The Tea Party people held a rally calling for the health care reform bill currently being considered in congress to be stopped. Republican U.S. representative Michele Bachmann was the guest speaker. The crowd was filled with signs and stickers for Bachmann and other Republican candidates.
photo credit: Fibonacci Blue
One of the more baffling things about the media coverage of the Tea Party movement is that very seldom are these self anointed patriots asked to reconcile their alleged views with their own reality. They are literally taken seriously by the main stream media because they make the most noise and when they do make noise they are angry, really angry. For too long reporters in the MSM never asked Tea Partiers: how do you pay the bills? How do you pay for your health insurance? How do you put food on the table? When these questions are actually asked, stories like this pop-up.
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.
Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.
[…]The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.
Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”
“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said.
The reporter rightfully asks Grimes what he did when he lost his job, and how gets by. He asked for Big Government help when he lost his job and he receives Social Security payments a few sentences later, the reporter writes that The members of the Tea Party “vehemently wants less” government. Huh? They say they want less, but their own actions betray what they truly vehemently want.
Take for instance far right renaissance man Mike Vanderboegh who is a former militia man and an advocate of throwing bricks through the windows of Democratic Party offices because they have the audacity to pass legislation into law.
“The federal government should not have the ability to command us to buy something that it decides we should buy,” Vanderboegh said. The government, he added, has “absolutely no idea the number of alienated who feel that their backs are to the wall are out here . . . who are not only willing to resist this law to the very end of their lives, but are armed and are capable of making such resistance possible and perhaps even initiating a civil war.”
[…]Vanderboegh, who lives in the Birmingham suburb of Pinson, described himself as a “Christian libertarian” and said he has long been a gun rights advocate. He said he joined a clandestine militia group called the “Sons of Liberty” and later became a public leader of the First Alabama Cavalry, Constitutional Militia.
[…]Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.
[…]Still, Vanderboegh’s public cry for vandalism has made him vulnerable to the same threats.
“Frankly,” he said, “my phone’s been ringing off the hook with death threats the last few days.”
via Former militiaman unapologetic for calls to vandalize offices over health care.
Get all that? Vanderboegh lives on a mandated, fully public, federal income insurance program while he opposes a mandated, publicly supplemented, private insurer driven health care system passed by President Obama and the US Congress. I would guess that he doesn’t load his rifle and chase the government dispatched mail carrier away from his mailbox so that the tainted money from Obama’s ever growing communist empire never hits his mailbox. I am sure Vanderboegh cashes his monthly tax payer funded , disability checks without incident and then heads to the local hardware store to buy some throwin’ bricks to protest the establishment of health care reform less government controlled than Disability Insurance.
Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) is a payroll tax-funded, federal insurance program of the United States government. SSDI, managed by the Social Security Administration, is designed to provide income to people who are unable to work because of a disability. SSDI is intended to be provided until their condition improves, and is intended to guarantee income if the individual’s condition does not improve.
SSDI is a social insurance program[…]
via Social Security Disability Insurance – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This Tea Partying is not about opposing a government that is taking over the lives of citizens, without representation under the threat of unjust incarceration or death. It’s members care not of limiting government size or scope to repair the debt. Its about a fear of America where most of the benefits of citizenship are not enjoyed solely by people Vanderboegh is comfortable with. Namely himself and people that he can fit in his whacked out world view. They just don’t have the guts to stand there and say it. So instead they spin yarns about being against big government when they are really worried about keeping their piece of the pie. Mother of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin was dubbed maverick 2.0, is a former secessionist and at the same time as an elected Republican was happy to run a US State that receives two federal dollars for every one dollar of tax collected and used windfall taxes on the oil industry to pay each citizen of Alaska about 3200 dollars a year. Michelle Bachmann, has said repeatedly that anti-American Obama is trying to ruin the country and yet her family farm received over a quarter of a million in corporate welfare through a farm subsidy from the federal government because they produce corn and dairy products.
There is no coherence between principle and practice. The most vocal Tea Partiers can see no irony in personally benefiting from federally guaranteed social programs while calling any federal policy implemented by Democrats tyranny. Their marches are a thinly veiled exposition of anger directed at “the other” having perceived control over anything having to do with “real America”. Basically, tea parties are losing. Money, security, access to wealth, credit and the like and they fear that they will lose their safety net. When Dick Armey rails about debt, Tea Parties think Obama and friends will come to yank out their social safety net to make up the difference.
The tea party prefers to disguise an attempt to ignite a self centered, xenophobia super charged turf war as a patriotic march to stop government tyranny. Look for these passions to burn hotter as the Obama Administration and Reid/Pelosi led Congress attempt to deal with immigration reform: a classic us vs. other rallying issue. In fact, last weekend when the tea partiers called US Representatives “nigger”, “faggot”, and “schlomo” in spoken and written word, openly advocated vandalizing political offices and began intimidating their families we all saw that it doesn’t take much for the mask to fall away.
The tea partiers don’t want less government, they want a government that is exclusively theirs, responsive to their wants. They believe that America has no more to offer than what they are due and so they will fight to keep the status quo.
In Addition:
Vanderboegh’s claims of receiving threatening phone calls for the “last few days” seem Cantor-like. Who is threatening him? How many times did they call? What did they say? Why is he the one to be threatened? What information has he provided the authorities. Are we to believe there is some liberal so upset that Vanderboegh has tried and failed to stop the passage of health care reform that they tracked down the venerable militia statesman to target him with threats? I can see the Communist/Socialist/Fascist Obama-nation meeting now: we must stop Vanderboegh at all costs. The only fact here is that the reporter didn’t seek to investigate the veracity of Vanderboegh’s claims or present any evidence to substantiate them. Instead, his claim is accepted as a truth. Because this admitted vandal says it is so, it is so.