two other landmark acts of this session were the health care overhaul, a giant step toward universal coverage that had eluded presidents back to Franklin Roosevelt if not Teddy Roosevelt, and the Wall Street accountability act.
Obama has also signed into law at least a dozen other pieces of legislation of significance. They include:
So where is the love?
Indeed; because the polls, in which all reporters and politicians have abiding faith, all indicate that, instead of rewarding them, voters are hell bent on punishing Obama and the Democrats for their historic achievements. Perhaps “Americans still see themselves in a ditch”. But this could only be so if they were deaf, dumb, and blind.
After all, even if job creation were the litmus test for electability, Americans should be voting for the Democrats who passed not only the stimulus package that saved millions of jobs but also special legislation to extend unemployment benefits. And they had to overcome near-unanimous opposition among Republicans to pass them, which is why Democrats are quite properly ridiculing the Republican Party as “the party of no“….
Not to mention that Obama’s economic policies have created more new jobs in two years than Bush’s did in eight; or that we’ve had four consecutive quarters of economic growth, which is the surest sign that many of the concerns being propagated about the economy are unfounded and unwarranted.
In any case, the absurdity of such concerns is personified by the fact that the people expressing them are invariably the gainfully employed (even if they’re a little paranoid). Frankly, nobody polls the unemployed because nobody really cares what they think. But it would speak volumes about the self-immolating stupidity of American voters if they reject the Democrats’ historic record of achievement in favor of the Tweedledee and Tweedledum, pie-in-the-sky rhetoric of Republicans and Tea Partiers on Election Day … just because they’re “angry”.
So bring on the freak show.
NOTE: I’m on record predicting that, despite this conspiracy to make nutjob Tea Partiers and do-nothing Republicans into viable alternatives, the Democrats will retain control of both houses of Congress.
Related commentaries:
Why I’m so utterly dismissive of the Tea Party
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