No surprise here from the GOP base. Blender Kel Munger of the Sacramento News & Review covered the teabaggers in that part of the world this week and has a great description of the event in the post “Revolt of the frightened, middle-aged white tea-baggers”:
The stage was set up way to the front of the west capitol steps rather than near the steps, which crowded the audience into a much smaller space. Figures; it made 5,000 people (guestimate based on number of rows times number of people in the third from the back row, which I cut through to get out of the crowd) feel more like 10,000 because the crowd area was small and packed.
Second, this was all about the over-40 white people (only person of color I saw in the whole place who wasn’t wearing a police uniform was a brave Black man on a bicycle who rode by with a “Fox Sucks” sign shouting “Fox can teabag me!”). Men outnumbered women about three to one.
Third, there was plenty of wingnuttery: the usual “Abolish the IRS” and “Return to the gold standard,” as well as one guy who kept saying, “They‘re committing treason. Hang ‘em all!”
Fourth, nobody seems to grasp that the Obama administration was not the author of TARP. They seem to have forgotten that a Bush administration ever existed, and the anger at President Obama ranged from the usual accusations of socialism (except for the guy with a sign equating him to Hitler—I think that’s an accusation of fascism) to several signs with variations of “OBAMA: One Big Awful Mistake, America.”
But the fun part is that Kel received a classic voicemail from an irate female teabagger.
Uh, yeah, Kel, my name is Liz and I was at the same Sacramento tea party you were. And I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about about the black stuff, you’re probably black yourself, I guess. I don’t know whether you’re some kind of hate monger … maybe goes with your last name, Munger.
Anyway, as far as the black people showing up, there were quite a few black people and they were probably intelligent ones that weren’t home on welfare where the rest of ‘em probably were, and a lot of hispanics that we’re paying for that are illegally here. So next time you write an article you better write it right because there was a black man that sung the tea party song in case you missed that one, and there was also a black guy from Hollywood, a comedian, who was up there speaking to the crowd.
The next time you decide to write your slanted view get your fucking facts straight you fucking asshole.
Click over for his reply. Below the fold, KO and Janeane Garofalo gab about teabagger bigots.
Keith Olbermann and Janeane Garofalo discussed this phenomenon of teabaggers who are so upset by Barack Obama “presidenting while black” that these events are serving as their outlet to vent their overflowing sense that white privilege is under assault. Nah, those teabaggers weren’t racist....
GAROFALO: They don‘t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of tea bagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And, you know, you can tell these type of right-wingers anything and they‘ll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become—it‘s like showing Frankenstein‘s monster fire. They become confused, angry, highly volatile.
That guy caused in them feelings they don‘t know because of their limbic brain—we‘ve discussed before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist - - the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person. And it is pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring.
Is Bernie Goldberg listening? Bernie might not have heard this when I said this the first time. So, Bernie, this is for you. It is a neurological problem that we‘re dealing with.
OLBERMANN: Well, what do you do about it, though? I mean, our friend in Pensacola there, who played them like a three dollar fiddle.
GAROFALO: Yes.
OLBERMANN: And led them right down the garden path with nothing but facts, and then they went, wait a minute, that doesn‘t sound like Rush Limbaugh. If you can‘t—
GAROFALO: Right.
OLBERMANN: If you can‘t get them to make that last leap to what are we all doing here, Howard Johnson is wrong.
GAROFALO: Yes.
OLBERMANN: How do you break through that?
GAROFALO: I don‘t think you do, for most of them. This is a pathological—it‘s almost pathological or elevated to a philosophy or lifestyle. Again, this is about racism. It could be any issue, any port in a storm. These guys hate that a black guy is in the White House, but they—they immigrant bash. They pretend taxes and tea bags—like I said, most of them probably couldn‘t tell you thing one about taxation without representation, the Boston Tea Party, British imperialism, whatever the history lesson has to be.
But these people always—unless there‘s some people with Stockholm Syndrome.
OLBERMANN: I didn‘t see them. They were in the back. They weren‘t near the cameras, which is bad strategy on the part of the people staging this at Fox.
GAROFALO: True. And Fox News loves to foment this anti-intellectualism. That is their bread and butter. If you have a cerebral electorate, Fox News goes down the toilet very, very fast. It is sick and sad to see Neil Cavuto doing this. They‘re been doing this for years. That‘s why Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch started this venture, is to disinform and to coarsen and dumb-down a certain segment of the electorate.
But what is really—I didn‘t know there were so many racists left. I didn‘t know that. As I said, the Republican hype in the conservative movement has now crystallized into the white power movement.
OLBERMANN: Is that not a bad long-term strategy. Even though—your point is terrifying there are that many racists left.
GAROFALO: Right.
OLBERMANN: The flip side of it is there aren‘t that many racists left.
GAROFALO: You‘re the minority, literally tens of people showed up to this thing across the country.
OLBERMANN: But if you spear your television network or your political party towards a bunch of guys who are just looking for a reason to yell at the black president, eventually you will marginalize yourself out of market, won‘t you?
GAROFALO: No. Here‘s what the right-wing has—there are no shortages of the natural resources of ignorance, apathy, hate sphere. As long as those things are in the collective conscious and unconscious, the Republicans will have some votes, and Fox News will have viewers. What else have they got. If they didn‘t do that, who‘s going to watch?
I mean, they have tackled that elusive clam—I said clam—you know, the clam demo, the 18 to 35 clam demo. Klan, with a K, demo. Who else is Fox talking? What is it, urban older white guys, and the girlfriend—you know, the women who suffer from Stockholm Syndrome again. There‘s a lot of Stockholm Syndrome, is what I‘m saying, ultimately.
What else you got? What do you want to know?
OLBERMANN: What if somebody was at one of these things hurts somebody.
GAROFALO: That is an unfortunate byproduct, since the dawn of time, of a volatile group like this of the limbic brain. Violence, unfortunately, may or may not ensue. It depends on immigrant bashing and hating the black guy in the White House. Will people act on that? It‘s not new. But, you know, Fox doesn‘t mind fomenting it. Michelle Bachmann doesn‘t mind fomenting it. Glenn Beck doesn‘t mine fomenting it.
OLBERMANN: Lou Dobbs.
GAROFALO: Lou Dobbs. Oh, man. But what have they got if they don‘t have this? You know what I mean? It‘s like identity politics of the worst kind.
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The whole pathological bit does bother me ... in some ways I agree, but then I think about how some wingnuts choose to characterize homosexuality as a pathology.
I think the general gist of what is being said here is true ... I simply reject the packaging. Pseudoscience and ascribing innate physical pathology to disagreement are not appropriate.