The Essential Tea Bagger

From the WaPo;

"I came here because of what I see going on in this country," he said. "We're bankrupt in America. We can't run our households like the government's running the country. That, and the idea of people [sitting] around on their butts. Fifty percent of the people collecting a check are paying no taxes, while the other 50 pull the wagon."

Johnson continued: "Normally I'm not a protester. I've got other things to do in life. I'd rather be doing all kinds of other things. But I just can't stand by and watch this country go down the tubes."

He said he "worked my way up from nothing" and was not about to allow "somebody else to reach in my pocket and just take it away and give to somebody" who does nothing.

Johnson expressed opposition to Obama. "It's not just because he's black," he said. "I wish I could tell you that I loved this guy, that he was a great president, that I had faith in him. But I have none. Zero."

This is what drives tea baggers. They see the world as the hard working 'Murkins and the they. They are not pulling their weight. They aren't contributing to society. They aren't working hard like we do. They just want to sit on their asses doing nothing while we pay for it.

Thing is.. they never really articulate who they are. Is it a homeless guy? Is it a single mom with kids and a shitty job? Is it a senior living on Social Security?

I'd really like to know who they are.

I have a theory, of course. I've said many many times (I'm sure too often) that we pay a lot in taxes. It never, ever, occurs to me to be upset because they might get a piece of it. It never occurs to me that there are people in this nation who do nothing while we subsidize it. I've never seen those people. Nobody has shown me they exist. It never occurs to me that the biggest problem this nation faces is slackers taking all our tax dollars.

It seems to me that conservatives have some other frustration working in thier own lives, and they refuse to confront it. They simply redirect it to some other mythical group that is easy to blame. This is, incidentally, why they are so infuriated by same-sex marriage. Whether or not somebody else marries a person of the same sex has absolutely nothing to do with them, but it makes them in-fucking-sane. Conservatives need, intrinsically, to make the they suffer in any way possible. If everyone else is content and going on about their business, that forces the conservatives to realize that maybe the problem is them.

It's why religion exists.. to enable the pointing of fingers at everyone else. And eventually it gets to, they had it coming.

....

It just occurred to me.. that some of they work for John's company. One of his employees is a Hispanic woman with kids and no husband. She makes around $30k and gets some types of "public assistance". She works as hard as anyone, and John has been helping her improve her situation by paying for her education to get licensed, out of his own pocket, and help her learn to do real-estate deals to generate her own additional income.

In the conservative world.. she and her kids are the they. To us, she's just another person trying to make shit work, for her and her family. It never, ever, occurred to me to be pissed off because some of our tax dollars might end up going to people like her.. and maybe, god forbid, end up helping some little kids get something to fucking eat.

The tea baggers are some seriously twisted mother fuckers.. and I hope they get fucking shit on when they need help from somebody else at some point in their lives.

/adding

This is a recent bit from an op/ed writer at the NY Times;

Unlike 90 percent of America, I was rooting for Duke last night. This was widely cast as a class conflict — the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys. If this had been a movie, Butler’s last second heave would have gone in instead of clanging off the rim, and the country would still be weeping with joy.

But this is why life is not a movie. The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense.

It's the exact same thing. The Butler players are the they. They just didn't work hard enough to win the game.

The link will take you to Matt Taibbi's blog.. which I've added to the links. He's a tremendous writer, entertaining and informative.

I had to read this thing twice before it registered that Brooks was actually saying that he was rooting for the rich against the poor. If he keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a half farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history. But then you come to this last line of his, in which he claims that “for the first time in history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people,” and you find yourself almost speechless.

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.