A week after health-care reform has passed and still no sign of Vladimir Lenin's reanimated corpse, which was supposed to be laying waste to hard-working (retired/unemployed, technically) Americans. What's more, the economy is slowly shaking out of its slump. By next fall, some of those unemployed (but hard-working) droves of the South Florida Tea Party will have the chance to do some of that hard work they've missed -- and the cash that comes with it. What will they be angry about then?
Congressional candidate Allen West doesn't care, so long as they're angry. In a speech this weekend at a tea party luncheon, West ticked off a long list of affronts to the true American way. If not health-care reform, then Obama's civility toward the Muslim world, or amnesty for illegal immigrants, or the Democrats' multifarious insults to the U.S. Constitution. Or just taxes.
After the jump, let's see how West's fellow Republicans have been trying to fill that emotional void.
It's a hard problem to understand: Bad news for people who like bad news, to paraphrase a Modest Mouse lyric, but it comes through brilliantly in this weekend's story in the New York Times. An excerpt:
The fact that many of them joined the Tea Party after losing their jobs raises questions of whether the movement can survive an improvement in the economy, with people trading protest signs for paychecks.For most of the past two years, Republican politicians like John McCain have tried to distance themselves from their most extreme supporters, who trafficked in myths and advocated violence as the last remedy to a desperate situation.
But as you can see in the video below, those roles are reversing. Now politicians are the ones screaming hysterically and endorsing violence as a means to an end.
West himself has joined that trend. In his remarks this weekend, he suggested the tea party fight against a Chicago politician like Obama in the Chicago style that's described in The Untouchables: "They send one of yours to the hospital. You send one of theirs to the morgue."
He's speaking figuratively, right?
