Tea Baggers: Out of Work and on the Dole
Monday 29 March 2010
by: Terrance Heath | The Campaign for America's Future
This is too rich.
See, during the campaign, I watched countless videos of McCain-Palin supporters. I compiled snippets of them for two post-election videos, and I collected the videos in an online playlist. (I've archived them offline, just in case they disappear and their existence is called into question.)
Everywhere that McCain-Palin supporters encounters Obama supporters demonstrating outside the venue, they always said one thing that I found perplexing.
Invariably, one of them would say to the Obama-Biden supporters, "Get a job."
Huh? Why is it, I wondered, that conservatives always assume progressive don't have jobs?
So, I can't help chuckling over the irony that the tea-baggers themselves are out of work, on the dole, and protesting for a living. Mr. Grimes is one of many Tea Party members jolted into action by economic distress. At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.
Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”
“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said.
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.
Get a job, indeed.
As a progressive, I don't want to make fun of anybody's misfortune. Yet it's tempting to think that perhaps they and Senators Bunning and Kyl (not to mention Tom Delay) deserve each other.
But the problem of unemployment, like the crisis of health care care coverage, isn't just their problem. They may somehow believe that they will get by even if they get the smaller government they long for — too small to help them, but also anyone else.
Perhaps they'd be happy to give up their Medicare and Social Security, and see them privatized. (When it comes to health care, though, many of them over 50 — and thus are part of or aging into demographic that few insurers deem it profitable to cover.) Perhaps they aren't aware that Medicare is a government program. Perhaps they'd rather do without their disability benefits too. Doesn't matter, though. Facts, after all, are stupid things. Why bother with them, when you can just ignore the consequences?more...
http://www.truthout.org/tea-baggers-out-work-and-on-dole58138
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