Taking a closer look at Tea Party Spoutings

Like millions of interested observers, you've probably been wondering what constitutes the inner President Obama. Well, lucky for both of us, the answer arrived in my inbox just days ago: He "is nothing less than a capo of a vast, uncompromising thugocracy, utterly drunk with power and completely unconcerned with public opinion or public will."

That would be completely unconcerned, just in case mere unconcern on the capo-regime thug's part might fail to concern you.

This assessment, from a certain Mr. Claude Sandroff, came to me via TeaParty.org, one of the many publicity arms for modern right-wing hysteria. And in that, the organization does a wonderful job; it blasts its screeds with unabashed abandon, spewing them hither and yon to not only the movement's identifiable followers but every unfortunate member of the commentariat.

Yet rarely will you hear the movement's intensity on, say, cable news. Its public spokesmen almost invariably present the face of activist Tea Partyers as the merely fiscally conservative in something of an emotional knot about excessive federal spending and debt, perhaps accompanied by a dash of (newfound) worry about executive power. Its spokesmen are the Everyman, the solid citizen, the civic republican, the rational player -- who's getting a bad rap from the biased mainstream media.

Those overzealous activists with the deranged posters we see on the news? They're just that, say the spokesmen: sincere but overzealous, hardly representative of the sound, sober sentiment of the Tea Party movement itself.

And then, away from the cameras, the movement's leaders blast this drivel: Obama is the thuggish head of a criminally organized political syndicate, infused with a Nietzschean-superman Will quite indifferent to the public's -- you know, as vividly evidenced by his arduous, two-year presidential campaign, a freely held election, his decisive victory and, ever since, his rolling pleadings to do a few right things ... for a change.

If only, I have often thought, the movement's spokesmen would just read to the media their e-mailings of internal hysteria. That would pretty much say it all, and then, perhaps, somewhat less than one of every four Americans, according to Pew Research, would sympathize with the movement. Which, at its core, is just clinically, indisputably, sulfurously nuts.

How nuts? How's this, again from the above-quoted email:

"Many of us spend time trying to place Barack Obama in the correct collectivist phylum. Is he a Saul Alinsky socialist? An Anita Dunn Maoist? A Van Jones Marxist? A mummified Wilsonian progressive suddenly come back to life?

"Or, given his corporate and unionist cronyism, and complete control of a fawning, propagandistic media, is the label most fitting for Obama also the most frightening one: fascist?

"Whichever label is most apt, Obama is instinctively a dictator, and dictators are surprisingly quick at seizing power."

When such stridency negates the necessity -- or even urge -- for any counter-analysis or rebuttal, you know you're experiencing a too-close encounter with Hofstadter's Paranoid Style. The above isn't opinion; it's a condition, and one in desperate need of some quality Thorazine.

Other of TeaParty.org's emails are merely in need of a remedial writing course. From March 29, for instance, there was this emetic:

"The sweet perfume of Liberty which once permeated the Halls of Congress and the White House is conspicuously missing.... Today, the aroma of Liberty has grown stale; a dowdy cloud of ominous proportion hangs over Washington like an impending storm waiting to pour forth its fury."

That was, I guess, Snoopy's rewrite: a "dark and stormy night" was a trifle too stale, although the writer did manage to work in a mention of our presidentially "cruel warlock" who has cast "a dark and eerie spell ... over a once vibrate and thriving setting, turning the halls of Liberty into corridors of depression, loss and gloom."

Mostly, however, my TeaParty.org emails are from its "president/founder," whose monomania about Obama's "bitter poison of Global Marxism" dominates. Yet he's not depressed, at a loss, or gloomy; he is, rather, positively randy to "redirect our justifiable anger and outrage into a focused and straight forward [sic] effort to stop the Global Marxist take-over [sic] of America."

Should we "fear" the likes of this garbage, as so many abhorred voices exhort us to do? Hardly, for that is precisely the overreaction that TeaParty.org's "president/founder" and his terrorism-tinted minions aim for. Fear, of course, lies at the heart of their strategy; they cannot advance without it, for it is that which legitimizes and empowers them.

What does frighten, however, is that one of every four Americans is willing to express political sympathy with the public face of the Tea Party movement. Perhaps if they could only read what's behind that face ...

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

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