Modestly...

You need each other, gentlemen.

David Carr's best line in his NYT piece is the last line: cable anchors trying to harness teabagger rage sound like candidates, but all they're running for is "first place in the demo."

With that in mind, a modest proposal to teabaggers: do you really want to throw off the yoke of government bailouts and corporate welfare, only to remain slave to the bottom line at NewsCorp? Trade a banking devil for a media devil?

Aren't you concerned that maybe other Americans actually like the "Kenyan Who's Destroying America"? That you might be alone?

You need an ally, Dear Teabagger. You need to broaden the demo. Allow me to introduce to you the Iranian Street! Back in October, when Mahmoud tried to enforce a sales tax on bazaar dealers, they called a general strike. When he delayed the sales tax, they expanded the strike! These are people you want on your side, Teabagger!

And the Iranian Street has a long history of restiveness. Every time the government reduces the gas subsidy, like in 1991 and 1999, blood is shed. Happened summer 2007, too.

What's more, every time there are price or tax riots in Teheran, we 'Merkins get all breathless about a coup. And it never happens. More often, the reaction is stronger than the protest. But with an army of kindred souls in relaxed fit jeans, egging them on across the ocean, perhaps real revolution can come to Persia Iran. Did I say that out loud?
--
ds

Ain't Skeert of Rick Perry...

...nickel's worth for the Governor of Texas: don't listen to the voice of reason. Tea parties are the way of the future; stick with it! Nothing says "capable of governing" like a mob of rusticated yuppies frothing at the mouth, overusing the word "fascist," painting signs, demanding to pay zero taxes for their sewer system, their electrical grid, their roads and highways and their overseas adventures (for the record, I'm essentially in agreement with the teabaggers: I'd like the 40 cents out of every dollar of my taxes that goes to Defense cut in half. And since DoD has been operating at or near 739 billion the past two years, halving that is easy to do). I want more! Perry-Palin 2012!

There is no plan. There is no Prop 13. This is self-entitled bourgeois nonsense. Laughable. I entreat every Republican running for anything, dog-catcher, in 2010 to hew ever closer to the fringe. Jefferson Davis was talking about "States' Rights, States Rights', States Rights'" and did it better ("That we transmit unshorn to our posterity..."), and lost a war over these artificial rights, possessed by no one, asserted by everyone.

Please, everyone, tell me more. I want to hear more. Because every time some exurban arriviste starts complaining about rights and responsibilities, I get all tingly, anticipating the huge left-wing majorities in America's explosively-growing, majority brown cities we're going to rack up in the next decade. Bring it on, cornpone.

Notes On Teabagging. Really.

[Photo: Teabagging in Charlottesville VA, 15 April 2009]

Who gave this tax revolt the catchy name? Is she demanding royalties? Is she paying them to John Waters?

Where were the teabaggers when the last guy in office was bloating defense spending beyond reason or proportion and initiating the most expensive entitlement program in American history?

Teabagger is not an epithet I would self-apply. Anything-bagger is generally derogatory, e.g. "carpetbagger". Note to teabaggers: I vote for "Sons of Liberty," or "Mohawks".

Capitalism, like the sign says, is supposed to rock. If you believe that, you may console your bruised ego with the knowledge that you, and all of us, now own huge chunks of the American financial sector, theoretically valuable chunks, and that we bought them at closeout prices. If capitalism works, these chunks will, at some point in the future, be worth much more than 3 dollars a share. At that time, Treasury will be able to unload its stakes in the banks at a profit. Parti-nationalization would be good capitalism. Something any conservative worth his salt would applaud; buy low, sell high. This frisson between "defense of capitalism" and hatred of Tim Geithner's faith in that same "capitalism" is really the most interesting thing about teabagging, beyond the ballskin.

Of course, we don't have nearly enough nationalization, or the right kind, to recoup, much less profit from our national investment. Per the Geithner Put, the FDIC guarantees a profit for anyone who bids on bundles of troubled assets; barring unnatural occurrences -- such as every homeowner tied to a subprime mortgage suddenly winning the lottery -- the FDIC has no opportunity to profit. We are -- all together now -- privatizing profit and socializing loss.

I like the teabaggers' equation of fiscal dumbfuckery with treason. I especially like to see the advocates of less-to-no government espousing a penal ethic that would punish spendthrifts with beheading. I like the contradiction inherent therein.

I like the idea that Newt Gingrich will run in 2012. I see the teabaggers as his plutonium: there lieth power and radiation poisoning. I can see a future wherein the Republican Party boots its (presumed) Pawlenty-Steele-Romney wing, its paleo-conservative technocrats, in favor of sexier, wildfire hillbilly demi-movements. After all, Limp Bizkit is getting back together, so impotent white male rage might actually be a thing.

Pretty sure we'll all be speaking Chinese before we learn Teabagger.
--
ds