Reply #75: I think Hartmann's wrong on this one

[jmowreader]

There used to be two kinds of conservatives: those who are in the movement for fiscal reasons, and those who are in it for social reasons.

The fiscal conservatives are the ones who want lower taxes and reduced government spending. Some of them don't mind government spending so long as the government isn't feeding poor people or anything like that. Bombs are fine with them.

Social conservatives also hate taxes--tell me who DOESN'T hate taxes; it's been a while since I heard someone saying "y'know, what we really need here is a good tax hike"--but they want their increased spending for things like religious education and throwing abortion doctors in prison.

Now we have teabaggers. They just don't like the government. For some reason, though, they're madly in love with The Troops--apparently not realizing that The Troops are in fact employed by the federal government. They love police officers and firefighters too, and those folks also work for the government. Teabaggers work counter to their own interests because Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity tell them black is white, up is down and a Big Mac Extra Value Meal with a side dish of a Quarter Pounder every week is a massive increase in their standard of living.*

The only way you'll ever please those people is to shut down every part of the government but the prison-industrial complex and the army, turn all education over to the Baptist Church and criminalize abortion. The most effective way to deal with them is to grab the zoom ring of the news camera and rack it out to the wide-angle setting so people can see the "biggest tea party rally ever organized" has a hundred people at it. We managed to put several hundred thousand people in the streets of DC (or did we actually get a million people? I know it was a lot) asking Shrub not to invade Iraq, and we're the marginal fringe. The teabaggers put a thousand people in the streets of DC protesting President Obama's tax plan, and they're the mainstream. Shit doesn't make sense, folks.

* Someone who earns $30,000 per year makes $625 per week. If we cut this person's tax rate by 10 percent, he will receive an extra $9.38 in his weekly pay envelope--enough to purchase one Big Mac Extra Value Meal and a Quarter Pounder.