Having just returned from the Tea Bugger/Palin rally on the Boston Common (abridged version: It's just the same shitheads that have been making the rest of us miserable for the last thirty years, only with a new name), I came across this superb post by Lance Mannion (italics original, boldface mine):
Grammer doesn't live as if he believes in his own political views....
Grammer doesn't live anything like a Republican-approved lifestyle. He lives the life of the sort of big city liberal Republicans affect to despise. And as far as I know he's quite happy with that life and has no plans to change it. He's not about to move to any place Republicans regard as part of the "real America." He's not leaving Hollywood or New York for Topeka, Biloxi, or Wasilla. He's not about to give up acting to start an oil company, become a hedge fund manager, or a cattle rancher. I don't know if he goes to church and I don't care, but it's pretty hard to imagine him in the front pew at St Patrick's, although it isn't hard to imagine him leading the choir at the nearest Baptist mega-church---but that's Frasier I'm seeing bouncing around in a purple robe and singing it joyfully. Grammer himself? Religion doesn't seem to be something he's given much thought lately, an odd thing for a Republican these days.
Now, I don't believe that any Republican should have to go live in Topeka, Biloxi, Wasilla, or anywhere else on Sarah Palin's short list of places that count as the real America. But I do believe that happy and contented East and West Coast elitists like Grammer---and conservative members of the punditocracy in Washington---should stop talking as if they believe that the lives lived in places like Topeka, Biloxi, and Wasila are more "authentically" American than lives lived in Brooklyn, Brookline, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, or San Antonio and that the people in the one set of places are more American than the people living in the other.And it's probably too much to ask, but could they acknowledge that the lives they live in the most decadent parts of decadent Blue America have been made possible for them by liberalism?
Grammer could respond that Los Angeles and New York were built through the efforts and with the money of stalwart capitalists of a conservative bent, and that's true to the degree that you believe that all capitalists are conservatives as all actors are liberals and that those capitalists intended the cities that got built up around them and you forget the people who did the actual physical labor to build them....
It's very easy for Kelsey Grammer to be a Conservative Republican because so many people around him are busy at the hard work of not being one.
I'm struck by Mannion's point, having been surrounded this morning by thousands of Tea Buggers, who:
1) Took the government-funded T to the rally.
2) Drove on government-funded roads to the rally.
3) Had the rally held in a publicly-funded and maintained area (the Boston Common).
4) Had security provided by the government--the Boston Police Department.
We won't even broach the topic of using the DARPA-develop internet as an organizing tool. Yet "taxes are too high" and "government is the problem." Scientists are elitists, and so on. If everyone lived like the idealized Republican, society would come to a screeching halt.
Same old, same old.
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Mannion would have a point if and only if the tea party members were anarchists who oppose all government.
Get a hundred tea partiers into a room and go down the Federal budget, sorted by dollar amounts. Ask them if this is the Government they want to do without?
You're not going to get a majority to agree to anything in the top 90% of the budget, and aside from Social Security and Medicare you aren't even going to get a nontrivial minority. They're all for cutting spending on welfare mothers, but don't touch their Medicare Part D.
Their taxes are too high, the deficit is going to destroy the country and bankrupt their grandchildren, but we're going to make it all better by cutting Federal funding for abortion.
Mike, do teabaggers count as an anarchists because they're too goddamn stupid to understand what a functioning government does? Not that I don't think anarchists are already pretty stupid, but I guess they go above and beyond the call of duty.
The next time you're in a conversation with a tea bugger who says taxes are too high, suggest that all federal road and bridges be sold to private enterprises for $1 trillion and the proceeds used to balance the budget. And that the new owners would be allowed to set any price that they wanted for users of their roads. Imagine trying to ship your new product from Boston to LA when every couple of miles the drivers have to stop and pay a toll. An authentic Boston Creme pie might cost $3000 in LA. The tea bugger MIGHT understand that the federal govt really does provide valuable services that their god, Free Enterprise, could never provide.