Pirates, Teabagging, Al Franken

Who ever thought we would see those words in so many headlines in a single week?

I expected the Right to flip out after losing power, but the teabag fever that’s got the FoxNation so hot and bothered truly shatters the concept of self-satire. This “movement” has branded itself with a joke that makes Beavis lighting a fart on fire seem urbane in comparison.

But how much more can the Right possibly regress. From the Reagan era through the McCain campaign, this once intellectually formidable movement has been in a downward IQ spiral that appears to have crash landed right into a giant metaphorical nutsack. Even George W. Bush sounds like a Rhodes scholar compared to Sarah Palin, yet many tea-baggers still actually hold up this dim bulb up as the guiding light of the GOP.

How could they possibly sink any lower? Who are they going to run for president in 2012? Maybe this guy…

Remember being blown away back in 2003 by the shock that the citizens of California would elect a completely unqualified actor and homeboy of former Nazis to Governor? Somehow, the level of hyperbolic discourse that passes as our “marketplace of ideas” has gotten so whacked out in the ensuing 6 years that seeing The Terminator chiding the California legislature for the economic and political gridlock that our state is locked in barely registers on the surrealness scale.

Anyway, Matt Taibbi presents a great analysis of this mind-bending lunacy in his new article on Truth/Slant, “The peasant mentality lives on in America”. Here’s a link the full article and a clip that captures the blazing contradictions of unhinged teabagger prophet , Glenn Beck:

“It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.”

Tags: check your nuts, glenn beck, matt taibi, schwarzenegger, teabag, Truth/Slant