At this point, making fun of The Tea Party is almost like shooting fish in a barrel. EXCEPT that they are still somewhat popular in parts of the country and their popularity isn’t really fading fast enough. Besides, The Tea Party is a blanket term that doesn’t really stick to any one person or group of people. It’s a loose confederation of nationally anonymous, disposable politicians that many voters don’t know. Too often I see a crazy senator or rep. is “associated” with The Tea Party, but not actually a PART of it. So that makes it all too easy for voters to forget who was in it when they voted for them, and for Republicans to come up with a “Liberty Party” four years from now to challenge the Tea Party and clean house once again…even though it’s probably created by the same people.
And who actually creates these movements is even more important than whatever failed-businessmen-turned-politicians they can round up to ride it into office. In The Tea Party’s case, the creation went something like this: a few fringe weirdos like the guys behind Freedom Works already gathered before Obama was President. They met at a Radio Shack or something every few weeks to bitch about how awful the government was, but nobody really cared about them. Then “President Black Panther” took office and a few corporations pored a ton of money into these guys to create a “movement” of people who didn’t know a lot about taxes, government, or history. Only that they had never seen a black president before in history and were having a hard time (i.e. hated it) accepting it now.
I’m not saying the guys behind Freedom Works are racists or even the guys funding the movement are, but I don’t think there’s any way in hell this movement could have gotten any type of “popular” support without the “coincidence” of America’s first black president. A lot of the early marches and the signs people held up made that abundantly clear.
So what’s all that got to do with the title of this item? Well, selfishness led a select group of people to decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore in 2010. And apathy let the majority of the country not vote in that same election. The Tea Party’s fringe popularity only cast such a large shadow over the 2010 election because the majority of the country–that only shows up for presidential elections and too often ignores the midterms–just didn’t care one way or the other. They felt comfortable in the ability of Black Jesus to keep them safe from harm and didn’t think the election was important enough to pay attention to.
The people that hated Obama showed up in droves and the people that like him stayed at home, content to find more important news in their friend’s facebook statuses of “Just fed my cat,” or “about to hit the club with Karen C.” The Tea Party should really be called The ME Party as it finds a minority of this country willing to tear it apart to get what they want whether it’s the best thing or not, and the majority is too apathetic or tuned-out to bother stopping them.