Tea Baggers

I don't think I'll ever understand why middle class Republicans, who are as hurting as anyone in this economy, support extending tax cuts for the very rich and are against a middle class tax cut which would help themselves and vast numbers of Americans. I could understand if we knew that tax cuts for the rich are some magical device that also make middle class folk become rich, but the last thirty years have shown us that they don't. We've just widened the gap between the super rich and everyone else.

Bob Cesca has a good article about the absurdity of the current "Tea Bag" protests that explores the contradiction. Some goodness below.

And unless I'm mistaken, the basic idea of the tea bag revolution is to protest against government bailouts and in favor of tax cuts for the wealthiest five percent of Americans. Ultimately, the tea baggers (can I call them that?) appear to be against allowing the Bush's tax cuts to expire. Strangely, they also appear to be against President Obama signing into law the largest middle class tax cut in history. They're also against helping middle and working class "losers" keep their homes. (By the way, your neighbor's mortgage is your problem. Just watch your property values plummet as soon as there's just one foreclosure on your block.)

This series of Obama policies, they say, portends tyranny in America. Of course none of the policies of the Bush administration were considered tyrannical by many of the current tea bag leaders. You know the list of Bush trespasses. The illegal searches and seizures, the illegal electronic eavesdropping and torturing. The suspension of habeas corpus, the record deficits, the doubling of the national debt and so on. None of that was tyrannical. But allowing the tax cuts for the wealthiest five percent to expire is absolutely the vanguard of totalitarianism.

His point about tyranny is also dead-on. One of the current Republican talking points is that Obama is somehow trashing our civil liberties. First, huh? Second, where were these goons when Bush/Cheney were trashing civil liberties left and right?