Friday, April 16, 2010

Ungrateful Basterds

OK, my hiatus is over, time to resume taking names and kicking asses. And what a list of choices I have today!

First, let us consider the tea party fools. Did any of them notice that their taxes most probably went down? You wonder what the hell is wrong with them; it seems that they just really want to bitch about the black guy living in "their" White House? Speaking of which, President Obama himself had a few choice comments to make about their cluelessness:

TPM:
"We cut taxes for 95 percent of working Americans, just like I promised we would on the campaign," Obama said.
[...]"So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies, about taxes. You would think they would be saying, 'Thank you!' That's what you'd think!"


95% of all Americans received a decrease in their taxes. So, despite that recent New York Times/CBS poll showing that tea partiers are allegedly wealthier and better educated than most Americans, still, a large number of these idiots, perhaps the vast majority of them, should also have received a tax cut. What's the rationale for their anger, then?

Well, for starters, I have a problem with their numbers. I refuse to believe that these old, fat, largely male and overwhelmingly white crowds of idiots, marching with their misspelled signs and unfocused anger, are wealthier and better educated than, for example, I am. (But that's a topic for another post.) More likely, these crowds of people--who somehow manage to find the time to travel cross-country in the middle of the work week--are the unemployed who were displaced by the Bush Recession, as detailed in a recent post at Politico.

Uber-geek Nate Silver discovered something even more damning and determinate, the tea party love affair with Glen Beck:

FiveThirtyEight.com:
[...]tea-partiers are disproportionately attached to, and perhaps influenced by, FOX News. And they are particularly enamored of Glenn Beck. Nationally, just 18 percent of people have a favorable opinion of Beck (the majority have no opinion whatsoever about him). But most tea-partiers do. Do the math, and you'll find that 59 percent of those who do think highly of Beck consider themselves a part of the tea-party. This is, in fact, the single biggest differentiator of any of the items that the NYT asked about: not ideology, not any particular political belief, but whom they watch on television.
So I'm supposed to believe that people who get most of their news from Faux, people who adore Glen Beck, and who can't spell "certificate," "Germany," or "moron," are wealthier and better educated than most Americans? Please!

1 comment:

FreeSprirtedRuminations said...

Very nicely put...and welcome back. You've been missed!