Weak Tea

Matt Taibbi's latest screed in Rolling Stone digs down deep into the sclerotic piss pump that is the Fox News Tea Party.

                             These people need to wear their Depends over their mouths.

This is an immensely informative and horrifyingly entertaining piece of journalism. I stopped reading Wenner's Folly when it went gaga for grunge, but Taibbi is among the best and most insightful reads in all of wordom.

Some highlights:

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters.

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

 Taibbi also makes stops at Rand Paul World, the GOP T-Party Puppet Show,
The Altar of the Oligarchy and even a detour to the Creation Museum.

If some of your favorite topics are hypocrisy, corporatist domination, the termination of the American dream, and mind-numbing narcissistic stupidity, you won't want to miss a word of this masterpiece.

Please- go read it.