Tea Party Poll

CBS/NYTimes did a poll this week identifying Tea Party supporters and activists. The numbers are enlightening.

• 59% are male, pale, and stale
• 29% are welfare geezers
• 58% own firearms
• 53% describe themselves as "angry", so it's a good thing they own guns
• 24% say violence against the government is justified, so watch it
• 58% believe America's best years are behind it, so maybe they should move someplace nicer
• 78% are hypocritical dumbasses, but don't know it

Those are some interesting numbers. Where to start? How about that just last metric, as most would object to it and it demands the biggest explanation.

Why are they dumbasses? Well, according to the poll, 37% of the Tea Partiers are college educated (versus 25% of the normal population) and yet, they possess a rather horrifying lack of knowledge and curiosity about politics, business, their government, and their history.

They all want limited, small, unintrusive government. Well, we tried that once, under the Articles of Confederation at the end of the 18th century. Remember that? The conditions were so chaotic that it resulted in a Consitutional Crisis in 1787. I guess they want to go back to a period when businesses could not thrive, when the court system was so weak that trade and property rights could not be enforced, when state currencies were worth less than the paper they were printed on, when trade and transportation tariffs brought interstate commerce to a standstill. Yeah, that period of limited government was great for business and the citizenry!

How about our disastrous flirtation with lassez-faire capitalism throughout the 19th century?Want me to sum up that period? Big guys cornholing the little guys. That is the closest we ever came to a truly free free-market economy, with little or no government intervention. Fraud, theft, and graft were rampant. Intellectual and physical property rights were a bad joke. Patents were stolen more often than roylaties paid out for them. The courts were clogged with lawsuits. Businesses colluded with each other to keep prices high and products shitty. Labor was exploited to keep costs low. Child labor. Slave labor. Product quality was shoddy at best, lethal at worst. I suppose the Tea Partiers would prefer to return to the Golden Age when filth was in our food, poisons in our medicines, con men in our businesses, and politicians were firmly in the pockets of rich criminals. Those were good times!

Tea Partiers bemoan how the current state of affairs goes against the intention of the Founding Fathers, and yet they really have no clue as to what those intentions actually were. Few have ever read the Constitution. Fewer still have read, but will cite, the Federalist Papers. Hey, here's clue #1, dumbasses. You won't find the Federalist Papers in the Constitution, so stop referring to them as if they were part of the National Canon. They are the rationalization behind the Constitution, and all disputes aside, the Founding Fathers came down squarely on teh side of a strong central government. Why? Oh, something about a stable currency.

And besides, if you idiots (TP'ers) did read any of our nation's history - not just what Glenn Beck tells you how it was - you'd know that there was constant revisions to the way things were done in between, say, 1787, and 1815. they had these things called amendments, dumbasses. You might want to read the Constitution sometime.

Of course, the other part, the hypocrisy stems from the fact that these Tea Partiers want their government services, but don't want to pay for them. How so? Well, the majority are currently either on Social Security and Medicare, or soon will be. And yet, somehow, they think they are deserving of these services. That somehow, they paid up already.

Bullshit. This has never been the arrangment. The current workforce pays for the current crop of retirees. The Tea Partiers paid for the last generation's retirement, and there's no reason for we workers to pay for their retirement. Why should today's workers shell out their hard earned cash for these socialist parasites? It is not like they are ENTITLED to it.

Especially when they should have been showing a little capitalist initiative and foresight, and saved their own goddamn money for their retirement like responsible people do. And since the intent of Social Security was to prevent a complete slide into poverty of the elderly poor, the poorest of the poor, why are those able to fend for themselves feeding at the public trough? Selfish, greedy, entitled, hypocritical, communist piggies - the worst kind of Commie: Republican Commies.

Come to think of it, the government has been raiding Medicare and Social Security for decades now in order to pay for other government services. Raiding these funds because it lacks proper revenue. Revenue that should have been received in the form of taxes, but did not. So, today's crop of retirees, having made full use of these government services, such as public defense, infrastructure, social services, shcools, parks, police, fire, libraries, etc., why, these fuckers have been double dipping.

I think its time their taxes were raised to pay for all the free shit these assholes have gotten and whine about having.