Could The American Tea-Bagger Hit Parade Be A Passing Fad?

What is is it with white conservative losers when they don’t get their way invoking Martin Luther King? We, in Canada, saw it not long ago with the bimbo, Sa-wah Palin look-a-like, Sarah Landriault when she discovered she couldn’t jump to the top of the employment ladder with no marketable skills, certificates, education or experience. That was nothing short of dispicable.

Then, we saw not only Glenn Beck and Sa-wah Palin, herself, scheduling their wingnutty hate festivities on the anniversary of Dr. King’s march for civil rights in the US, but actually invoke him to push their all white, Christian, intolerant, far right agenda. Man, Dr. King must be turning over in his grave about now. As Boris over at The Galloping Beaver describes this ironic message of Palin (and Beck’s):

It doesn’t need to be said that Palin’s “restoration” would seek a return the America that squeezed the trigger on MLK.

Disturbing doesn’t even begin to describe the theme of “Restoration of Honor”.  What I don’t get is why Alveda King would’ve even entertained the idea of speaking at Beck and Palin’s hate festivities. She must be the relative they don’t talk about.

However, unlike the 9/12 festivities of last year, I don’t think this tea-party had the energy. In fact, it’s to the point where I wonder if the tea-bagging movement is becoming a passing fad.

As yet another Glenn Beck extravaganza drew nearer, this time with Sa-wah Palin, I was looking forward to checking out the colourful misspelled signs of all shapes and sizes with such hateful, yet such stupid slogans as to be somewhat amusing. Call it morbid curiosity, much like the way many will stop to watch the aftermath of a car crash or train wreck.  I would learn that Glenn Beck had banned signs for the occasion, but that didn’t seem to stop a few from doing just that. Check out the link: a great diary with some amusing slogans.

I was checking the Twitter feed and the American blogs as well as some online media pages for some mishap or misstep, but, again, not much. Checked out Sa-wah Palin’s speech; but turned it off as I felt a migraine coming on. Honestly, she just has one of those voices that can feel like she’s drilling nails in your head.  She was just boring this time. Stupid can be funny, but Sa-wah has ceased being funny since comparing herself to William Shakespeare last month.

For me, to summarize the Glenn Beck / Sa-wah Palin extravaganza; boring! One big snore! And I don’t seem to be alone, neither. So much for all of Beck’s predictions of this extravaganza being the “turning point” and  “defibrillator on the heart of America”. I suggest you click that link and read Glenn’s predictions on how “miraculous” this event would be: I think that’s the most entertaining part of it: it all just went to snoozeville from there. Much of the audience looked like they could use a jolt of that defibrillator. So boring!

Other than the fact that Glenn Beck was wearing a kevlar vest under his shirt, his speech at first didn’t seem to offer anything of entertainment value and the audience was quite subdued. Then I read Jymn’s piece last night, where he observed Beck changing directions; one toward the more evangelical. I listened to the speech again and I have to say that Jymn is probably on to something.

He has turned his evil upside down so that it looks smiley face Stepford wive-ish. He has presented his rally as an open book (mostly the bible) for all people to join. The only stipulation it would seem is that you are all very, very religious, preferably Christian. He asked attendees to leave their signs at home (like true Beckbots, most did – great response from NAACP: “Dr. King never had to ask his followers to leave hateful signs and guns at home”.)

Beck made pains too to make the rally about the troops, of course. All immaculately planned and organized, Beck’s rally positions the tea party and the radical right to further their goals in turning the US into a theocracy.

Well, if as Jymn suggests, Beck is going from pathetic pundit to Revvin’ Reverend, I don’t think even that will succeed for too long. Hell, his message might have sounded outrageous and hateful, but he didn’t say anything different than what other American televangelists over the years have been spewing. He offered nothing original.  He bawled his eyes out, as usual. Big Deal. He has always done that.And by the by, the secret to Beck’s crocodile tears, apparently, is Vicks Vapo Rub. Take a look a the video here, if you dare, you will see that even his eyes and nose are starting to develop a tolerance toward the strong smelling cold remedy.

I remembered growing up, on Sunday mornings, before the days of satellite and digital cable; the days when we could access but a handful of channels and Sunday tv was pretty dismal, my partents would tune into American Televangelists like Popoff and Ernest Angley for the entertainment of it. We used to laugh at how these people would miraculously ‘rise from their wheelchairs’ or their ”cancer and diabetes and blindness was mysteriously cured’. We would chuckle at how these buffoons would hit people on the forehead, as it was suppposed to be a ‘touch from God or Jesus’ and they would all drop and faint on cue. Couldn’t Glenn Beck at least have done that? Would have made it more entertaining.

The point I’m trying to make here is that while there will always be an audience for evangelism and the preaching to bring America back to “fundamentalist values”, I think Beck may well have shrunk his own audience.

This brings me to my next point. After watching this non-event; Sa-wah playing the mom of a vet which was nothing more than her parading her kids into the spotlight, as she usually does, and Beck turning into Reverend Beck and sucking badly at it, the seemingly much lower than projected turnouts, I have to wonder if the American tea-bagger hit parade is becoming a passing fad?

There will always be that fringe Christian Evangelical far right element who will always attempt to push their agenda on everyone else and in American politics. There will always be tea-baggers whining that same refrain of “less taxes-smaller government”, grossly misusing words like ‘socialism’. They’re never going to go away completely and yes, they will more than likely make a splashy come back as they did when President Obama was about to introduce health care reform, but for now, I think they’re just a tired, pathetic movement.  As this Daily Kos blogger, who was at the ‘restoring dishonor’ festivities  put it:

In giving credit where it is due, they were mostly well-behaved and teh crazy was at a minimum.  They may like to speak of “revolution” and “replenishing the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots,” from the safety and comfort of their dial-up internet, but I don’t see that happening.

I would say that would sum it up best. I think the numbers have dwindled. Perhaps because they are tired of being shown to look like idiots when they can’t answer even the simplest of questions when asked by reporters as we’ve seen on YouTube at various Tea-bagger events in the past.  Maybe  they’ve (with the exception of those usual wingnuts where hope springs eternal and will die trying; those must be kept an eye on; very dangerous people)  even discovered that they can never move back to ‘restoration’ or ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘Christian reconstructionism’.

This time last year, Sa-wah and the newly self-proclaimed Reverend Beck along with bloated bleached buffoons like Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman, were all brainwashing an already paranoid, uneducated American population with the impending end of the world if President Obama passed health care reform.  That was the main catalyst (certainly one of the tops) for the surgence of the tea-bagger hit parade.   Now, Obamacare, such as it is, has passed and I think most, no matter how against health care reform they may have been and still may be, they have seen that the sky hasn’t fallen down.

Sure, many Rethuglicans are planning to repeal the reform following the 2010 elections, but first, this motley assortment of misfits the tea-baggers have voted through various primaries have to get elected.   With the exception of the bible belt and states like perhaps Kentucky, I can’t see too many of them getting elected.  If anything, the tea-baggers are victims of their own success…or failures, depending which way you look at it.

I expect that mainstream Americans rude awakening is already happening, as they begin to see exactly what the shrieking of “smaller government and less taxes” brings them–paved, unlit streets in their cities and towns, as well as a rapidly deteriorating public education system.

I suspect that many Americans, after extended periods of unemployment and no prospects of future employment despite all efforts to find work, are now seeing that that whole “Anybody can achieve the ‘American Dream’ of prosperity if they simply worked hard and didn’t rely on their government” is nothing more than bull-shit propoganda.

Again,  while Beck transforms from potent pundit to roarin’ reverend representing the evangelical Christian far right sub-culture, while worrisome and never to be underestimated; I would also take this as a sign that  the weepy Glenn Beck may well be on his way to becoming a has been, as mentioned above, the Vicks Vapo rub ain’t even working anymore. I noticed that in Sa-wah as well during what little of her speech I heard; don’t know about you, but I got the feeling that she was straining to stay relevent. She talks about being the parent of an Iraq war vet. Big deal, so are thousands of people in America today. Many of whom have lost their children in these senseless wars, yet we don’t hear most of them shrieking her stupidities. They’re too busy trying to somehow pick up the pieces of their lives.  She offered nothing new. Not even any fun stuff like cheat notes smeared all over that white suit jacket!

The blogger from Daily Kos concludes this:

Put simply, this is a crowd of mostly older, white-folks-in-lawn-chairs™ who fear change, even if for the benefit of themselves, their families, and the country at large.  They are the heels in the sand of progress and like it or not, we progressives will drag them forward, kicking and screaming, to a better day, as we have always done.

I wish them all the luck in the world with this endeavor.   Lord knows they’ll need it.

Go read Apost8′s diary at Daily Kos, many fun pics and a poll over there.

Sidenote: Good to see that there was another group led by Reverend Al Sharpton, who not only continued to honor Martin Luther King’s memory and reminded the next generation of what he did and how they must continue his fight for civil rights and equality for all, but also   didn’t  allow Beck’s and Sa-wah’s  desecration  and perversion of  Dr. Martin Luther King’s memory. Turns out, both events simultaneously happened with little incident, other than the usual taunting between the two groups. Little skirmishes like:

“One woman from the Beck rally shouted to the Sharpton marchers, “Go to church. Restore America with peace.” Some civil rights marchers chanted “don’t drink the tea” to people leaving Beck’s rally.

Sharpton basically appealed to his group to take the high road; to not take their bate.

“The folks who used to criticize us for marching are trying to have a march themselves,” he said. He urged his group to be peaceful and not confrontational. “If people start heckling, smile at them,” Sharpton said.

After reading the above quote as well as the rest of that passage in the Huffington Post story, I got the feeling that Sharpton as well as the other civil rights’ marchers,  may almost (“almost” being the key word here) feel sorry for Beck and the tea-baggers.  I could be wrong, but that’s my impression, thus further giving me the idea that the tea-bagger hit parade in the US may well have hit its’ peak and is dwindling, that is, until their next crisis, whatever that may be.

Now for something entertaining. No, no painful videos of either Glenn Beck or Sa-wah Palin. How about a little segment of Psycho Talk with Ed Schultz , demonstrating how both Sa-wah and Beck have a combined IQ in the single digits.