The Truth About the Tea Parties (Steven Weber)

When I started this blog, we were deep into the waning years of the second Bush Administration.  I was deeply frustrated, and wanted to scream out loud my point of view, which seemed to have no--or very little--place in American discourse.  The tone shifted abruptly with the run up to the 2008 election, and immediately after.  How refreshing it was to not only have my side represented again, but to feel like things were returning to sanity.  I knew (and wrote about here) that the conservatives wouldn't take defeat lying down.  I knew that they'd be on the attack from day one of the new Obama Administration.

I didn't count on all the crazy and all the stupid.  I thought Bush was the end game of those categories. Who could predict the vague but angry tea baggers?  The birthers, the deathers? The growing popularity of Sarah Palin? Sharron Angle? Christine O'Donnell?  I worry about the country being plunged into a new political era that is stupider, crazier, and more dangerous than the eight years that just about drove me around the bend.  That's why I'm glad there are shows like Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher.  At least I can see that somebody out there sees what I see.  And then there is Steven Weber, the actor and blogger at Huffington Post that always seems to write what I'm thinking, with a wit and style that I can only aspire to.  Here is his latest piece, which I wish I'd written.

[Excerpt]

"They", Tea and Me

. . .See, "they"---that is, the corporate behemoths intent on creating a nation of mindless consumers---are doing to We The People what they also do periodically to foreign countries with phlegm-producing names and brownish people who wear weird headdresses and who have something we want: weaving a fictional scenario in which said foreign peoples are demonized and dehumanized in order to elicit a gut (and therefore thoughtless) response from We The People so We The People will do what "they" want. . .

Read more at: Huffington Post