The Tea Party movement has flexed it's old, white, mostly male, muscles in the Republican Primaries recently. Of special news-worthy-ness is the Republican nomimation in Kentucky of the trilobite Rand Paul. Rand has a hard time with questions like "Should restaurants be allowed to refuse service to black people?" Or, "Do you expect to be wisked away in the Rapture?" etc.Most surprising though is that there are some issues many folks from all political stripes agree with them on. The biggest is the bailouts of the billionaire's banks and bankers. Followed a close second by the huge bonuses these 'masters of the universe' have paid themselves before-during-since the meltdown and bailout they themselves created by racheting up their self-centered greed machine with their derivitives schemes.
i've always hoped for a populist uprising but i never thought it's be the ultra right wing christian coalition types that'd be spearheading it. Pro-guns, anti-gays, pro-war, anti-abortion, pro-white, anti-immigrant...both are long lists and i'm probably 100% in disagreement with every one of their positions, yet i still have to give them credit for having the gumption to get out there and flaunt their ignorant racist reality in the full light of day instead of behind the cover of darkness covered in a sheet, while lynching some innocent black guy, like in the old days.
The silver lining may be that this further tilting of the political balance toward the right-wing nuts maybe-could-might give the left enough of a kick in the ass to actually put down their lattes and actually do something. The left in North America has been sold out by its liberal parties and elected representatives. Whether in Canada or the US the corporations buy the votes they need from both sides, our governments are totally corrupted by the corporate state. The surprising thing is that it's The Tea Party that represents wholesale change. i'm hoping it's a pendulum kinda thing and that once the rightwing crazies have had their turn rototilling the political mind-field it'll be time for the pendulum to swing hard left, not Obomber-Ignatieff liberal left, but idealist left and that the newly tilled garden will be ready for the planting of new ideas, the growing of a unfied worldview, and the harvesting of the fruits of our common ground.
