by Guest Author, Communications Consultant Doug DrenkowSo let me get this straight. Tea Party darling and Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul says that even though the government should not discriminate on the basis of race in public accommodations, it's "unconstitutional" for the government to stop business from discriminating on the basis of race (etc.) in its private business dealings.
I have just one question: Did President Lincoln step out of constitutional bounds with the Emancipation Proclamation? Here I'd just heard the argument from the "states rights" crowd, that the Northern states were infringing on the power of the Southern states to make their own laws.
But according to Paul and the Tea Partyers, it's even more basic than that: Apparently the government has no right to make any law that "infringes" upon the "rights" of any business or individual to do as it, he, or she pleases, the consequences to any other individuals be damned. The "marketplace" will presumably sort it all out.
News flash: It didn't. With their abominable practice having grown over the centuries into a quite "respectable" institution, the slaveowners didn't set their slaves free in the 1800s -- and innumerable department stores (etc.) didn't open their "whites only" lunch counters (etc.) to African-Americans in the 1900s -- until the federal government made them do so.
Although Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the Tea Partyers are usually identified with the Right -- most by far do vote Republican -- they're actually far, far to the Left: What's "Libertarian" to some -- those left unrestrained by any meaningful laws -- is Anarchy to the rest of us -- their victims.
Ironically, insidiously, as the Tea Partyers rail against Wall Street bailouts, it is their very own philosophy that left big business far too unregulated for far too long, with catastrophic consequences for the rest of us.
--Doug Drenkow
_____________________
My two cents: The 'Tea Party' movement is neither an 'aberration' nor a grass roots 'movement'. I have alleged that it was 'cooked up' by a GOP-dependent political consulting firm and decided upon after numerous studies, analyses and focus-group sessions. It's all 'top down', the very anti-thesis of 'grass roots'.
This movement has no interest in representing the real concerns of real people. It's raison d'etre is the preservation of the welfare state and by that I mean the 'corporate welfare' state. It is also dedicated to, defined by an equal commitment to the 'warfare' state from which only the Military/Industrial Complex benefits. In fact, there is no 'aberration' so absurd, so nonsensical, so horrible in its effects, that it could not, does not follow inexorably from the right wing raison d'etre, itself best likened unto a puss filled boil crying out desperately to be lanced! The U.S. has tended toward 'fascism' since WWII where it tasted war and liked it.
The tea bagger movement owes its very existence to Fox News which it adores and depends upon for misinformation, i.e. anything designed to reinforce or encourage their prejudices. It is the 'top down' product of the corporate/fascist establishment and mentality that brought you 'corporate personhood', in fact, 'corporate privilege'/people enslavement!
The tea bagger movement is a by-product of the blind eye given Halliburton-BP, the corporate authors of disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the mind-set behind the Reagan 'tax cut' of 1982 which began the transfer of wealth upward so that now just one percent of the population owns more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined.
The tea baggers are enemies of Democracy and our republic. The tea baggers are liars, bigots and hypocrites to a person. Now --we're hooked on war despite the fact that with each passing year, fewer and fewer actually benefit from it. Millions just get a vicarious and perverted thrill via the media. The boardroom perverts, however, are closer to it, benefit financially from it with profits exponentially proportional to deaths. One can almost hear the war mongers cackling among themselves in glass-steel towers, plotting new adventures, new murders, new atrocities.
Limp dicked in every other way, it is their last orgasm before dying. I wish to hell they would get on with the 'dying' part and leave good people alone to live out full and meaningful lives, free of war, lies, bullshit, and oil spills.Down with tea baggers and other traitors to the Constitution, free speech and Democracy.
--Len Hart, The Existentialist CowboyPublished Articles on Buzzflash.net
Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009
Subscribe
Add to Google
Add Cowboy Videos to Google
1 comment:
I think it's also important to understand the exact nature of how the TeaBaggers (referring to the manifestations of the Party as opposed to any formal organization) are actually intended to function. This all came home to me during the healthcare debate, when both I from the left and CATO from the right were raising some serious concerns about extremely bad (and otherwise unnoticed) features of the legislation.
What I learned was that no matter how serious our concerns were and no matter how loudly we screamed, the antics of the TeaBaggers were always sucking the air out of the newscycle, and neither of us could ever be heard. And this IS the function of the TeaBaggers; to crowd out serious criticism of anything their corporate masters don't want discussed.
The fact of the matter is that the insurers (mostly, but also others) did not want considered either my objections (which would be solved by single payer) or CATOs (which would be solved by an austerity system). The insurers did not want either of those alternatives, and so they effectively excluded our criticisms from the debate by making the media look elsewhere whenever we spoke.
And yes, as a result, every one of those "unnoticed" (rotten) features were in the legislation that was signed into law.
Post a Comment