Some Not So Deep Political Thoughts

The last California Gubernatorial Debate was held tonight, about five minutes from my house. Didn't attend in person, and wouldn't have watched any of it except my wife is more responsible than me. Of course, we've both made up our minds on who we are voting for but you never know with these things, right?

So, I turned it on, and heard Meg Whitman say the following (I may be paraphrasing slightly):

Proposition 13 is critical to the future of California.

Yeah...it's critically awful for California, and the only people who think otherwise are people who think the future of California is dependent on people not paying enough property tax to fund our schools.

Look, I'll be holding my nose when I vote for Jerry Brown -- it's not that I think he's a bad candidate, it's just ... seriously? In a state this large, we can't find anyone new? Seriously?

Awhile back, I wrote about a guy in Kansas who spent money to put up a billboard calling Democrats a "Party of Parasites" ... who also has taken over $1,000,000 in governmental subsidies. He didn't see a contradiction because he isn't lazy, it's his money coming back to him (he pays a lot of taxes, you see).

It turns out this is pretty endemic to many in the Tea Party (which, of course, is just a bunch of Republicans pretending to be a upstart political movement). Matt Taibbi has been writing about the Tea Party for Rolling Stone, and as you can imagine, it's not a pretty portrait.

Back in September, he wrote this:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's 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 two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

Yeah, ouch.

Not content to just put merely a large pin in this idiotic, hypocritical movement, he's at it again:

This whole concept of “good welfare” and “bad welfare” is at the heart of the Tea Party ideology, and it’s something that is believed implicitly across the line. ...

The reason these arguments are inherently ridiculous is that if you live in America, you have a pretty good chance of being in some way or another dependent upon government aid. Whether it’s aerospace or military contracting or farm subsidies or grants in academia, medicine or the arts… most of us are in some way living off of this spending, directly or indirectly. Defense spending in particular has been a primary engine of American capitalism for more than half a century now. And government subsidies of agriculture and financial services have begun to rival defense largesse.

All of which would normally make it unfair for any journalist to go after a politician for taking government aid. After all, pretty much everybody has in some way or another lived off the government in his life – whether by working in a firm that takes government contracts, or attending a state school, or getting into a college thanks to affirmative action programs, or serving in the military or law enforcement, or collecting Medicare or food stamps or unemployment.

But these Tea Partyers make themselves fair game with their preposterous absolutist stance on government. If you call Obamacare radical socialism and unemployment insurance a parasitic welfare state program—well, guess what, asshole, you’re going to get rung up when we find out you had your whole family living off state medical aid and farm subsidies.

And yet, people still fall for this nonsense. Embarassing.

Speaking of Tea Party candidates, one of them (Christine O'Donnell) has had to put out a campaign video stating "I am not a witch..." while another (Sharron Angle) believes some cities in the country have enacted Sharia Law --- presumably simply because some cities have large Muslim populations -- and yet another (Rich Iott) likes to re-enact WWII by acting as a Nazi.

Now, it's this last transgression that I have both the least sympathy for and the most -- I'm not inclined to like anyone who is a Nazi sympathizer, but then again, historical reenactments of wars aren't that rare. (Though I've never heard of anyone re-enacting WWII, but what do I know?)

But then, Iott doesn't do himself any favors, when asked about this particular hobby:

Ohio Congressional candidate Rich Iott got grilled by Anderson Cooper last night on his rather unusual hobby of dressing up as a member of the 5th SS Wiking Panzer Division, a unit in the German army during World War II.

Iott defended the members of the unit, who he said "wanted to fight what they saw as a bigger threat to them than Germany," so they joined up with the Nazis to fight the eastern front of the war against Soviet forces. "I don't think we can sit here and judge that today. We weren't there the time they made those decisions," he said.

Yep, folks...this guy won a primary in Ohio. Your modern Tea Party...