Even to me, a Democrat, Rolling Stone, the publication that “outed” General McChrystal, sometimes goes overboard in how it portrays the opposition and in the “colorful” language it uses to do so—“expletives deleted” certainly called for here.
In his “Tea Party Rocks Primaries,” Matt Taibbi doesn’t break the mold in his analysis of Tea Party successes in the recent primaries.
First, Taibbi is forced to admit:
Some shocking electoral results this week are providing new proof that the loony Tea Party movement has surged to levels of influence far beyond anything most of us could ever have imagined possible, with the key results coming in Arizona and Alaska.
He provides a couple of examples (Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Arizona’s Jan Brewer), but has a hard time explaining McCain’s trouncing of a “Tea Party candidate named J.D. Hayworth.” He does not mention Sarah Palin’s support for her former running mate, but he does describe the “occasionally culturally empathetic McCain” getting stuffed in a steamer trunk for the primary season and going “100% caveman in a desperate attempt to hold on to his bigot constituency. Never an advocate of walls and fences, McCain in this race was shrieking that we just need to ‘complete the dang fence.’”
Taibbi painfully acknowledges that, “If Murkowski loses, she would be the seventh incumbent and the fourth Republican to lose key primary challenges this year, with Tea Party activism being a driving force in many of those races.”
Taibbi then describes what he feels are factors and reasons for the Tea Party success. Take for example Jan Brewer’s turnaround:
Last year at this time she was in trouble politically because of a tax increase she proposed two months after taking office. Then she rammed through Arizona’s notorious 1070 immigration law, and her political fortunes among Republicans changed instantly. By this summer she was following the Fox News script in telling phony scare stories about immigration (she told reporters the Arizona deserts were littered with beheaded bodies; the claims were later debunked by local law enforcement), and her status as the champion of America’s first attempts at pass laws helped her cruise to victory in her primary this week.
But Taibbi saves his most damning and colorful language for the Fox/Limbaugh/Hannity/Savage “crowd”: This “summer’s blowout [that] has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts ‘warning’ Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in ‘self-defense.’”
Taibbi provides an equally colorful “sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year,” which, if one is interested, can be read here, along with his “analysis” where he gets a little bit carried away.
Taibbi is correct about the excesses of the Tea party and of the extreme right wing and how—perhaps as a return on such an investment—the Tea Party has “rocked” the primaries by appealing to the fears, raw nerves and emotions of a vocal and ideological far right wing base.
I hope, however, that come November, when right wing candidates along with their Tea Party cheer leaders have to appeal to the hearts and minds of all Americans, it will be a different story.
Just a personal opinion and, as I said, a hope.
