CBS News headline: “Recharged tea party demands justice in IRS targeting scandal”
In public, tea party activists and pundits and the lobbyists who fund them may be expressing outrage over the admission by the IRS that it has targeted tea party groups over their claims of nonprofit status, but away from the cameras and microphones, the movement’s members and the corporatists who back them are surely dancing the happy dance. Miracles do happen. A purportedly anti-tax movement has been resurrected — by the IRS.
Before the scandal broke last week, the tea party was at its lowest point nationally since its inception four years ago. Now it’s alive again and surely to be increasingly reinvigorated as the scandal drags out over the next weeks and months into next year — just in time to give it the power and influence to tilt the 2014 midterm elections to the extreme right, just as it did in the in 2010 midterms.
In fact, the lobbyists who run the tea party couldn’t have asked for a better scandal. By targeting the tea party, the IRS has played into the movement’s key motivator: the victimhood of conservatives in general and of white right-wingers specifically.
The fundamental paranoia of the movement is evident in its foundational myths:
- That Pres. Obama was born in Kenya
- That Obama is a Muslim
- That the president is a Marxist who is bent on a government takeover of Social Security and Medicare, among other things
- That Obamacare, which delivers as many as 30 million new customers to giant private health insurance companies is a “government takeover” of the insurance industry and therefore “socialism.”
- That the U.N.’s Agenda 21, which was passed during the George H.W. Bush administration, is a scheme to take over the United States
- That the administration will confiscate guns
- That FEMA camps will be used to “re-educate” conservatives
… Just to name a few. And remember that the genesis of the tea party was an on-air rant by CNBC’s Rick Santelli in Chicago, on Feb. 19, 2009 — just one month after Pres. Obama’s inauguration and four months into the Bush recession when hundreds of thousands of Americans were losing their homes — against a plan being floated in Washington to provide government assistance directly to mortgage holders, rather than using taxpayer money to rescue them from their own malfeasance, greed and ineptitude in the form of bailouts.
On the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, Santelli directed his rant to the enraged traders around him: “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.” No one did, of course. Instead, they booed — with Santelli cheering them on, “President Obama, are you listening?”
Help our neighbors?! BOO!
The plan to help mortgage-holders had originated in Republican circles — the McCain-Palin campaign finance team — but, as has been the case throughout the Obama administration, as soon as it was given serious consideration by the Obama administration, it was instantly transmogrified into jackbooted socialism. In his rant, Santelli suggested the McCain-Palin plan was the stuff of Cuban Marxism, while simultaneously smearing the United States automobile industry: “You know,” he said, “Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now, they’re driving ’54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit.”
And then Santelli issued the call to arms that would, after eight years of sitting by while their president did what may be irreparable damage to the United States and its economy, finally get middle-class conservatives up off their sofas and into the streets with their poorly spelled signs:
SANTELLI: We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.
Santelli could have saved his breath about the mortgage plan, of course. In Washington, the argument over whether to use taxpayer money to help taxpayers or bailout the bankers — Santelli’s “capitalists” — with taxpayer money had already been settled by the Marxist president himself. The billions in debt accumulated by the giant banking corporations was to be nationalized, just as Santelli and his band of traders had demanded.
Later, of course, the tea party flip-flopped on its support for bailing out the banks instead of regular Americans after, surprise, surprise, the banks essentially kept the bailout money — some even handed it out to their executives as bonuses — instead of using it to help their customers escape bankruptcy and eviction.
Over the past four years, the majority of Americans who care enough about politics to look into the tea party’s paranoid myths have come away unconvinced. Because of this and other reasons, the tea party movement has been losing steam of late. It lost favor with establishment Republicans after the 2012 elections because its extremist ideology dragged the Republican presidential candidates so far to the right that the candidate who finally prevailed — Mitt Romney, a former liberal Republican governor of Massachusetts, the inventor of Obamacare — had adopted so many of the tea party’s crackpot positions that he was ideologically toxic to the moderate voters who decided the election that November.
In January, a poll by Fox News approved pollster Rasmussen found that just 8 percent of respondents would admit they were tea party members.
But now, thanks to malfeasance by the IRS, the tea party movement finally has something real to be paranoid about. Unlike Benghazi, this is a real scandal that is likely to have a real impact on politics over the next year.
