Overwhelmingly they agreed that she is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Whew, Greta, did you really want to know?

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“What happened to the “Revolution” Republicans or Texas talked about? Tea Parties? That’s it?
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

My answer:

“Somehow it turned out that the glorious “Revolution” was just a publicity stunt designed for television. The Republican organizers of this debacle thought that it would be enough to design the event and tell people to show up. Not only would tens of millions of people attend, but they would be so encouraged by the outpouring of support that they would have become activists. They would exert political influence.

Republican leadership has forgotten how to organize, or even worse (not from the perspective of Democrats, of course) they have decided to shun it and vilify it. What better way to guarantee that they will never achieve grass-roots popularity again?

The overwhelming majority of radio listeners and television viewers are couch potatoes. Why would Rush listeners and Fox viewers be different? People like this have no connection to the political process. When they get angry, they don’t write their Congressman, they act as anonymous internet trolls. When they get really, really angry, they grab a gun from their arsenal and shoot someone.

The sentiment on the part of their target group seems to be vague agreement with principles, enough to keep them from switching the station but hardly the basis for a revolution from people who are by nature so unconnected with the political process that they can barely drag themselves to the polls to vote every couple of years. “

Alas, while I was distracted doing things like working and writing this blog, another answer was chosen. But there’s no point in wasting mine.

The issue is not really whether or not the Revolution will be televised, it is whether it will even happen if the only reason for a “revolution” is to generate television content.

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And a quote from Robert G Kaufman, speaking at the 61st Annual Conference on World Affairs on what Republicans should do to advance their party…

The fifth thing that Republicans have to do is understand the problem of communicating in a world where much of the television media, particularly, is hostile…If I had to recommend one single thing that the Republicans should be doing to help articulate the message, it is to acquire another television network so that there is not just FOX, but multiple sources of alternative information that will do a much better job than we did in 2008 to keep things honest.

Admitting that Fox News was bought and paid for by the Republican party.

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Notwithstanding the fact that people who report on the news are not supposed to be using their position to make the news—or start political movements, for that matter—he got involved with a website that apparently had previously been set up just for this and ran with the “tea party” concept.

Again, for those of you who are not familiar with the concept, prior to the start of the American Revolution, a small group of colonists attacked a ship in Boston Harbor and dumped its load of tea overboard as a sign of their refusal to endure “taxation without representation”. The issue was that the King had put heavy taxes on many things to cover the expenses of financial mismanagement of government back home, and somebody had to cover the costs. This is now known as the “Boston Tea Party”.

Right after Santelli’s rant, there were a few gatherings called “tea parties” around the country, though attendance was rather spotty. Some only had a few dozen attendees. There were a few where the size of the crowd was claimed to be in the thousands, but official estimates (by public authorities) put it significantly lower. So altogether nationwide it didn’t total the attendance at one typical Obama rally.

The thing is, even among right wingnuts, there isn’t that much enthusiasm for raising taxes for the poor so that rich people can keep more of their money. They have to keep the issue abstract and hope that their supporters don’t start calculating how much money they have lost in real wages and buying power in the last 8 years.

Example:

I answered a question on Yahoo Answers a week or so ago, written by someone who claimed to be in the bracket where he would be paying more taxes, but thought that he and his wife ought to be able to keep their money because “they work hard”.

I answered that if he’s making $250K he should be able to afford to pay the extra few dollars a day, and everybody works hard. The guy sent me an email complaining about how he has paid $70,000 for special schools and rehabilitation services for his autistic child. I was like, “Whoa, you’re complaining to the wrong person. I think the government ought to pay all of that, whether a person is rich or poor.”

He didn’t respond.

So many of the people who show up at these “parties” have some other agenda. They may be “birthers” who believe that Obama was born elsewhere and therefore can’t be President. They may be opposed to abortion rights. They may be anti-immigrant, anti-welfare, anti-civil rights. Or they may be just plain nuts.

The “parties” are all organized from the top down to try to generate the appearance of populist sentiment. That’s about all that Republicans seem to be able to do nowadays, and it’s not working out all that well. Fox News is pushing these parties hard to try to get people to attend. So is the Huffington Post, which is looking for “citizen reporters” to upload videos and write stories about their local parties. So it is not impossible that many of the parties will be attended by mostly moles.

At this link you will find several videos recorded at the last round of tea parties. I don’t want to put them all in here, so I’ll just give you one.

By now of course Rick Santelli has found that he was losing credibility by being associated with this “movement” and has dissociated himself from it.

But anyway, the big “teabagging” issue is how they thought they could squeak that name by. While many people involved in the parties do not seem to have been aware of what the term also means, it seems like at least some of them thought they could use the sexual allusion to their heart’s content and not have it turned against them. Or at least not for comedy.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “teabagging”, you will by the time you have watched both these videos.

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Let’s see what we have here:

First of all, the Rick Santelli thing. After Santelli, who poses as an analyst on CNBC but is actually just another greedy derivatives trader, decided to hold a rehearsed and scripted anti-homeowner rally on the trading floor, it turned out that the Republican party had orchestrated a series of “Tea Parties” for protesting against unfair taxes. They were poorly attended (50 here, a few hundred there). Watch some of their philosophers at work.

Birthers at a “Tea Party”

Jon Stewart eviscerating Santelli and CNBC

Surely everybody remembers how McCain’s backing out of his Letterman interview may have cost him the election. Well, Rick Santelli got cold feet after agreeing to go on The Daily Show, and don’t you know, finally somebody did some real research and showed America what CNBC is good for.

Steven Colbert on Glenn Beck’s Fox News War Room Part 1

Steven Colbert on Glenn Beck’s Fox News War Room Part 2

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• McCain’s choice to pander to right wing evangelicals, which alienated him with the moderates who had respected him.
• McCain’s choice of Palin, who gave a good bump to the polls before pushing them both off the edge of the world.
• Sean Hannity’s decision to run 24/7 smear attacks on Obama, in spite of the fact that the more people listened and watched, the more likely they were to vote for Obama. Hello?!? Hannity may have single-handedly destroyed the campaign hopes of the Republicans.

It turns out the Obama campaign was pleased to hear that Palin had been selected, because they had checked her out ahead of time and found her, uh, wanting.

Story

And now, for some juicy gossip on Fox News, no less. Sarah Palin had no idea that Africa was a continent, rather than a country. Didn’t she learn anything from Muthee?

What didn’t Palin know and when didn’t she know it?

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He more than holds his own against her. When did “fair and balanced” come to mean “shouting down the interviewee so they can’t answer your wild accusations?

I have not been able to find a copy of the audio of the original in context (hmm, I wonder why that is), and he ones I have found have inflammatory comments and/or illustrations of Lenin and Marx on them.

I suspect the context is highly relevant.

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And as long as I’m scraping YouTube, here’s a cute little video on the “How many homes do you own?” issue.

Also, McCain’s cheat sheet to keep that from happening again.

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