(Community Matters) reading the Oct 14 issue of Rolling Stone as Steven drives from Marfa. Matt Taibbi’s article (Tea & Crackers) on the Tea Party.
One paragraph which have to cite:
Scanning the thousands of hopped up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheel-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression – “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” – the person sitting next to me explains.
“These scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”
“Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it is going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending – only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through 2 terms of record deficits & spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about john Kerry’s medals & Barack Obama’s sixties associations.”
Community Matters 