"T" is for "thugs"

As we approach the critical 2010 midterm election on November 2 it is increasingly apparent that the "Tea Party" is more akin to the "brownshirts" of 1930s/40s Nazis than anything resembling the founding fathers' resistance activities. Aside from being an out-of-control ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party, these folks assume they have the right to silence a diligent reporter (see "Alaska Dispatch editor detained at Miller event"). They are typified by candidates who have little to offer the electorate beyond a vague (but intense) outrage and fed-up-ness of "big government" and a desire to reduce the deficit (which ballooned up to the largest size EVER during the Bush presidency). Couple this with a willingness to silence any form of variance from their "message" and you've got modern-day American brownshirt thugs.

This is a "movement" that deserves to be tossed upon the slag heap of history along with Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" and other serious politically divisive mistakes of our American evolution. (It also seems to be a sad/ironic commentary on the overall state of American education when a movement based primarily on "outrage" linked with a bit of racism and based on inherently false assumptions that historic legislative milestones--such as the Healthcare Reform Act--are misunderstood and twisted into negatives.) These folks just don't realize that they are ginned-up and "working for the man" (i.e., big business and the ultra-wealthy) and their movement is one step away from the American equivalent of the totalitarianism of the ultra-wealthy where the middle class gets more and more marginalized and sqeezed into poverty while their overlords grow into a twenty-first century equivalent to the oligarchy of pre-revolutionary Russia.

I, for one, still believe in the power of hope and the pursuit of a more perfect union through progressive populism.