I am so sick of hearing about this allegedly awesome tea party.  Time Magazine has just published a longish article on the subject of Why The Tea Party Matters, thus demonstrating that a) the general consensus is the tea party does not matter; b) to the extent it may matter, it takes three long internet page-jumps to explain why it matters; and c) Time Magazine no longer matters.

I know, I know, Scott Brown.  But you know what, even Scott Brown doesn’t care about this dumb tea party.  As far as I am concerned, a bunch of ill-informed, reactionary white people does not make a revolution — that’s just business as usual.  You can’t invite a couple of xenophobic teddy bears to the tea-table and call it a legitimate national movement.  That’s just a xenophobic teddy bear you’re pretending is your friend, and the whole thing is weird, frankly.  In fact, it’s embarassing.

So please, let’s get back to the time when we made teabagging jokes and appreciated how funny it was that Fox News managed to galvanize a few hundred people around probably one of the few Historic Events they managed to learn in spite of the American education system.  Whatever we do about this super-lame garden party of sorts, let’s just make sure we don’t take it seriously.  After all, dumb things we start to take seriously have a bad habit of becoming real.

-AS

Lying To Make Friends, and several Nobel Prize winning economists, respond:  No

I would like to address, briefly, the political correctness argument.  This argument was no doubt quick on Shaggy John’s tongue because misguided folks (read: Fox News) have been saying that political correctness is to blame for the Ft. Hood shooting.  As in, if we weren’t so politically correct we would just lock up devout Muslims preemptively?  Or like if we weren’t so politically correct we would just call Muslims who kill people terrorists?  WELL THEN.  So now that we’re clear that a world without this so-called political correctness would involve preventative detention and discrimination on the basis of religion, what would Shaggy John like to add to the mix?  Ah, yes, Shaggy John would also like us to stop, just stop, with all the politeness, and in the interest of being real, keep on detaining criminal suspects on an island and denying them judicial review in U.S. courts.  Well, call me impossibly mannered, but I happen to think due process is more than a euphemism.

Quick, judicial clerks, grab your children and extended relatives!

-AS

This guy:

Listening to Sarah Palin now is kind of like remembering how we used to wear Hypercolor T-shirts. I guess that was the kind of thing that would only make sense as a pre-teen in the 80s. Once puberty hit, wearing a Hypercolor T-shirt just meant wearing a shirt with hypercolor pit stains. Also, as far as I remember, all the Hypercolorness wore out after about 10 washes. What a drag! Anyway, it’s nice we have enough distance from Palin now that it’s charming to look back and say to ourselves, wow, what was that all about?

There is already speculation about Palin’s real motives for resigning, so I want to get in while the gettin’s hot. Here are my top pics for the *real* reason Palin resigned by the banks of Lake Lucille today:

1. Trig actually Bristol’s first child. This news is about to be revealed by some creepy person who collected skin and hair samples from both and now has definitive proof.
2. Having illicit affair with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News.
3. Got carried away on vacation in Palm Springs; signed Alaska up for timeshare; Alaska now has to sit by pool in scorching heat and hope resale value of timeshare improves.
4. Just another victim of toxic mold syndrome.
5. Paid off by Mark Sanford who, after poisoning Michael Jackson, was at a loss how to keep the news cycle rolling elsewhere.

-AS