12 Days of Christmas Scorn: Day 4 -- Teabagger Edition

by Noah

1. THE SIGN OF THE TIMES AWARD

To the Crackpot Party itself. Oh, I know, some will say that you shouldn’t lump all Republicans into some lunatic-fringe category and that the kooks are only a part of the party, but when the sum total of the party itself has shrunk to the size of a speck of mold in a dark corner of the basement, how are we to discern the difference, especially when no spokescreeps for the party come forward to correct the impression?

Somehow, I’m not going to be swayed by the likes of Eric Cantor, John Bo(eh)ner, Bachmann, Palin, Rush, Beck, Sean Insanity, Jeff Sessions, Inhofe, Grandpa McCain, or whoever. Michael Steele? Bill-O? Anyone named Cheney? I don’t think so. Last year Repugs gave us signs with pictures of Obama as a monkey eating a banana. This year featured a widely circulated one of Obama dressed as a witch doctor and one of Obama leaving Air Force One carrying a watermelon.

That’s typical and very predictable stuff from such people. But my “favorite” Republican signage, appearing at an anti-healthcare rally, has to be one that read “No Youth In Asia." Ya know, if Repugs believed in supporting education, things like this just might not happen. Hmmm. Maybe we do need those death panels they all yap about. Do I see a cabinet-level Secretary of Euthanasia on the horizon?

News flash: The only Department of Euthanasia will be those insurance companies that Repug crackpots and their Conservadem comrades are trying so hard to protect and aid and abet in their crimes.


2. THE PSYCHOBABBLE AWARD

To professional victim Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who loves to make outlandish, stone-crazy comments, then whine that the librul media is picking on her when they repeat them. Result: Money pours into the Repug coffers to defend this poor, abused cash cow. Bachmann has taken the whole Republican “I’m being victimized," “elites are picking on us” shtick to the max. That is her talent. With her supporters holding up signs that compare Dems to the Germans that ran Dachau, she is in direct competition with Sarah Palin for the position of Pied Piper of Crazy. In a different decade she’d be living at the Spahn Ranch with Charlie Manson, wearing a sack dress and carving a swastika into her forehead.

Republicans love her. They even bow down to her when it’s a full moon. Fox may like to show clips of crowds of millions of people juxtaposed with her appearances to give the illusion that millions hang on her every nonsensical word, but in reality her kook and freak shows are not setting the woods on fire. Still, crazy is as crazy does. I can’t wait until Bachmann tries to walk on the reflecting-pool water at her next rally on the Mall and Fox doctors the film to show her really doing it! Hannity will think he’s died and gone to heaven. Please don’t tell him otherwise. I’d hate to see his delusion so cruelly shattered. He’s worked so hard to achieve it.


3. THE P. T. BARNUM AWARD

To Dick Armey and the Teabaggers. No, this is not a leather boy heavy metal band. It’s a match made in a cesspool, a perfect confluence of people who have a subconscious need to be duped and an evil P. T. Barnum type who is all too willing to prove that there’s a sucker born every minute -- all for fun and profit, of course. Former House Majority Leader Armey is a wannabe leader of an American Taliban. His plotting gets over in the tribal areas of our country, and the duped can’t see him pulling their strings. They are the last to know.

Armey is “the thing that will not die.” It was bad when as majority leader he strove for things like privatizing Social Security. Just imagine what would have happened last fall to Social Security and to those who benefit from it if Armey had succeeded in his pro-corporate anti-citizen privatization plan. Now he runs a devious organization called FreedomWorks, which has dedicated itself to protecting the insurance companies that are robbing us blind and destroying both our personal health and the economic health of our country.

How many Teabaggers, egged on by FreedomWorks, will end up dying before their time or losing a child due to poor healthcare resources after they expressed themselves so loudly and obnoxiously? How many companies will go under because of the status quo of the system that Armey and his followers seek to preserve? How much will the prices of goods and services skyrocket because a company has to include a portion of the skyrocketing cost of healthcare in those prices? How many people will remain unemployed or become unemployed because the economy remains a mess because of a healthcare crisis that sucks it dry while the insurance-company puppet masters who pull the strings of their emotions laugh behind their backs, counting their profits all the way? Ever wonder who finances Armey?

In doing the insurance industry’s dirty work, teabaggers might have a better chance at a brighter future if they played Russian roulette for cash on the barrelhead like in the film Coming Home. Teabaggers, who’s your daddy? We know you have the guns and the misspelled signs. We saw the pictures. I’m sure Dick Armey will be glad to sell you the bullets while Michele and Sarah shake the pompoms and cheer you on.

The point that seems to go unnoticed in all of this is just how much the goals of people like Dick Armey, Max Baucus, Joe Lieberwhore, Rahm Emanuel, Jim Dementia, and Tom Coburn conveniently match up. They are all out to preserve the insurance-company status quo that is so injurious to the middle and working classes while it fills the coffers of thug insurance corporations. They are just attacking from a different angle. Party affiliation means nothing. Dick Armey and Rahm Emanuel are working for the same devil. They are just rivals for his affections: two sides of the same corporate coin. Call it in the air!


4. THE I'M SO CUTE, I DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' EDUCATION AWARD

To Sarah Palin, Queen of the Birthers! The clip from Palin’s Ohio appearance that I’ve included here reminds me of the folks in Ohio who felt that not enough students were killed at Kent State when that went down back in ’71. I remember news clips of them driving around back then flashing four fingers out their windows, yelling “four more more.”


Sarah Palin fans are interviewed before a book signing in Columbus on Nov. 20, 2009. "She's like a rock star in the conservative movement." "She stands for what America is -- freedom, our liberties, the right to speak." Her issues? "Fairness. Realness." "She's the epitome of conservativeness, and I'm telling you, if the Republicans don't back her, it doesn't matter, because she's going to get the presidency." "When you're right, you don't have to compromise." But the fans seem thin on actual issues either she or they believe in.

High schools are full of girls like Sarah. They get by and get over with some winks and some cute and bubbly, bu, after graduation comes the real world. For Sarah Palin, 2008 was about things like accusing Barack Obama of hanging around with terrorists while she and her hubby had done it for real, as exemplified by their relationship with Alaska Independence Party (AIP) founder and secessionist Joe Volger, who once screamed, “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government... And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.” They even attended, and she once addressed, an AIP convention. That, of course, was before Volger got killed as he was buying some plastic explosives. (Funny how we heard so much about the Reverend Wright in the MSM, but not this guy or his relationship to the Palins, isn’t it?) The irony of Palin’s supporters claiming that Obama isn’t really the president because he’s not an American citizen while they wish to see someone who actually doesn’t seem to want to be an American citizen seems to go right by a lot of people.

Then there was that “What magazines and newspapers do you read?” thing. The truth is, that’s not a “gotcha” question, unless of course you simply don’t read any. And putting down Katie Couric just because you think you’re a better looker or whatever isn’t enough, just as telling a head of state at a deadly world-serious moment wouldn’t be. I can just imagine if JFK had said to Nikita, “I’ll get back to ya,” and winked on the phone. Actually, I can’t imagine that, because I wouldn’t be here and neither would you, Sarah baby, even if you can see Russia from your house of wolf pelts.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Ms. Palin is necessarily naturally stupid. Weasels are damn smart critters. They even make nice pets, but not presidents, or vice presidents. They’re not even suitable for honorable positions such as dogcatcher. Now in 2009 she pretends to write a book, when her time might have been better spent reading one, or two, or three, or four, or… She even managed to disrespect those who are naïve and gullible enough to believe her shtick, like she did in Indiana where she got her sucker followers to buy “her” chock-full-of-BS book and then ran out on them without signing after they bought the book and waited in the cold. Next time, they might rock her "you betcha" express bus until it tips over, rather than let her drive away saying, “So long, suckers!”


The most hysterical thing about this is that the bus just takes her to the nearest airport, where she boards a private jet to the next stop on the “bus” tour. This after she made a big deal last year of putting that jet on eBay to show how frugal she is. For some, I guess, life is about faking it all the way through. Maybe we’ve done the dumbdown so much that phonies like Palin can get over with their act all the way to the top. Then again, she might just end up being Icarus and one day we’ll hear her screeching like the Wicked Witch of the North that she is: “I’m melting. I’m melting. I’m melting!” Could be, though, that she is just one of those Alaskan ice sculptures, and she should have paid more attention to the global warming problem. And is it just a coinkydink that Oprah decided to retire her show the day after trying to interview Palin? I know if I were Oprah, I would have been saying “That’s it, I just can’t do this anymore. Pack up the cameras and the set, and burn that damn couch."


TOMORROW: Day 5 -- A Circus of Horrors

1. The I'm Gonna Take My Ball, Throw a Hissy Fit, and Run Away Award
2. The Squeal like a Pig Award
3. The Treehouse of Doom Award
4. The Separation of Church and Snakes Award


THE SERIES SO FAR

Day 1: Con Men, Grifters, and Outlaws Edition
Day 2: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same Edition
Day 3: Media Manipulators and Seditionistas Edition

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