Not Much Fear, But Certainly Loathing

Politics

But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

Matt Taibbi writes about his time with the Tea Partiers in Rolling Stone.
Edit: Here’s another great quote:

It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.

The Way Things Work

Politics, Well Worth Reading

Two excellent articles from the New Yorker provide informative glimpses into the tipped scale of our political system.

In “The Empty Chamber,” author George Packer explains how the U.S. Senate has become constitutionally incapable of taking necessary action. Obstruction has become the new status quo, with the body’s storied history of deliberation used to rationalize paralysis.

(James Fallows reached a similar conclusion in his largely optimistic “How America Can Rise Again” in The Atlantic:” That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke.”)

The other bit of essential reading is “Covert Operations,” which has Jane Mayer lay out the network of think tanks and advocacy groups organized by billionaire Koch brothers to advance their conservation agenda. Tea Parties, the Cato Institute, non-profit organizations designed to boost or exempt their for-profit activities–they’re all under the Koch umbrella. It’s a thorough, and distressing, portrait of influence.