During the George W. Bush presidency, there was a lot of talk about patriotism any time a question arose about the legitimacy of the Iraq war, and the implication was that questioning the Bush administration was unpatriotic because a real patriot is someone who feels strong support for his or her country regardless the leader’s deceit in taking a nation to war based on lies. Early in President Obama’s first term, the Koch brothers, neo-conservatives, and Republican Party took advantage of racial animus for the African American President and funded a so-called “grassroots” movement of alleged patriots who, within months of the President’s swearing in, complained they were overtaxed and suffering tyranny. The teabaggers, as they called themselves, immediately claimed they were patriots and any opposition to their agenda was tantamount to Marxism or Nazism and they demanded to take “their country” back to when a white man inhabited the Oval Office. However, there is nothing remotely resembling patriotism in teabagger ranks, and as time went on a pattern developed that linked teabaggers to the Taliban and it did not take long for them to threaten violence to impose their will.
The concept of threatening, calling for, and inciting violence against the government has never been part of being a patriotic American, but there has been no dearth of violent threats from conservative malcontents that make up the majority of teabaggers. Recently, another instance of a teabagger calling for gun violence was reported over a Republican senator’s vote for immigration reform, and it is becoming an all too common occurrence unique to the so-called patriot group that throughout its existence threatened violence and armed insurrection to control the direction of the government. Threatening to use force to impose their will is not limited to disaffected racists, and has been embraced by teabag leaders since the anti-American group came into existence.
Whether it was Sarah Palin telling her sycophants to “don’t retreat, reload,” Michelle Bachmann calling for Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” or Sharon Angle citing “second Amendment remedies” against Congress for not acquiescing to teabagger demands, it is always and only teabaggers calling for violence against their “enemies” in government. Throughout their short existence, Republicans were on the sidelines inciting teabaggers with time-tested tactics of fear-mongering with outright lies. Throughout the healthcare reform debate, John Boehner led Republican assertions that the Affordable Care Act was “government takeover of your healthcare,” and in January Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent out a frightening email to gun owners warning that “You and I are literally surrounded. The gun-grabbers in the Senate are about to launch an all-out-assault on the Second Amendment, on your rights, on your freedom; they’re coming for your guns.”
These so-called patriots, the teabaggers, justify their outrage and threats of violence with claims that President Obama is destroying America and it is the greatest proof they are as stupid as they are un-American. During the healthcare reform debate and during their rallies, teabaggers claimed they were “taxed enough already” and “came unarmed this time” despite the President just gave them a tax cut in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (stimulus). After Bush-Republicans assisted the banking industry to tank the economy and destroy Americans’ jobs, retirement accounts, and thousands of small businesses, the President righted the economy, created millions of jobs, saved the American automobile industry, increased gas production, and presided over record corporate and Wall Street profits only to be accused of destroying the economy and giving teabags justification to threaten violence to take the country back to economic devastation under Republican rule.
For the past two-and-a-half years, teabaggers in Congress openly touted shutting down the government, letting the economy “fall off the fiscal cliff and see what it’s like,” and default on the nation’s debt despite their un-American policies would send the nation into a depression. One of teabaggers’ claims of patriotism is adhering closely to the framers’ intent in writing the Constitution and opposing everything President Obama supports as unconstitutional with no basis in fact, and yet the only part of the Constitution they recognize as valid is the 2nd and 10th Amendments that incite them to pass nullification laws and threaten civil, race, or revolutionary war. Calls for insurrection against the government pre-dated attempts to enact gun safety measures, and as part of their lunacy to revisit the American Revolutionary War, teabaggers decried President Obama’s policies as tyranny that Republicans in Congress are too happy to endorse as truth. Teabaggers have cited the IRS investigation into their perjury on “social welfare” applications and illegal campaign donations as Obama tyranny, but their cries of tyranny are little more than criminals playing the victim card when their dubious practices are revealed.
Teabaggers are not patriots; they are the Tea Party Taliban. No other group in America openly threatens violent insurrection against the legally elected government of the United States, passes nullifications laws, supports theocracy, and no patriot calls for assassinating elected representatives for their votes. Republicans are just as culpable for not tamping down threats and calls for revolution or civil war, and openly advocating for armed revolution “if President Obama won re-election.” There is a reason teabag leaders advocate for armed resistance against the federal government and it is because they know their followers are bound to take them seriously and begin an uprising to overthrow the government evident in gun zealots stockpiling weapons and ammunition to defend themselves against government tyranny they never claimed during the Bush Administration, and it exposes their real anti-American bent is racial animus. Teabaggers were content with millions of jobs lost, a decimated economy, and unnecessary wars so long as a white man was president, but they became uber-patriots fighting tyranny when an African American was elected President.
The tea party is no more patriotic to America than Osama bin Laden was, and their desire to see this government fail is only matched by their incessant threats to “take America back” to the 1770s when the country was under tyrannical English rule. Teabaggers feel strong support for America, but it is an America that never existed and unrelated to 2008 when their worst nightmare came true; the people elected an African American President. After he saved the economy, cut spending, created jobs, and cut taxes that most Americans believed earned him a second term, the Tea Party Taliban threatened more violence, stocked their armories, and prepare for revolutionary war.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn't look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
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