Sarah Palin – who earlier had held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate – railed against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republicans in Delaware and New York. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism, as Matt Taibbi calls her, spoke at the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners.
Matt Taibbi, a reporter for Rolling Stone, attended the event and writes: "Palin chortles, 'We're shaking up the good ol' boys,' to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star.
"There isn't a single black person in the crowd. And there is a 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. Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression: 'Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!'
"…the person sitting next to me leans over to explain that the scooters are because of Medicare. They have these commercials about how you won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay! Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
Apparently, although they want government spending cut for everyone else, they do want government to spend on them. They feel entitled. They think they earned it when actually they use up what they paid into Social Security and Medicare within the first few years. For the remainder of their years, they are on the dole of taxpayers.
Taibbi continues, “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.”
After Palin wraps up, Taibbi searches for departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. He come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views:
I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. Oh, I'm a property appraiser - have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."
More from Taibbi:
"They're full of s**t. 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. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse (for themselves) is key to understanding what this movement is all about – and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
"Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself – half of his patients are on Medicare – he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason."
Rand Paul said that physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living and therefore, Medicare should not be allowed to reduce payments to physicians. (But he is against the government bail out to the states that saved the jobs of teachers, fire fighters, and policemen.)
Taibbi continues: "Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. (Ha, ha, you thought the Tea Party actually gave a s**t about spending, joke's on you.) That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues – it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a ‘them-versus-us’ thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ('radical leftists' is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do."
(Remember, facts do not matter to this crowd. Reasoning with them is futile.)
"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.
"The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as a great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement are not yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
"The rest of it – the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade – will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives."
"The over 65 dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh."
To read the remainder of the Taibbi’s article, go here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904?RS_show_page=0
