There's a new NY Times/CBS poll on the teabaggers, and guess what? It only confirms what we've been saying all along. They are mostly white male conservative sore losers who hate the poor and hate President Obama. Which means of course that they dislike black people, and are staunch Birthers and climate-change deniers. And they fall in line with the GOP because they do not want a third party.
The NY Times gave 17 Tea Party people 34 minutes of free ad time by posting videos of each one of their complaints. Did the Times do that for the blogosphere when we first started to rise? Did they do it when there were major Iraq war and immigration reform protests? Nope.
Anyway, Digby has a full rundown on the poll, so read the whole post because it's awesome. I'll only quote her wrapup.
They say the don't like the GOP 54% to 43%. But 92% of them despise the Democrats.
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There's nothing particularly surprising about the rest of them either. These people are nothing new. They have different iterations, but when you get right down to it they are, quite simply, the far right. They hate poor people (especially blacks) and they hate government that helps poor people (especially blacks.) They are deluded about taxes and spending and are paranoid about the government being infiltrated by "the other." They believe they are the only "true" Americans and alternate between insisting that their "traditional values" are best represented by the Bible or the Constitution, both of which they believe they are ordained by God to properly interpret. And they do not really believe in democracy which is really why they hate the government.
When they lose they stage a national hissy fit of epic proportions and persuade the Village (where they are perceived as the personification of the heartland of America) that they are something very important. Now that they have their very own TV and radio networks featuring crazed right wing demagogues 24/7, they are more successful on those terms than ever. But they are nothing new, nothing new at all. They are mostly a bunch of cranky, white men with money who are trying desperately to hang on to their privileges. Same as it ever was.
They are what we have called "Republicans" for at least the last 30 years.
Most of them get their information from FOX News because they don't read websites and only 6% believe George Bush had anything to do with the deficit. Oh, and only 20% of them have heard of Ron Paul and they just love Glenn Beck. Why the media is spending so much time trying to figure these people out is a mystery to me now. They are arch-conservative racist wingnuts who hate the government, but still want their Social Security and Medicare.
Poll after poll will say the same thing. When they lose they get angry. When they get angry they make f*&ked up signs and scream in town hall meetings about the Constitution.
UPDATE: Rick Perlstein writes an incredible historical comparison in the NY Times about the teabaggers of today and yesteryear.
Watching the rise of the Tea Party movement has been a frustration to me, and not just because it is ugly and seeks to traduce so many of the values I hold dear.
“I just don’t have time for anything,” a housewife told a news magazine in 1961. “I’m fighting Communism three nights a week.”
Even worse has been the overwhelming historical myopia. As the Times’s new poll numbers amply confirm — especially the ones establishing that the Tea Partiers are overwhelming Republican or right-of-Republican — they are the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within U.S. government.
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The same establishment conservative opportunists taking advantage, setting up front groups (it’s one of the reasons so many people in such movements report they’re in politics for the first time; they soon find themselves so ill-used that they never get involved in politics again). The same lunatic persecution fantasies. (In Robert Welch’s 1961 it was probable internment camps for conservatives. In Glenn Beck’s 2009 it was … probable internment camps for conservatives.)
The only thing that changes is the name of the enemy within. And sometimes not even that: “They’re not 90 miles away. They’re already here,” was a slogan in 1961, referring to the twin socialists Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy; only now the socialist is also a Muslim...read on
Hey, remember back in late 2002 and early 2003, when tens of thousands of people showed up for several rallies to protest the looming war in Iraq -- suggesting that maybe a pre-emptive war under false pretenses wasn't the best use of American dollars and lives -- and when the American news media was falling all over itself to get the Iraq war protesters to tell their stories, and what their movement in opposition to the president of the United States was all about?
Yeah...me neither...read on
