How the Tea Party Monster Was Created

One of the things to remember about the Tea Party Uruk-hai who run the Republican Party make up the shock troops of the GOP is that they were manufactured--just like the orcs in the Lord of the Rings. Comrade Driftglass explains:

Conservatives built this monster.

It didn't just wander out of the woods one day, or land here from another planet. The Wingnut Base -- whatever teabagger, Colonial Williamsburg camouflage they're sporting this week, and however hard the media tries to pretend they aren't who we know they are -- was manufactured by the Conservative Movement to win elections. Made right here in the U S of A out of spare parts left over from the Segregationist South, Right-wing fundamentalism, Bircher paranoia and general Archie Bunker pig-ignorance.

Conservatives built the unholy thing, programmed it, wounded it up and sent it out to do their bidding.

And everyone knows it. David Brooks knows it. David Gregory. Tom Friedman. David Frum. The goofs at the "No Labels" freakshow. The entire GOP Brain Caste.

Everybody.

This is the same monster that never gave a shit that Reagan/Bush were running up historic deficits, or sold weapons to terrorists to finance illegal wars. The same monster that hunted and impeached Clinton. The same monster that completely looses its shit over "activist judges"...right up until five of the most malignantly activist judges in modern history put their candidate in the White House and gave corporations the right to buy elections.

The same monster that cheered on George W. Bush's serial, catastrophic betrayals and failures while it called Liberals "traitor".

The same monster that dutifully gets its opinions from Rush Limbaugh, its "news" from Sean Hannity and its Jebus from Pat Robertson.

And everyone knows it.

...Nixon would of course be considered a filthy Commie Liberal by the monster his strategies created and would have to carry Pat Buchanan in front of him like the Ark of the Wingnut Covenant if he wanted to get into CPAC.

And everyone knows it.

Everyone also knows that calling your Conservative member of Congress isn't going to budge them, because your Conservative member of Congress owes his or her job to the monster.

Nothing short of an extinction-level event is going to change the monster's course or ferocity: it is quite mad in exactly the way its designers intended. It has no capacity whatsoever to correct or even recognize its own madness, which means it is never going to recover.

So please stop trying to reason with it.

And here is a case study in how the psychiatric wing of the GOP, the batshitloonitarians, and the theopolitical right were enabled:

In the spring of 2010, GOP Speaker of the House gave some fatherly advice to a fellow conservative facing a primary challenge and a series of increasingly bizarre questions from constituents. Boehner's advice was a distillation of twenty years of tactics from the rational, but increasingly cynical Republican insiders who had up to that point survived the rising tide of weird that has destroyed so much of the Party's core.

He gave the advice to Rep. Bob Inglis, one of the young Turks of the last great Republican wave in 1994. Inglis asked Boehner what he should do about committed Republican constituents who were repeating to him some wildly inaccurate crap they had heard on TV, radio, and the Internet. Inglis described some of the encounters:

"They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'"

And the best one:

"I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow."

Boehner's advice was to give them platitudes and let them be, "I would have told them that it's not quite that bad. We disagree with him [Obama] on the issues." Don't confront them or try to correct any of the dangerous lies they were repeating. Don't try to lead. Inglis was stunned by the advice.

...Boehner is typical of this bunch. His ambition long ago overwhelmed his good sense. His reasoning has been that he gets to keep his very good job, no matter what happens to yours, so long as he carefully patronizes the nutjob fringe. Throughout the rise of the Tea Party he remained convinced that he could manage the mob. Republican politics in our time is drowning in the delusion that we can harness the lowest tactics to achieve the highest ends. In other words, the Party is controlled by people blindly convinced that their own success is what's best for the country.

While that's a good description of Boehner, this is nothing new for Republicans: there was a reason they made pilgrimage for decades every presidential election to segregationist Bob Jones University--and it wasn't to laud them for their innovative curriculum.

They are finally reaping what they have sown. Unfortunately, they're taking the rest of us down with them.