Friday, February 12, 2010

Tea Party Wing-nuts Love Conspiracy Theories

I’m shocked to see this one coming from a mainstream source.

teabagger This world view's modern-day prophets include Texas radio host Alex Jones, whose documentary, The Obama Deception, claims Obama's candidacy was a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to "con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery"; Christian evangelist Pat Robertson; and the rightward strain of the aforementioned "9/11 Truth" movement. According to this dark vision, America's 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, one-world socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan.

Sure enough, in Nashville, Judge Roy Moore warned, among other things, of "a U.N. guard stationed in every house." On the conference floor, it was taken for granted that Obama was seeking to destroy America's place in the world and sell Israel out to the Arabs for some undefined nefarious purpose. The names Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers popped up all the time, the idea being that they were the real brains behind this presidency, and Obama himself was simply some sort of manchurian candidate.

tea-partier1 A software engineer from Clearwater, Fla., told me that Washington, D.C., liberals had engineered the financial crash so they could destroy the value of the U.S. dollar, pay off America's debts with worthless paper, and then create a new currency called the Amero that would be used in a newly created "North American Currency Union" with Canada and Mexico. I rolled my eyes at this one-off kook. But then, hours later, the conference organizers showed a movie to the meeting hall, Generation Zero, whose thesis was only slightly less bizarre: that the financial meltdown was the handiwork of superannuated flower children seeking to destroy capitalism.

And then, of course, there is the double-whopper of all anti-Obama conspiracy theories, the "birther" claim that America's president might actually be an illegal alien who's constitutionally ineligible to occupy the White House. This point was made by birther extraordinaire and Christian warrior Joseph Farah, who told the crowd the circumstances of Obama's birth were more mysterious than those of Jesus Christ. (Apparently comparing Obama to a messiah is only blasphemous if you're doing so in a complimentary vein.) To applause, he declared, "My dream is that if Barack Obama seeks reelection in 2012 that he won't be able to go to any city, any city, any town in America without seeing signs that ask, 'Where's the birth certificate?'"

Many of the tea-party organizers I spoke with at this conference described the event as a critical step in their ascendancy to the status of mainstream political movement. Yet with rare exceptions, such as blogger Breitbart, who was reportedly overheard protesting Farah's birther propaganda, none of them seems to realize how off-putting the toxic fantasies being spewed from the podium were.

Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin's Saturday night keynote address...

Inserted from <Newsweek>

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

The whole country needs to know this.

7 comments:

the walking man said...

The thing about bullshit is that most people recognize a foul smell before they step in it.

Want to know what happened to all of the old flower children?

They are the ones who believe this bullshit: "the financial meltdown was the handiwork of superannuated flower children seeking to destroy capitalism."

I personally would like to look at the history of EVERYONE from the leaders of this madness to the dope holding the sign and ask them of their military service.

TomCat said...

Now Mark, I was a flower child of the 1960s and did not serve in the military, but I didn't become a tea bugger.

Beekeepers Apprentice said...

I was a little late for the 60's revolution, but if I had been there, I'd have been in San Francisco with flowers in my hair, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be a teabuggerer.

That said, here in Ol' Virginny, we've got some dimwits in our state legislature who came up with a law that prevents citizens of the state from being forcibly implanted with microchip tracking devices.

yep, that's what I said. What microchip tracking devices? This is NOT a Philip K. Dick novel, people!

Stark-Raving-Mad evidently is contagious.

otis said...

I remember the 60s, proving definatively, I wasn't there.

Every 'hippie' I have ever talked to has never mentioned completely crashing the economic system. Now, hackers of my generation dream of doing it on a daily basis.

Of this whole convention thing, I can only recall the immortal words of Adolf Hitler: "The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed." These people don't even realize they would be the first slaughtered. Furthermore, they are being bought and sold at their expense by this stupid 'convention'.

I thought that is was un-Constitutional, and treasonous, to spread propaganda about the government?

TomCat said...

I've heard of that, Bee. I have a problem with chipping people against their will on privacy grounds, but the 'mark of the beast'? LOL Of course 30 years ago, lomg hair was the mark.

Well Otis, it depends on who is in power.

Unknown said...

Clearly Obama is doing everything he can to prove the Tea Party right.

TomCat said...

Jimmy, with blank ID, I don't suppose you can support that statement, can you?