Really mad tea party

If you’re wondering about the thinking process of the Tea Party ’Pubs whose intransigence caused the partial government shutdown, here’s an interview by NPR’s Scott Simon with Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the political group.

In it she twists reality like a LSD tripper on a three-day high, cherry-picks “facts” and generally blows it out her backside like a…well, like a tea partier.

(I’ll give her this—at least she’s not screaming, which is what her ditto-heads are doing on social media. I find it fascinating that you can be holding a Facebook discussion on, say, Nostradamus quatrains and someone will suddenly go ballistic on how—well, how about a direct (anonymous) quote:

(“It is starting to get scary as callers at night are outraged and the democrats went too far with their shut down to run on in 2014. Many of us are from that generation who may be democrats or republicans but they would all be speaking German if not for these veterans who came in planes to be shut away. Fortunately, republicans took down the baricades [sic] and republicans and ordianary [sic] Americans wheeled the veterans inside the open air memorial. They did the same to Martin Luther King and if the Black people are democrats, they took away veterans who wanted to see his memorial so are you happy about that for your party? It had to be ordered by the White House who wants to hurt us all to have his way.”

(Usual disclaimer—I did not make this up. And this woman had plenty more along these lines before I hope her meds kicked in. There’s heaps of the like on Twitter, too; but of course the 140-character limitation cramps the ranting capability somewhat. So they just do whole strings of tweets that are broken up by other people's self-promotion, inanities and non-sequiturs.)

However, back to Martin—I found it interesting that in supporting her accusations that the ACA is causing people to “lose their jobs, their hours, their healthcare” (in present tense), one of her alleged sources of these predictions is…labor unions. (It’s in the audio, not the excerpted transcript.) I’m wondering how it is that righteous Republican lightning did not strike her the very instant that a tea partier spoke the words “labor” and “union” in conjunction without hissing.

But the thing that absolutely had me gobsmacked was when she said, “we are looking for ways to reopen the portions of the government that we agree with.” As though that made them somehow reasonable.

First—by “the portions of the government that we agree with,” she means “the things like the WWII monument or the parts of NIH running pediatric trials where videos of wheelchair-bound vets and dying kids showing up on even Fox news make us look like ignorant, heartless morons.” Even if her followers do manage to turn it into a “democrat” fulmination.

Thus they’ve been trying to pass limited Continuing Resolutions that would fund enough such agreeable portions that would get the journalists off their backs. So, say—reopen the WWII memorial, but keep the other national parks closed. Except for logging and fracking operations, of course.

Second—you don’t get to bloody fund only those portions of the freaking government that you agree with. Not even if you’re a delusional, brain-dead ideologue. We may not have the government we’d like, or even the one we deserve; but we have the government you bozos have delivered. You want to de-fund [insert agency here], you man up and pass a bill to wind it down that you can get the President to sign in the regular course of events. You don't take over the bank with balaclavas, C4 and assault weapons and then offer to toss out a few wads of Benjamins to your BFFs while you insist that you're going to get your way or blow up half the town.

Well, if you're a tea partier, that's exactly what you do. 

Oh, and—BTW: if you think that we don’t notice that all this flapping about with the volume turned to max on these little CRs is nothing but continuing to fail to do your job, it’s time for someone to start trepanning on a mass scale in the US Capitol.

Finally, to get back to Martin’s little hissy fit about how their tea party efforts to “delay” ACA implementation is just responding to what “the majority of Americans want”, let me give you Jon Stewart’s analysis.

People—and Congressmorons—it’s not a debate, it’s not a negotiation, it’s not a “bridge”. It’s the fucking law—passed by Congress, signed by the President and upheld by the Supreme Court. That’s all three branches of our government, just like it’s supposed to work.

Which appears to be something that sticks in these people’s throats. Although sadly not enough to choke them permanently.